SEATTLE – On the eve of Game 1 of the 2018 WNBA Finals, the Seattle Storm and Washington Mystics hit the hardwood at Seattle Pacific University to make their final preparations for the series opener on Friday (9 PM ET, ESPNews).

Both teams also met with the media Thursday to discuss their road to the Finals, the matchup at hand and being just three wins away from securing the WNBA championship.

1. Delle Donne’s Status

A key question coming into this series is the status of Washington star Elena Delle Donne’s injured left knee. While it will take much longer than this possible 10-day series for the bone bruise she suffered in the Semifinals to heal, Delle Donne has been on around-the-clock treatment in order to keep the swelling of the knee down and make it as comfortable for her to play as possible.

“It’s a little better every day,” said Mystics coach Mike Thibault. “We’re trying to monitor and give her rest in between, not practicing a lot, stay off of it, a long plane flight coming here, but she’ll be ready to go at 6 o’clock tomorrow night.”

Delle Donne said the knee is “doing all right” and she was glad to see that Finals opening on Friday in order to have an extra day of rest.

“It’s definitely been a lot of treatment,” she said, “but luckily it’s been able to keep me on the court and I’ll do whatever I can to stay out there.”

While the injury has limited some of her explosiveness and her scoring has dipped since her return, just having Delle Donne on the court provided a huge lift for the Mystics in the final two games against Atlanta. The Mystics have not lost in the playoffs when Delle Donne has played a full game.

“That’s who she is, she’s going to give everything she has,” said Mystics teammate Kristi Toliver. “Obviously her going down you’re first effected as a human being because that’s your friend, your teammate. So just making sure she was okay was the first priority. And getting her back on the floor, her getting herself out there and doing everything thing she possibly can, it says a lot about her and how bad she wants to win, how much she wants to show up for her team. She’s just an unselfish human being that has a lot of heart and is always going to give 100 percent in whatever she does.”

2. Seattle’s Road To The Finals

After winning titles in Seattle in 2004 and 2010, Sue Bird saw the championship window close and the rebuild window open as she was entering her mid-30s.

“In 2004, I was young, I was 23, it was my third year in the league when we made the Finals and I thought we’re probably going to do this all the time, and it didn’t play out that way,” she said. “In 2010, it felt a little sweeter because you never know when you will get back. What’s different now is that I’m 37, we were in a rebuild three years ago, so I didn’t even think this was in the cards for me. That’s why this one is different.”

Bird watched as the Storm added Jewell Loyd (“she was young but there were signs like this kid is going to be an All-Star”) in 2015, then added Breanna Stewart (“you knew with Stewie that players like her don’t come around all the time, so that was huge”) a year later. But the influx of talent wasn’t enough as the Storm finished under .500 for the fourth straight season in 2017. Sure, they made the playoffs as a low seed but were eliminated in the first round in each of the past two years.

The team added a new coach in Dan Hughes and new players like Natasha Howard, Jordin Canada and Courtney Paris, but when the 2018 season opened, Bird did not have Finals expectations. She said even after seeing the team at the top of standings two months into the season, it still hadn’t fully clicked that they were a championship team.

“The issue with franchises when they start to lose consecutive seasons, is you get caught in this mentality where your expectations just change, you’re not really thinking anything bigger,” she said. “So it took a second for the switch to flip, even for myself, to be like wait a minute, we’re really talented.

“You go from going into a game thinking, two years ago we would go into some games, with Minnesota lets say, like, ‘Man, I hope we play amazing and then maybe we can win,’ to now we’re thinking if we play our game we’re going to win this. It’s a mentality change; it’s a mindset change. I think at some point halfway through the year, as a team collectively it flipped over to that where now we go into games expecting to win.”

3. Washington’s Path to the Finals

While the Storm are making a return to the Finals, the Washington Mystics are on this stage for the first time in franchise history. Their two All-Stars – Toliver and Delle Donne – both played in the Finals before coming to Washington and helped lead the franchise to a quick turnaround over the past two seasons.

Toliver joined the Mystics after helping the L.A. Sparks win the 2016 WNBA title.

