Becky Hammon likens Liberty to 2014 champion Spurs

From her spot at the news conference table underneath Barclays Center, Becky Hammon attempted to dissect what went wrong — and has kept going wrong — for her Aces.Their one-game deficit against the Liberty in a best-of-five WNBA semifinal had just doubled Tuesday.

Their quest for a three-peat went from hitting a Game 1 roadblock to having a possible remaining shelf life of 40 game minutes.Maybe, Hammon said, it was because the Aces “haven’t had the edge” for most of the season.Maybe it’s because the entire WNBA “has been pissed off for the last eight months” or that Hammon’s players starred in commercials and are “frickin’ celebrities” and, due to what she called human nature, simply got distracted.But then Hammon traveled back a decade.

Back to the 2013-14 NBA season, when she was recovering from a torn ACL that ended her San Antonio Stars campaign after one game and spending time around the Spurs.Back to a year before she retired and shifted into a trailblazing role on Gregg Popovich’s staff.

Hammon witnessed the Spurs recover from a heartbreaking loss in the 2013 Finals, make it back to that same spot — against that same Heat team — 12 months later and, this time, cruise to a title.That, to a degree, has been the Liberty in this season and this series, contributing to what’s at stake in Game 3 on Friday with the Liberty one win from a return trip to the Finals.“They should’ve walked away with the title that year,” Hammon said of the Spurs.

“They lost it that year.The next year, they came back.

They came back with so much drive, so much discipline, so much focus that there was no way somebody was beating them in 2014.I mean, that ball was popping.

“But they took a huge loss.Liberty took a huge loss last year, and I liken it to that a little bit where they had it, they felt like they had it and we walked away with it.

I did think we were the better team, but we were dealt a really frickin’ tough hand last year in t...