2010 WNBA Finals

Result

Finals MVP: Lauren Jackson

Games

Finals context

Seattle's second championship, six years after its first, came against an Atlanta Dream team that had authored one of the more remarkable playoff runs in league history — a fourth-seeded club that swept through its first two postseason rounds before running into a Storm team that had gone a dominant 28-6 in the regular season. Game 1 in Seattle went down to the wire, with Sue Bird hitting a clutch foul-line jumper with 2.6 seconds remaining to seal a 79-77 win; Lauren Jackson led all scorers with 26 points and 8 rebounds, Camille Little added 18 points and 11 rebounds, and Atlanta got 19 apiece from Angel McCoughtry and Iziane Castro Marques in a losing effort. Seattle improved to 21-0 at home for the season in Game 2, winning 87-84 as Jackson again scored 26 and Swin Cash added 19; McCoughtry finished with 21 points on an inefficient 7-of-23 shooting, and Castro Marques suffered a suspected broken nose in the first quarter that limited her the rest of the way. The series shifted to Atlanta for Game 3, where the Storm completed the sweep, 89-84, despite a furious McCoughtry rally of 35 points, including nine in the fourth quarter, and late three-point attempts from McCoughtry and Coco Miller that fell just short at the buzzer. Jackson was named Finals MVP after posting 15 points and 9 rebounds in the clincher, capping a series in which she was the singular best player on the floor in every game. Cash contributed 18 points in a balanced Seattle attack that leaned on the continuity of a roster that, together with Bird, represented the only holdovers from the franchise's 2004 championship team. The series also carried symbolic weight in the coaching ranks: Brian Agler (Seattle) and Marynell Meadors (Atlanta) were both making their first Finals appearances as head coaches, and the two had been the league's two most recent Coach of the Year honorees, giving the series a rare top-versus-top coaching matchup. It featured a WNBA Finals-record nine international players across both rosters, reflecting the growing globalization of the league's talent pool by the turn of the decade. Seattle's win marked the end of a five-year stretch of first-round playoff exits for the franchise and reestablished the Storm, alongside Detroit and Phoenix, as one of the WNBA's dominant forces of the era. Atlanta, for its part, had announced itself as a legitimate contender despite a modest 19-15 regular-season mark, foreshadowing three Finals losses across 2010, 2011, and 2013 that would leave the Dream still searching for the franchise's first championship.

Sources

• Wikipedia — 2010 WNBA Finals
• Basketball-Reference.com — WNBA Playoffs