With every winner, there has to be a loser. In the WNBA Finals this season, the losing team was the New York Liberty, whose season ended Wednesday night at the hands of the Las Vegas Aces.

The Aces had the Liberty's number for most of the season and when it mattered most, New York was no match for the now two-time defending WNBA champions. Not even WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart was enough to slow down the Aces. Instead, Las Vegas gave her fits all night long. She finished the game with 10 points, shooting 3-of-17 from the field.

“We knew what their game plan was going to be to like chuck it up and make it difficult and that’s exactly what happened,” Stewart said, via Bridget Reilly. “Couldn’t get anything to drop and I mean, credit to Vegas. They played well, but we wanted to, obviously, push it to Game 5.”

The Liberty kept their season alive with a Game 3 win on the brink of elimination. Game 4 was by far the closest contest of the series and came down to the wire. The final possession of the game went how most of the series went: in the Aces' favor.

Stewart's clutch moment has to wait another day

The Liberty had a chance to send the WNBA Finals to a decisive fifth game as they had the last shot in Game 4. New York had the ball coming out of a timeout down one with nine seconds left. Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello called upon her best player to make something happen, drawing up a call to get the ball to Breanna Stewart.

Stewart was quickly shut down by the Aces' defense and had to dish it off. Courtney Vandersloot air-balled the final shot of the Liberty's season.

“I put the ball in the hands of the MVP because we trust her. And it just didn’t work out today,” Brondello said. “It ended up with Breanna at the end, so it was just her trying to make a play from there. So, I [would] still do it again. That’s the right call.”

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“I think they would just throw whatever defense they had at us and make sure it was ugly,” Stewart said. “Sometimes we lost our flow and our ball movement, but [we were] confident behind all the shots that we got, and they just didn’t go in.”

Neither team shot particularly well in Game 4, the lowest-scoring game of the series. New York shot 36.1% from the field, its second-worst shooting percentage in 10 playoff games this season. The Liberty made just 12 shots from the field in a 30-point second half.

The Aces were no doubt going to be tough to beat in a five-game series, but the Liberty put themselves on the back foot from the start. It doesn’t help that their best player had arguably her worst game of the year in what turned out to be the last game of the WNBA season.