MINNEAPOLIS — When Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve ran into Liberty coach Chris DeMarco before their first-round playoff game in the Target Center (which also happened to be DeMarco’s first career WNBA playoff game), the veteran coach gave DeMarco her honest assessment, which is a thing that Reeve does well and often.

“That they’re an eight seed is really,” she said, not mincing words, “cruel.”

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She said it again to the media ahead of the game with a knowing smile. Nine days earlier, New York had come into the Target Center and beaten the Lynx by 12. Though their pairing wasn’t finalized at that point, the expectation was that Minnesota and New York would meet in the first round of the playoffs, and the understanding was that this certainly wouldn’t be your grandmother’s No. 1-No. 8 WNBA matchup.

And it wasn’t.

New York beat Minnesota 91-75 on Sunday in the opening game of the 2026 WNBA playoffs, marking the first time since the WNBA returned to a best-of-three series for the No. 1 vs. No. 8 seed in 2022 that a No. 1 seed has dropped a game in the first round. Through the last four seasons, the average margin in these games had been 19.5 points. So, Minnesota got that margin part almost right, just, in the wrong direction.

It was an upset in name only.

Because, yes, New York as a No. 8 seed is cruel for many reasons. The Liberty are lengthy and physical. They have mucked it up with the Lynx this season, winning two of three regular-season games and now the first playoff game. And when the score has turned in New York’s favor, Minnesota has kept coming back to a word to describe its offense: Sticky. The ball doesn’t move. The offense doesn’t flow. Minnesota loses its identity a bit, and then, just loses. The Liberty have now held Minnesota to four of its worst 11 shooting percentages on the season.

And it’s cruel because the Liberty just happen to feature the player up for debate as the best in the world in Breanna Stewart. And Stewart happens to have Minnesota’s number. Of the 43 times in her career that she has scored 30-plus points, the Lynx have been on the receiving end seven times. No team has had a front-row seat to Stewart’s 30-plus point bonanzas more often than the Lynx.

So no, New York doesn’t look like your typical No. 8 seed. And with how much the league has evolved at warp speed this season — with a free agency that included nearly every player, expanding rosters and two more teams added to the WNBA docket — perhaps the definition of “typical” is also changing.

If there’s anyone who can expound on that growth (and someone who, even if this current reality hurts, might also someday be grateful for what these results mean down the road), it’s Reeve, the winningest coach in WNBA history who led the Minnesota Lynx to four titles between 2011 and 2017. Eight times before this season, she led her team to the No. 1 seed. And while playoff formatting has changed over the years (there was a span in which the No. 1 seed received an automatic double-bye to the semifinals), Reeve knows good and well what it looks like to be standing on top of the mountain and taking stock of the rest of the league.

She remembers those dynasty years when it was Minnesota that had the best player in the world on its roster, Maya Moore, and Minnesota had a bit more length and the rest of the league was just a bit further behind.

“There were probably, maybe two teams — at the most — that you felt like had a legitimate chance to win a championship,” Reeve said. “If you had the one seed and you were playing the eight seed, yeah, you’ve got to play, but there wasn’t real concern that you weren’t going to be successful.”

It’s different now.

“The league, where it is at right now, and having a truly wide-open championship, I think is just fun — fun for fan bases, fun for viewership, all the things,” Reeve said.

Losing is not fun. But you know what Reeve will find fun?

The tinkering. The adjustments. The learning. She calls herself a “serial preparer.” These playoffs — the chess match of a best-of-three series — is enjoyable to Reeve. The exhaustive is not exhausting, for her. There’s no cruelty in watching the film and seeing the self-inflicted wounds and miscues and the frustrations, knowing that it’s fixable.

She knows Napheesa Collier, who has been the Lynx’s franchise player for several years but has yet to win a title, needs to be more assertive and move more. She knows her star rookie point guard Olivia Miles is learning and there’s a growth curve to that. She knows her team needs to adjust to the way the whistles are being blown but they can’t send Stewart to the free throw line 12 times. She knows that her team can’t grow a few inches or add a 6-foot-8 player overnight but there are adjustments that can make Minnesota’s deficits on length an advantage elsewhere.

“It’s a 120-minute series,” Reeve said. “We said it before the game — nothing’s decided in the first 10 minutes or the first 40 minutes. It’s not how it works.”

Minnesota now hits the road for a must-win Game 2. No team in the league had a better road record than the Lynx this season, a stat that probably says more about how this team can come together in tough times than anything else that might be found on a box score. So, as Reeve tinkers and the Lynx regroup, they have a chance to return to a place where they’ve found comfort this season, a fact that, for Liberty fans (especially those that remember being blown out by Phoenix in Game 2 at home a season ago) might feel just a bit cruel.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Minnesota Lynx, New York Liberty, WNBA

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