September 8, 2026
September 8, 2026
Phoenix Mercury’s 2025 Season: A Finals Run for the Ages
Phoenix Mercury’s 2025 season opened with a hard question. What happens when the two most decorated players in franchise history walk out the door in the same winter? Diana Taurasi retired in February. Brittney Griner signed with the Atlanta Dream days earlier, handing general manager Nick Uren a roster to rebuild from nothing. What followed was not a retreat. It was a declaration. Phoenix restocked with All-Stars in their prime and charged all the way to the WNBA Finals, redefining this franchise without its two most famous faces.
Losing Taurasi and Griner in one offseason could have gutted a franchise for years. Phoenix answered by trading for Alyssa Thomas, a reigning MVP runner-up out of Connecticut. The Mercury also landed Satou Sabally in a trade with Dallas that reshaped the league’s power balance overnight. Kahleah Copper, already established after her 2024 arrival from Chicago, stayed on as the roster’s connective tissue. Sami Whitcomb signed on to add shooting and playoff savvy off the bench. Nate Tibbetts, entering his third season as head coach, inherited a group with almost no returning continuity and an enormous amount of talent. Training camp carried real risk: five new starters and a compressed timeline. Nobody outside the building expected a Finals run from this collection of new faces. That made everything that followed even more striking.
The Mercury did not stumble into contention. They clawed their way there through a stretch that tested every bit of the new roster’s chemistry. Thomas, Sabally, and Copper needed time to learn one another’s rhythms, and Phoenix absorbed some rocky nights in April and May while that trust formed. Tibbetts leaned on ball movement and switchable defense instead of forcing his stars into rigid roles. The approach paid off as summer wore on. Phoenix Mercury’s 2025 season crystallized into a 27-17 finish, good for a top-four spot in a loaded conference. Sabally led the team at 16.3 points per game, and Copper followed at 15.6. Thomas anchored the offense with 15.4 points, 8.8 rebounds, and 9.2 assists a night, numbers that read like a point guard’s stat line on a power forward’s frame. The Mercury ranked seventh in offensive efficiency and posted a plus-3.4 net rating. This was no top-heavy roster leaning on one or two scorers.
Nobody saw a season like this coming out of one player’s fingertips. Thomas strung together triple-doubles at a pace no one in league history had matched. She broke the single-season triple-double record outright, then added three more in a row soon after. Opposing coaches scrambled for an answer that never quite arrived. Her game defied the usual categories. She rarely shot from distance, and she never chased a highlight dunk. Instead she controlled possessions like few players ever have. A deflection here, an outlet pass there, a defensive rebound turned into a fast break before the opponent had even settled. By midseason her name belonged alongside the league’s most complete players, and the Arizona Sports coverage of her record chase became must-read material for a Mercury fanbase hungry for a new milestone.
Sabally earned a starting nod for the AT&T WNBA All-Star Game. It was a fitting reward for a season spent shouldering scoring duties while still building chemistry with three new co-stars. She played through a nagging ankle issue for much of the year, a burden that would resurface at the worst possible time. Even so, she delivered the two-way production Phoenix fans hoped for when the trade first landed, and the league recognized her with an All-Star selection. Thomas joined her as a reserve. Two Mercury players now stood among the league’s best. Copper, meanwhile, quietly delivered the most efficient scoring season of her career, punishing tired defenses with her signature transition speed. That trio carried the offense all year. Their honors validated a roster gamble that could easily have blown up in Uren’s face.
Nobody circled Phoenix as a threat when the bracket was set. That underestimation became fuel.
The Mercury opened the postseason against the New York Liberty, the reigning champions. The pressure sat squarely on Phoenix’s shoulders. Thomas answered with a 20-point triple-double that swung the series in Phoenix’s favor. The Mercury closed it out in three games on their own floor, ending New York’s title defense before it found its footing. It was the kind of upset that reshapes a season’s narrative overnight. A scrappy roster of newcomers had become a team every other contender now had to fear.
Minnesota entered the semifinals with the league’s best regular-season record and home-court advantage in its favor. Phoenix seized it anyway. The Mercury won three of four games and closed out the series on the road behind balanced scoring and suffocating defensive rotations. That series victory validated everything Tibbetts had preached since training camp. A team built on movement and trust could outlast one built on individual talent alone. Phoenix Mercury’s 2025 season had officially become a genuine title threat, and the basketball world had no choice but to notice.
Las Vegas waited in the WNBA Finals, chasing a third championship in four years. The series opened with a gut punch. Game 1 slipped away on a fourth-quarter Aces comeback. Game 2 followed with a lopsided loss that put Phoenix in an immediate hole. Game 3 delivered the cruelest turn of all. Phoenix tied the score in the closing seconds, only for A’ja Wilson to answer with a turnaround jumper at the buzzer that stole the air out of the building. Sabally’s ankle then gave out for good, ruling her out of a series already tilting against her team. Phoenix faced a closeout game without one of its All-Star starters. Copper refused to fold. She poured in 30 points before fouling out late in the fourth quarter of Game 4, but the Aces completed the sweep with a 97-86 win that closed the book on a season nobody expected in October.
A sweep stings, but it does not erase what this group built from nothing. Phoenix Mercury’s 2025 season proved that a roster assembled in one frantic offseason could still reach the sport’s biggest stage. It did so by beating the defending champions and the top overall seed along the way. Thomas’s record-setting run redrew what a modern frontcourt playmaker could look like. Sabally and Copper showed that stars acquired through trades could mesh into something greater than the sum of their parts within a single training camp. Tibbetts, whose seat had drawn scrutiny after a rocky prior season, walked away with a Finals run that quieted most of that noise for good. For a fanbase that watched two franchise icons depart in the span of a week, this season offered something rarer than continuity. It offered proof the organization could reinvent itself and still contend immediately. That blueprint, laid out across the 2025 playoff bracket, now stands as the standard against which every future Mercury roster will be measured.
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