NEW YORK (AP) — The Minnesota Lynx have three straight games against the New York Liberty due to a scheduling quirk.
A rematch of last season's WNBA Finals feels in some ways like a playoff series for the Lynx, who beat the Liberty on Sunday 83-71 before traveling home. The team doesn't play again until hosting New York on Saturday. The Lynx then return to Barclays Center to face the Liberty on Aug. 19, playing three times in nine days.
“It’s a weird schedule, three games in nine days,” Minnesota guard Kayla McBride said. “You get to know a team and what they like to do."
New York doesn't have the same luxury, heading west for back-to-back games against Los Angeles and Las Vegas on Tuesday and Wednesday before traveling to play Minnesota for the home and home set.
“It would have been nice to have it be spread out a little bit,” New York coach Sandy Brondello said. “It’s a series with a few games extra for us, not for them.”
This is the fifth time since 2013 that one team has played another in three straight games in the regular season, according to Stats Perform. New York and Las Vegas played three straight games against each other in 2022. The year before the Lynx had three consecutive matchups against Indiana.
A number of factors go into scheduling such as arena availability.
The two teams will have played four times over a three-week stretch with Minnesota winning the first matchup at home on July 30.
New York star Breanna Stewart will most likely miss all of the games while recovering from a bone bruise in her right knee. Minnesota's Napheesa Collier, who is a front-runner for the MVP this season, was out for Sunday's matchup while dealing with a sprained right ankle. She might miss the next two meetings as well as she recovers.
“You never know what’s going to happen with teams and like the league didn’t know that Phee and I were both going to be out,” Stewart said. “You want to see everybody full throttle. That's the first game of the season or the second or the third, not August.”
Minnesota (27-5) currently has the best record in the WNBA with New York 6 1/2 games behind.
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Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve calls out to players during the first half of a WNBA basketball game against the Las Vegas Aces Saturday, Aug. 2, 2025, in Las Vegas. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)
President Donald Trump's administration announced on Tuesday that it’s freezing child care funds to Minnesota after a series of fraud schemes in recent years.
Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill said on the social platform X that the step is in response to “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pushed back in a post on X, saying fraudsters are a serious issue that the state has spent years cracking down on but that this move is part of “Trump’s long game.”
“He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans,” Walz said.
O'Neil called out a right-wing influencer who had posted a video Friday claiming he found that day care centers operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had committed up to $100 million in fraud. O’Neill said he has demanded Walz submit an audit of these centers that includes attendance records, licenses, complaints, investigations and inspections.
“We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud,” O’Neill said.
The announcement comes one day after U.S. Homeland Security officials were in Minneapolis conducting a fraud investigation by going to unidentified businesses and questioning workers.
There have been years of fraud investigation that began with the $300 million scheme at the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, for which 57 defendants in Minnesota have been convicted. Prosecutors said the organization was at the center of the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scam, when defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.
A federal prosecutor alleged earlier in December that half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen. Most of the defendants are Somali Americans, they said.
O’Neill, who is serving as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also said in the social media post Tuesday that payments across the U.S. through the Administration for Children and Families, an agency within the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, will now require “justification and a receipt or photo evidence” before money is sent. They have also launched a fraud-reporting hotline and email address, he said.
The Administration for Children and Families provides $185 million in childcare funds annually to Minnesota, according to Assistant Secretary Alex Adams.
“That money should be helping 19,000 American children, including toddlers and infants," he said in a video posted on X. "Any dollar stolen by fraudsters is stolen from those children.”
Adams said he spoke Monday with the director of Minnesota's child care services office and she wasn't able to say "with confidence whether those allegations of fraud are isolated or whether there’s fraud stretching statewide.”
Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has said fraud will not be tolerated and his administration “will continue to work with federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are caught.”
Walz has said an audit due by late January should give a better picture of the extent of the fraud. He said his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud. He has long defended how his administration responded.
Minnesota’s most prominent Somali American, Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, has urged people not to blame an entire community for the actions of a relative few.
FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, June 12, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
FILE - State Sen. Michelle Benson reacts at a news conference on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul to a report by the state's legislative auditor on combatting fraud in Minnesota's Child Care Assistance Program. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski,File)
