LAS VEGAS — The Liberty had no business hanging around the Las Vegas Aces Thursday for as long as they did.
Nevertheless, a team without Breanna Stewart almost always has a fighting chance.
But in the end, Stewart couldn’t save the Liberty this time as New York fell 104-99 to the Aces.
There’s plenty of blame to go around.
Sabrina Ionescu, who had 15 points, mostly disappeared in the second half.
Jonquel Jones didn’t have it, missing all but two of her 11 field goal attempts.
The bench had its moments, but was not nearly as productive as it was two nights ago in Los Angeles.
Stewart scored 11 of her team-high 26 points in the fourth. She also had 11 of the team’s 34 rebounds.
Guard Pauline Astier snapped out of her rookie funk, adding 19 points and four assists.
It was a three-point game with 17.9 seconds left when A’ja Wilson lost control of the ball, and it flew out of bounds.
Officials determined it was the Aces’ ball, despite the Liberty not touching it. New York couldn’t dispute the call after using its challenge earlier.
Asked about that sequence, Stewart acknowledged she saw what happened.
“So did A’ja,” Stewart said. “She was walking back to halfcourt.”
The Liberty’s winning streak ended at three games.
“We had a chance to win,” coach Chris DeMarco said. “We gave ourselves a chance and I’m really happy with the way the group fought back and we’re pretty resilient again.”
drive past Han Xu during the third quarter of the Liberty’s loss to the Aces. Getty Images
But defense continues to be a concern for the Liberty.
Aces star and league MVP front-runner A’ja Wilson scored a team-high 33 points. Jackie Young added 29 points and Chelsea Gray 16.
The Aces combined shot 51.6 percent from the field and went 13-for-28 (46.4 percent) from behind the arc.
“You can’t take everything away,” DeMarco said. “In general, we want to definitely protect the 3-point line but against this team especially, they’re very good in the paint. We know that they got hot a little bit and obviously we have to do a better job with our shot challenge.”
Six of the Liberty’s past seven games have been decided by five or fewer points.
Stewart said she believes there’s a positive from this stretch.
“Honestly today, we lost by five and there’s things that we could have done differently and there’s calls that could have gone our way, but the fact that we were fighting,” Stewart said. “We were in it for 40 minutes and it’s hard to have improvement off the loss, but I want to say this improvement because it’s like we didn’t have to dig ourselves out of the hole.
“We didn’t have to do all these things. … We were playing basketball against a good team and they made more plays than us and sometimes that’s the way it goes and now we move on. We look forward to Saturday.”
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