Back in the WNBA Finals, East Bay’s Ionescu on cusp of capping off banner year with title

Sabrina Ionescu is three wins away from putting the finishing touches on an unparalleled calendar year. She dueled with Stephen Curry in the three-point contest at All-Star Weekend. She won a gold medal with Team USA at the Olympics. She launched her second signature shoe. She’s had the best season of her WNBA career, and she’s on the cusp of helping bring the New York Liberty their first title.

To Kelly Sopak, who coached the star from third grade through high school, Ionescu’s continued ascent isn’t surprising in the least.

“Absolutely nothing has surprised me,” Sopak said this week, “but when I sit back and look at the totality of it all, it’s mind-blowing. I still see a little kid out there playing against pros. Sometimes, I can’t believe it. While it was happening, I knew it was going to happen.

“People have said, ‘There’s no way you could’ve known.’ I would say, ‘I knew it was going to happen, you’re the one that doubted.’ … None of it surprises me, but yet, as I watch just how big this whole thing has gotten, it blows me away.”

Sopak is flying to New York along with his wife, Beverley, and daughter, Lauren, to watch Ionescu and the Liberty in Game 1 of the WNBA Finals against the Minnesota Lynx, the first time he’ll see Ionescu in the Big Apple. There, Sopak hopes Ionescu can do what she did so many times on Bay Area courts: dominate and win.

“For us, we’ve talked about it every year: It’s New York versus New York,” Ionescu said after clinching the Finals appearance. “It’s not us versus anybody else. We want to go out there and be the best that we can be no matter what team it is.”

Before Ionescu became one of the faces of the WNBA, she played under the guidance of Sopak for roughly a decade. During her time with Sopak at Miramonte High School in Orinda, Ionescu led the Matadors 119-9 record, being named this publication’s 2015 and 2016 East Bay Girls Basketball Player of the Year.

Of Ionescu’s many mesmerizing amateur performances, the one that sticks out to Sopak was the 2016 McDonald’s All-American Game. At Chicago’s United Center, Ionescu set the exhibition scoring record with 25 points to go along with 10 rebounds. In retrospect, the performance was a precursor of what lay ahead at Oregon, where she won back-to-back Wooden Awards before being drafted first overall by the Liberty.

“Anytime the lights are on bright, she just seems to perform,” said Sopak, who is now the head coach at Carondelet High School in Concord.

The lights of the Barclays Center will be far brighter come Thursday, and Ionescu appears more equipped than ever to handle them.

Last year, Ionescu’s production tapered off when the games mattered most. In the regular season, she averaged 17.0 points on 42.3% shooting. In the playoffs, those numbers dipped to 13.7 points on 39.3% shooting. The Finals, in particular, was the nadir of her postseason run.

In four games against the Aces, Ionescu averaged 9.8 points and made less than a third of her shots (31.8%). Las Vegas won the series in four games, the first back-to-back champion since the Los Angeles Sparks in 2001 and 2002. During the ensuing offseason, Ionescu communicated her two points of emphasis to Sopak. The first was to get quicker. The second was figuring out how to consistently score in the paint, as opposed to relying on the 3-ball.

“Those are the things where the coach in me just thinks, ‘Man, she’s just put in so much work,’” Sopak said. “How can you get better from the year she had last year? She breaks the (single-season) 3-point record, and then comes back this year and is better. Her all-around game is better, and that’s what makes her a pro.”

Having refined those parts of her game, Ionescu has elevated her play during the Liberty’s latest run. After averaging a career-high 18.2 points in the regular season (39.4 FG%), she’s putting up 20.7 points a night in the postseason (48.9 FG%). The Liberty easily dispatched the Atlanta Dream in Round 1, sweeping the series as Ionescu dropped a playoff career-high 36 points and dished out nine assists to close the series out. In the semifinals, Ionescu and the Liberty avenged last year’s Finals loss by beating Wilson and the Aces in four games.

To Sopak, Ionescu’s response to Game 3 against Las Vegas especially stood out. After dropping 21/4/5 in Game 1 and 24/9/5 in Game 2, Ionescu totaled just four points on seven shots in the series’ third game. Two days later, Ionescu responded with 22 points, seven rebounds, two assists and two steals to close out the series.

“Talking to her after (Game 3), she had a totally different mindset than a year ago,” Sopak said. “There was no frustration. It was, ‘They took this away, we’re going to make adjustments, we’re going to be fine.’ There was no panic in her voice. Watching that evolution — that’s a pro’s mindset. That’s what she has.”

“It can go one of two ways,” Ionescu said. “You come back out and put your head down and not be the best and rely on going back to Game 5, but we came out here and understood we wanted to be our best and get this done.”

Awaiting Ionescu and the Liberty in the Finals are the Lynx, who had the second-most wins this season (30). Minnesota is led by Napheesa Collier, the MVP runner-up who, like Ionescu, is playing her best ball when it matters most. Collier enters her first Finals having totaled at least 25 points and 10 rebounds in each of her last three games, the first player in WNBA playoff history to do so.

“I want it so bad for her to put an exclamation point on this,” Sopak said. “If anything keeps me up at night, that’s what it is. When you have a personal involvement with a player like that, you want them to succeed at the highest level. You want all of that for them, and knowing after how they let it slip away last year, you want that for them.”