The present WNBA post-season playoff setup was started 10 years ago, in 2016, because of perhaps the league’s greatest rivalry ever.
Then, the league’s two best teams, Minnesota and Los Angeles, both resided in the Western Conference, which essentially forced the league to scrap the typical East vs. West finals and install an eight-team playoff system that put the Lynx and the Sparks on opposite sides of the bracket, hopefully on a collision course to the W Finals.
Those hopes became reality as Minnesota and Los Angeles capped off a decade-long rivalry that started during the 2010s with two classic five-game championship series. Featured were some of the greatest individual matchups with future Hall of Famers and brutal, physical action that sometimes led to flagrant fouls and “bad blood.”
The back-to-back 2016 and 2017 Finals, which pitted the reigning champion (Minnesota in 2016, LA in 2017) against its rival, were fought tooth and nail. None of the 10 total contests was for the faint of heart.
“It’s going to look ugly at times,” Sparks’ Nneka Ogwumike told ESPN prior to the 2016 championship series. The forward hit the Game 5 title-winning shot with a couple of seconds left after Minnesota stormed back and erased an eight-point lead in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter.
“This is probably the strongest [rivalry] I’ve experienced,” added Ogwumike, who, along with Minnesota’s Rebekkah Brunson and Chelsea Gray (who now plays for Las Vegas), is among three players who should be future Hall of Famers, joining seven other eventual HOFs who played, or in Cheryl Reeve’s case, coached in the colossal series: Seimone Augustus, Lindsay Whalen, Sylvia Fowles, Maya Moore and Reeve for Minnesota, and LA’s Candace Parker and Alana Beard.
At the recent 2026 Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame (WBHOF) inductions in Knoxville a couple of weekends ago, MSR asked Parker and Reeve to look back on the Lynx-Sparks storied rivalry. Both talked admirably about those days.
“To me, Sylvia Fowles and myself, we’ve been playing against each other since we were 13 years old,” recalled Parker on one of the game’s greats. “She went in last year in the Class of 2025. We’re about like identical in every single category, and I think she made me raise my game.
“She made me elevate like the basketball player that I am, and I think those are the competitions that really lift you and are able to be a part of your family.”
“Obviously Candace and I never thought we’d be in these spaces and really reminiscing and talking about those two years,” admitted Reeve, who guided Minnesota in those years, winning a title and finishing as runner-up in another. “We don’t think that there’ll be rivalries if you go and look at the rosters, the starting fives from those two teams, the number of Hall of Famers, that level of talent.”
“I think with expansion and subsequent growth, etc., it might be a long, long time,” Reeve pointed out. “But I think it was one of the two best years in the history of our league.”
MSR regularly covered those rivalry years, witnessing firsthand how both teams brought out the championship best in each other like no other W squad ever did. The iconic matchups: Fowles vs. Parker, Moore vs. Parker, Whalen vs. Beard or Gray, Brunson vs. everyone, et al. Watching the championship trophy grudgingly change hands between the two clubs in 2016 and 2017, as the last team standing, was as memorable as anything we ever covered.
A rivalry for the ages, we asked: Will there be another one like it?
“I don’t think so, to be honest with you,” stressed Parker. “Look at the amount of HOFs on the court at any given time, the points that separated us.”
“I don’t think that period of time is discussed enough about how I believe that was a look into the future of the WNBA,” surmised Reeve, “its success that we had, the viewing, the competition, the passion, the two fan bases, the talent. It’s not talked about.”
Concluded Parker, “You look at the rivalries in the NBA and our rivalry that we had; there was very little margin for error, and that’s what makes you a champion. That’s what makes you second place.”
Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesman-recorder.com.
Copyright © Charles Hallman