“It’s why I left. I wanted to make history, and we were able to do that by reaching the Finals, but it’s certainly not the ultimate goal,” Toliver said. “There’s still work to be done, but it feels good to be a part of something special and a part of something new.”

While getting back to the championship was the goal from Day One, Toliver admits that the Mystics are here sooner than she would have thought when she joined the team.

“Coming here I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t know how people prepared, trained, their mindset, but that was kind of the whole point of coming here was to build a championship culture,” she said. “Obviously being around it, having gone through many championship runs, that’s something I wanted to bring. Then with Delle we came in together as strangers and instantly connected.

“I think that is what has helped speed up the process of getting here because it’s all about chemistry. When you have chemistry with your teammates, usually good things happen on the court. And we were able to have that with everybody since the beginning.”

4. MVP vs. MVP: EDD vs. Stewie

What happens when two unicorns come in contact with one another in an enclosed space? We’re about to find out when the 2015 MVP Delle Donne squares off with the 2018 MVP Breanna Stewart in this series.

“They’re interesting because they both in a lot of ways, they mark the start of this new generation of post players that can be guards,” said Bird. “They are both very versatile – they do it a little bit differently, they definitely have different games – but they’re versatility at their size is very similar.”

What remains to be seen is how often these two players are guarding one another. From a size and position aspect, the matchup makes sense, but with Delle Donne limited by injury it may be best not to put her on Stewart from the opening tip.

“Obviously, you’ve got two of the best players in the league, it was one and three in the [MVP] voting,” said Thibault. “They both shoot 3s, they both post up, they both have length, they’re about the same size; in some ways it may be a series where they negate each other and now it’s all the other matchups that make the difference in the series. Historically, you know when you have two great players like that, if they’re both scoring 20 some a game then the difference is going to come somewhere else.”

Both players offered praise for their counterpart in the lead up to Game 1. It’s always easier to compliment an opponent before the series begins and the competitive fire is ignited.

“Stewie is a phenomenal player,” said Delle Donne. “She had such a great season and the team does such a great job with her ball movement, where it’s really hard to double-team her. She’s the type of player that draws doubles. It will be a lot of fun. They’re a great team and you have to beat the best to be the best.”

“Elena’s a great player,” said Stewart. “Her and I have a great friendship just from USA Basketball and now in the league and going up against her it’s a tough matchup because she’s so versatile and she can do so many things. I don’t know if you’re going to take one thing away, but just try to make things really, really hard.”

5. Stewart Back On Championship Stage

After winning an unprecedented four championships and four most outstanding player awards in college at the University of Connecticut, Stewart has finally reached the WNBA’s grandest stage.

“Honestly it feels great to be back in a championship situation,” Stewart said. “In the first two years, it was just a learning curve, it wasn’t as well as anyone would want, but it got us here now. Even at the start of this year, the fact that we’ve grown so much and been able to really get it together and put ourselves in position to win a championship, I think we’re all excited and just taking in the moment.”

Championship droughts are not something Stewart is accustomed to and she’s ready to get back to hoisting championship trophies.

“It means a lot to me. Coming into the league that was my goal, win a championship,” she said. “Everywhere I play I want to win the championship and now to get ourselves in the WNBA Finals this is the last step to doing it.

“Once you do it once, you want to do it as many times as possible.”

6. Finals Experience

Both teams feature players that have either been in the Finals or won a WNBA championship, so they can advise their teammates on what to expect in terms of media attention, larger and more raucous crowds, more pressure-filled moments and every possession having larger meaning than ever before.

“Kristi [Toliver] and I have both been in the Finals, we’ve been leaders of this team and have just been trying to make sure everyone is focused, staying light, having a good time and spending time together, not just on the court but off the court,” said Delle Donne, who played in the 2014 Finals with the Chicago Sky. “We had a great team dinner last night and we’re ready to get to tomorrow and start this thing off.

“We’ll just keep reminding them of the specifics that we need to maintain throughout the game to try and get a win. We will focus in on the process and what we can do in the moment. You can’t look too far ahead, you can’t look behind, you have to be in the moment.”

