Alyssa Thomas<\/a> had 15 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists. <\/p>\nCopper scored 19 points in the first half, one off her playoff career high for a half. Her personal best also came against the Mercury, when she scored 20 points for Chicago in the first half of Game 3 of the 2021 Finals. Copper’s five 3-pointers in the first half topped her previous high of four for a game.<\/p>\n
If this game was any indication, these Finals \u2014 a best-of-seven series for the first time \u2014 figure to be tight throughout. The largest lead was nine points, and there were 12 lead changes and nine ties.<\/p>\n
The Mercury threatened to take control several times, only for the Aces to respond with a run. In the end, it was Las Vegas that nearly pulled away, only for Phoenix to keep it close.<\/p>\n
With Phoenix down a point with 24.6 seconds left, Thomas went to the free-throw line but missed both. Young was fouled on the other end with 13.5 seconds remaining and made both free throws for the final margin.<\/p>\n
After a day off, the Aces will either take a major step toward winning their third title in four years or the Mercury will even the series in hopes of tying the WNBA record with four championships.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a great series,\u201d Mercury coach Nate Tibbetts said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to come down to the last possessions of the game. They\u2019ve been through it together. We\u2019ve handled these situations very well.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Mercury might have the Aces where they want them. Phoenix lost the opening game in each of its first two series before coming back to first knock out defending champion New York and then top seed Minnesota.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll walk through our mistakes and find better solutions for some things,\u201d Sabally said. \u201cAnd then we\u2019ll just come back on Sunday and win this game.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP WNBA: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/wnba-basketball<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LAS VEGAS — LAS VEGAS (AP) \u2014 The Aces hadn’t spent a lot of time working on zone…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":276857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[143212,347,1339,62,67,132,68,232,22795,66837],"class_list":{"0":"post-276856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-143212","9":"tag-article","10":"tag-basketball","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-wnba","16":"tag-wnba-basketball","17":"tag-wnba-finals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115315318797277368","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}