WNBA Finals Game One Notes and Quotes: Minnesota Lynx

• The attendance of 15,258 was the second largest in Lynx history. They Lynx had a crowd of 16,227 against Connecticut on July 14, 2004.
• Rebekkah Brunson had a playoff career-high of 26 points.
• The Lynx set a WNBA Finals team record with 11 blocks. The previous record was 10 set by Los Angeles on September 1, 2001 against Charlotte. Both teams combined for 17 blocks, a WNBA Finals record.

Seimone Augustus

On the atmosphere

It was amazing, just to run out and to see the white pompoms waving in the air and the seats are actually field, even the upper row, upper deck was filled. It’s amazing to see how the community has embraced us and they’re coming out and supporting us.  From tip to the last horn, it was loud, to the point where we had to call our plays two and three times to relay to the team to make sure we got the right calls. So it was a great thing.

On Angel McCoughtry

She’s extremely aggressive. When you think you’ve got her stop, she’s going to make that extra move, get that extra contact to try to get to the foul line and get free throws. And you know she can score from all over. She’s going to get to the basket. She can shoot tonight. That’s the lesser of the evils. We wanted her to take jumpers or 3-pointers, but they were going in tonight. It was a tough guard all the way around.

You have to expect that she’s going to get 20, 25 points in a game. It’s about maintaining and containing everybody else and making it difficult for them.

On changing the pace of the game after the break and taking the lead

We just slowed down. I think early in the game we were just so excited and there was a lot of emotions going on and we just really didn’t take our time and weren’t as patient as we normally are offensively. And once we got into our groove, you could see the difference. We started to make the right cuts. We started to set gray screens. We started to get the ball where it needed to go. But early on I think it was just a lot of emotions, a lot of energy that was being used in maybe the wrong way early on in the game.

Lindsay Whalen

On the atmosphere

Just a great atmosphere, walking in to warm up, we saw all the white pompoms, like Seimone said. That was pretty cool. And everybody got into the game there. It took us a little while to get playing but once we got going, it was really loud. It was a great atmosphere and we hope for another great atmosphere on Wednesday night.

On game two

I think we’ll take a look at video and see where some mistakes that we made, see some areas that we can improve in and we’ll use the next two days to do that and get prepared for Wednesday and just off the top of my head, just defensively in the first half being a little more aggressive, I think we only turned them over once in the first half which is pretty uncharacteristic of our team. But, yeah, we’ll look at the video and we’ll figure it out. We know they’ll do the same. So we’ll just do that over the next few days.