Toliver, who won the 2016 Finals with the L.A. Sparks, had similar advice about staying in the moment and making sure to enjoy the experience despite the pressure that comes with the title being on the line.

Howard is playing in her fourth straight WNBA Finals after spending the last two seasons with the Minnesota Lynx and soaking up the experience of winning (2017) and losing (2016 with Minnesota, 2015 with Indiana) at this level.

Bird has two WNBA titles on her resume – more than any other player in this series – but doesn’t think she can articulate what her teammates need to experience in order to fully understand.

“We talked in the Semifinals and I think that was a great experience for our team to have to gut it out in a Game 5 and have to find a way to win,” Bird said. “To have a tough loss in Games 3 and 4. Those were tough losses. But also to win in a tough manner, to have to go to overtime in Game 2.

“These are all experiences that you try to put into words but until you feel it you won’t know. So in some ways I’m really thankful we did all that in the semifinals and now we can take that with us to the Finals.

“Because I don’t know if there are actual words that can speed up the experience process, the only way to figure it out and to feel it is to do it.”

7. Home-Court Advantage

Games 1, 2 and 5 (if necessary) will be played at KeyArena in front of the rowdy Seattle fans as the Storm hold home-court advantage in this series. The Storm went 13-4 at home during the regular season, including a pair of wins over the Mystics, and won all three of their Semifinal games at home.

“As the regular-season started to wind down and we looked at the standings and said ‘We can actually finish first,’ that became huge,” said Bird. “We understood that that was really important, and know we’re feeling it, I hope. Just in terms of the rest we’re able to get, the lack of travel in between series.”

“I’m sure Washington is happy that we went to a Game 5 because it made it a little more even, but it is good that both teams went to a Game 5 and we’re in the same boat. To be able to sleep in our own bed and know that our crowd is going to be behind us is huge.”

Loyd mentioned not being able to hear the whistles or her teammates while out on the court during Seattle’s Game 5 win over Phoenix in the semifinals. She’s prepared to see the fans take it up even further on Friday. As are the Mystics.

“We’re approaching it like all of the other playoff games that we’ve played in,” said Delle Donne. “Obviously they’re going to have a phenomenal crowd, but that’s fun to play in those type of atmospheres.”

8. Similar Styles

While Seattle’s Semifinal series with Phoenix provided a clash of styles, with the Mercury slowing the pace and working through 6-foot-9 center Brittney Griner, the Storm and Mystics both play an uptempo style that emphasizes outside shooting and lacks the traditional centers that can dominate the game inside.

“I give my hat off to Seattle that they disrupted Griner enough times over the course of the series to make her uncomfortable,” said Thibault. “That’s hard to do especially when you have [Diana] Taurasi and [DeWanna] Bonner on either side of her, its tough and they won a very difficult matchup in getting here.

“I don’t think when you get to this point of the season that you root one way or the other because its damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Every team present different kinds of issues. But I think the fact that Seattle and us play so similar, we know the kinds of problems it causes, it becomes a chess match, little adjustments each game as things go on will probably make a difference.”

When asked what was the biggest challenge that Washington presents, Bird laughed as she responded, “I have to pick one? There’s a lot of challenges.”

“From a team standpoint they just have so many great shooters that they can stretch the floor. When you have a team that can do that, it just opens up so much for you and it constantly puts pressure on the opposing team, which unfortunately is us.”

“When you take away one player’s shot they just pass it to the next who is equally capable. That’s what makes them probably overall the hardest to guard and of course they have Elena Delle Donne. Kristi Toliver as well, you can go down the list but Elena obviously is the one, that’s the type of player that – luckily we have on too in Stewie – but she’s the type of player where even if you play perfect defense she might still get it done. When you have a player like that there’s always a chance.”

Delle Donne gave a similar scouting report on the Storm.

“Their offense is tough to guard,” she said. “They’re in constant motion and they have phenomenal individual players that can make a play at any given time. We have to make sure they don’t space us out too much and play great help defense.”