The Sting finished the regular season with an offensive rating of 98.4, good for fourth in the league. But even with the turnaround, they’d managed to post just a 96.2 defensive rating, which ranked tenth in the WNBA. The best defense? That belonged to the Rockers, with guard Merlakia Jones finishing tenth in the league in defensive rating, working with interior presences like Chastity Melvin and Ann Wauters, plus a rookie wing named Penny Taylor.
“I mean I’m being real with you—it was we felt great to be there and for me I think, and I’m sure for the players, Cleveland was a huge obstacle,” Donovan said. “I mean, Cleveland was just a team that we had really struggled with. They were so damn good with Wauters inside and the high-low game we struggled to defend.”
The Sting held serve at home, winning Game 1 of a best-of-three, 53-46. But then came two straight games in Cleveland, and the Rockers blew them out in Game 2, 69-51.
“I talked with Kay Yow afterwards, who was my Olympic coach in 1988 and she was at that game, and I was like I just don’t know how we’re going to defend ,” Donovan said. “So we talked about how to guard her a little bit differently, where I was really trying to three quarter her and force them to lob it. Well the lob was killing us. So we just ended up moving her up off the block a little bit more and trying to be a lot more physical with her and that helped us in that game.”
The Sting went into Cleveland and outrebounded the Rockers, 35-19, saw four players reach double figures. “Dawn wouldn’t let us lose,” Donovan said. “Let’s get out of here!”, Staley declared when it was over, a 72-64 Charlotte win.
“You’re drawing off of experience,” Staley said. “You draw on the things that you’re going through, which was—we’ve been here before. We’ve been to the depths of elimination. Because, 1-10 probably speaks to more of an elimination than playoffs. And we fought our way out of that. We were familiar with it. We were very familiar with that situation. At that point, Cleveland’s got a lot of pressure on them. Because, at the end of the day, we were the team that nobody thought would be there.”
What the Sting received as a reward for their unexpected win was a date with the New York Liberty, who’d survived a battle of their own with the Miami Sol in a series referred to as “the black and blue classic”.
Tari Phillips paced a balanced offensive attack for New York, along with versatile guard Vickie Johnson and a sparkplug off the bench, Becky Hammon. Teresa Weatherspoon served as a counterweight to Staley at the point guard position.
“They were like movie stars, that team,” Reeve said. “The support was unreal, just not an easy place to win.”
To make matters worse, the Sting went out and lost the opener of the best-of-three at home, 61-57, meaning to win, they’d need to win twice, at Madison Square Garden, on back-to-back nights.
They’d won once in Gund Arena, which Reeve remembered as a difficult place to go and win, crowds 12-13,000 strong. But at The Garden? Twice?
“The mood was not very good,” Reeve said. “We had some players that has some real trouble letting go of the game. My family lives in New Jersey, now we’re about to play in New York, they were letting me know they wanted to come to the game and I told them, ‘You know what? I just think you should stay home. I just think this is a team, they’re not going to be ready.’ Players still crying about the loss, I don’t know about this, we’re going to get blown out.”
But if Reeve’s moment of doubt came in New York, the Sting had made believers of Donovan by this point, reveling in being “a Jersey girl going back to New York”, just a short drive from her Ridgewood roots.
“I felt confident going to New York,” Donovan said. “Honestly Cleveland was the one for me but New York I felt good about. Were we still surprised we could pull it off? Yes. But I felt good going up there. Honestly Cleveland for me was the big boulder and once we got past them I felt like anything was possible for us.”
In front of a raucous crowd of 17,429, including San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds (a friend of Rebecca Lobo, he explained to reporters), the Sting managed to hold the Liberty to just three points—all from the free throw line—in the fourth quarter of Game 2, a 62-53 Charlotte win. Staley had 14 points in the first half. Stinson scored 16 of her team’s final 22 points in the second half.
A day later, in a game that distilled the Charlotte makeover down to its essence, a Sting team a year removed from the worst defensive season in league history held the Liberty to just 44 points, total, on their own home floor in a 48-44 win to advance to the WNBA Finals. That they won while managing to shoot just 19 percent in the first half, and New York limited Stinson to just five points, only emphasized the extent to which Charlotte had fully embraced the defensive identity Donovan had spoken into existence for her team.
When it was over, Donovan and the Sting celebrated, with New York an ideal place to embrace their new roles as unlikely Eastern Conference champions.
“All of our friends and family went out to a bar and Becky Hammon came in,” Donovan said. “I picked up her tab as well as the rest of the bar’s tab. Then getting back to the hotel at the crack of dawn. We were out in Times Square just really enjoying every bit of it. And walking back to the hotel, and it’s the first time I ever met Dawn’s mom.” Donovan laughed. “We were coming in a little bit intoxicated and they were coming out stone sober.”