When the Lynx take the floor Wednesday night in Connecticut, they will be starting two players who have never experienced a WNBA playoff game.
Rookies Diamond Miller and Dorka Juhász have experience with big games in college — Miller while at the University of Maryland, Juhász at Connecticut. But the first game in a best-of-three first-round series against the Sun is new territory.
"I'm just going to go out there and do what I did all season," said Miller, the second overall pick in the WNBA draft who, along with Juhász, was named to the league's all-rookie team Tuesday. "Which is really just play hard. I know if I put my best foot forward that good things will happen."
There hasn't been much turnaround time since the Lynx ended the regular season with a disappointing loss at Indiana on Sunday. It was a loss that changed the playoff seeding; a win would have pushed the Lynx (19-21) into the fifth playoff seed and a first-round matchup with Dallas. It was also a game that clearly irked coach Cheryl Reeve — both on defense, where the team strayed from the game plan, and on offense, where the Lynx went 0-for-9 with six turnovers while being outscored 18-2 down the stretch in a 15-point loss.
"It's just realizing what went wrong," forward Napheesa Collier said. "We worked on that in practice, locking in on what we're doing as a scheme, and executing on offense."
After the game Reeve said she didn't want her team to forget that loss, not to flush it, but learn from it.
"It's the next thing," she said of Wednesday's game. The playoff format has the first two games of the best-of-three series being played in Connecticut. That means the Lynx have to win at least one game there to force a third game at Target Center.
"We had a good practice [Tuesday]," Reeve said. "We'd had some slippage in terms of both the offense and the defense. We discussed it. We worked hard on it. They know what they're supposed to do."
What they want to do is a tall order. The veteran Sun's starting five has a combined 161 games of postseason experience to Minnesota's 23.
"Sounds like a lot of pressure on Connecticut for me," joked Reeve.
To Collier, what happened last week is over. Both teams are 0-0. "What we did in the regular season literally doesn't matter," she said. "What matters is the next two games, and to get to a third. Hopefully we win two [at Connecticut]. But we really need to get a win so we can have game three in Minny."
And the rookies?
"You can't tell somebody how hard it is," Collier said of the playoffs. "You can tell them all you want, but until they experience it, they don't know what it is. We have to have faith, like a kid, that you taught them everything you can and they go out into the world and implement those things. We taught them everything we could in the regular season. We have to have faith. And we do."
