MINNEAPOLIS — DeWanna Bonner knows the postseason more intimately than anyone in the WNBA. Over scores of playoff games spanning a decade and a half, Bonner has logged some 2,850 postseason minutes, victorious and wrenching and otherwise. That means that she owns the league record for playoff experience, and it also means that she has spent the last week being peppered with questions from her four rookie teammates on the Mercury, asked how to keep steady and what to do following a loss.
“It’s the playoffs,” Bonner said at shootaround on Tuesday. “It doesn’t matter if you win by 20 or by one. As long as you win.”
A suggested revision: It doesn’t matter if you fall behind by 20, start clawing back only to find yourself still down five with less than a minute to play, scramble for a backup plan on your final possession of regulation, grit your way into overtime having not held the lead since the first quarter, and then ultimately win by six. As long as you win.
It took an extraordinary second half for the Mercury to beat the Lynx on Tuesday in Game 2 of the WNBA semifinals. Their 89–83 overtime win evens the series at one game apiece before it moves to Phoenix. The 20-point deficit they overcame ranks third on the list of biggest comebacks in league playoff history. And it offers a jarring reminder of weakness for the Lynx, not just the best team in the league but the most universally competent, generally a case study in solid fundamentals and precise footwork. The No. 1 seed missed all of that in a disjointed, atypical second half, and paid for it.
“Very uncharacteristic,” said Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve. “We weren’t strong enough, we weren’t tough enough, and they ripped the game from us.”
This is not how things usually go for the Lynx. While this group did not lose very much in any fashion this year—Minnesota’s 34–10 record was the best in the WNBA—it certainly did not lose games that played out like this. The Lynx do not lose at home. (They were 20–2 in the Target Center.) And they do not lose close games. They won their sole overtime contest of the year and had just one loss in regulation that came by fewer than four points. No squad was better in the second half of games this year. Yet here a big halftime lead crumbled into a mess of poor late execution and baffling lapses in Minneapolis.
In the second half, Minnesota was outrebounded, outhustled and outshone. During one particularly galling sequence midway through the third quarter, Mercury reserve forward Kathryn Westbeld engineered steals on two consecutive possessions and scored five quick points to cut their deficit to 10. The Lynx had clearly begun to lose control of the game. But they would not lose their grasp on the lead until the final seconds of play.
Minnesota was up by five with less than a minute to play. And the group then found itself doomed by the same uncharacteristic sloppiness that had dogged them throughout the half. Phoenix got two offensive rebounds on the same possession to cut the lead down to three. Minnesota got slapped with a five-second violation when it tried and failed to inbound the ball. It still had the lead. That would not hold for long.
The Mercury took possession down by three points with 20.7 seconds remaining. Phoenix coach Nate Tibbetts assumed the Lynx would foul and drew up a play accordingly. Yet no foul came. Satou Sabally was the first on the floor to recognize that Phoenix would need to turn to Plan B. She passed to Sami Whitcomb, positioned on the perimeter, who promptly jacked up a woeful attempted three. But she would get a shot at redemption a few seconds later. Alyssa Thomas grabbed the offensive board and kicked it back out, and the ball came flying around the perimeter once more, landing again with Whitcomb, who could not miss her second chance to tie the game.
— Phoenix Mercury (@PhoenixMercury) September 24, 2025
“I messed that up,” Tibbetts said of his play-calling. “Sami saved my ass.”
His counterpart on the opposing bench owned that she too may have messed that up. She did not have anyone she could thank for saving her.
“In hindsight, you know, I do like a foul there,” Reeve said. “But I didn’t direct them to foul.”
Game 2 was a display of how Phoenix just might win this series. That’s a matter of physicality, of pushing the pace, of a strong performance from Sabally and the usual savvy playmaking and bruising intensity of Thomas. Yet it was even more striking as a display of how Minnesota just might lose.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Mercury Make Lynx Pay for Uncharacteristic Mistakes.