1997 WNBA Finals

Result

Finals MVP: Cynthia Cooper

The WNBA's inaugural championship was decided by a single winner-take-all game rather than a series — the only time in league history the Finals were a single game. Cynthia Cooper, the league's first regular-season MVP, scored 25 points to win Finals MVP as well.

Games

Finals context

The WNBA's first championship game was played on August 30, 1997, at Houston's Compaq Center in front of 16,285 fans, pitting the Western Conference champion Houston Comets against the Eastern Conference champion New York Liberty in a single winner-take-all contest rather than a series — a format never repeated in league history. The game was tight for a half, but Houston pulled away after the break behind a suffocating defensive stretch that held New York scoreless for nearly six and a half minutes and fueled a 10-0 run. The Comets won 65-51, with Cynthia Cooper scoring 25 points, 14 of them after halftime, to claim both the league's first regular-season MVP award and its first Finals MVP trophy. Tina Thompson added 18 points for Houston, while center Kym Hampton was the game's most productive all-around player on either roster, posting 13 points and 13 rebounds — though she did so for the losing Liberty. New York's offense sputtered badly down the stretch; Vickie Johnson led the Liberty with just 12 points, and Rebecca Lobo, the most recognizable name on the roster coming out of the 1995 UConn national title team, was held to single digits and closed the scoring with a meaningless late basket that merely kept New York off the list of worst offensive nights in franchise history. The stakes went well beyond one trophy. The WNBA had launched that summer as a direct answer to the American Basketball League, a rival women's professional league that had begun play the previous fall and signed several prominent college and Olympic stars; the fledgling WNBA needed its debut season, and especially its debut championship, to establish credibility with fans, broadcasters, and sponsors. Houston's win, delivered in the city that had also just watched Hakeem Olajuwon's Rockets win back-to-back NBA titles earlier in the decade, let local media brand the Comets' triumph a continuation of "Clutch City" glory. Cooper, a 34-year-old veteran who had spent much of her career playing professionally in Italy and Spain before the WNBA existed, became the league's first true superstar, and her regular-season and Finals MVP sweep set a template — dominant two-way guard play carrying a team through pressure moments — that the league's marketing leaned on heavily in its first years. The game's lopsided final frame obscured how competitive the first three quarters had been; Houston's ability to lock in defensively in the biggest moment of the season foreshadowed exactly what would follow. Houston's roster, also featuring Sheryl Swoopes (who played a limited role after recently giving birth) and rookie Tina Thompson, the first-ever WNBA draft pick, would prove to be the foundation of a dynasty rather than a one-off champion, winning the following three titles as well. New York, meanwhile, became the league's first bridesmaid franchise, a role it would repeat multiple times over the next three decades before finally breaking through in 2024.

Sources

• Wikipedia — 1997 WNBA Championship
• Wikipedia — WNBA Finals