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2008 WNBA playoffs

Basketball postseason event

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ4612230 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 2008 WNBA playoffs was the postseason for the Women's National Basketball Association's 2008 season which ended with the Eastern Conference champion Detroit Shock defeating the Western Conference champion San Antonio Silver Stars 3-0.

Format

The top 4 teams from each conference qualify for the playoffs.

All 4 teams are seeded by basis of their standings.

The series for rounds one and two are in a best-of-three format with Games 2 and 3 on the home court of the team with the higher seed.

The series for the WNBA Finals is in a best-of-five format with Games 1, 2 and 5 on the home court of the team with the higher seed.

Reseeding (as used in the Stanley Cup Playoffs) is not in use: therefore, all playoff matchups are predetermined via the teams' seedings.

Playoff qualifying

Eastern Conference

The following teams clinched a playoff berth in the East:

Detroit Shock (22–12)

Connecticut Sun (21–13)

New York Liberty (19–15)

Indiana Fever (17–17)

Western Conference

The following teams clinched a playoff berth in the West:

San Antonio Silver Stars (24–10)

Seattle Storm (22–12)

Los Angeles Sparks (20–14)

Sacramento Monarchs (18–16)

Bracket

This was the outlook for the 2008 WNBA playoffs. Teams in italics had home court advantage. Teams in bold advanced to the next round. Numbers to the left of each team indicate the team's original playoffs seeding in their respective conferences.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2008 WNBA playoffs” is basketball postseason event. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through WNBA, playoffs and Basketball, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA strong contextual entry point for chronology, institutions and public events when official records are distinguished from later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2008—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, WNBA, playoffs and Basketball is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “basketball postseason event” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4612230. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “2008 WNBA playoffs”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow 2008 WNBA playoffs primary sources, 2008 WNBA playoffs archive and WNBA research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “2008 WNBA playoffs”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “2008 WNBA playoffs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.