Liberty end a historic WNBA season with ultimate reward for their fans
Members of the Liberty pose with the WNBA championship trophy after defeating the Minnesota Lynx in Game 5 of the WNBA Finals at Barclays Center on Sunday. Credit: Errol Anderson
Yes, this happened. It really happened.
Twenty-eight years, four home arenas, five heartbreakingly unsuccessful trips to the WNBA Finals. Liberty fans stuck with their franchise through it all, hoping and believing and praying that this day would finally come.
Yes, this happened. The Liberty finally delivered a championship to their long-beleaguered fans. Not only that, but they did it in the most thrilling and satisfying of ways with a 67-62 overtime victory over the Minnesota Lynx in a winner-take-all Game 5 in front of their fans at Barclays Center.
The Liberty became the first New York basketball team to earn a title since Julius Erving led the Nets to the ABA championship 48 years ago. The Liberty are expected to be the first local team to get a ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes since the Giants won the Super Bowl in 2012.
As streamers and screams spilled out of the packed stands, the players swarmed the court after Leonie Fiebich stole an inbounds pass and Breanna Stewart dribbled out the final seconds.
With “New York, New York’’ playing over the public address system, tears streamed down Jonquel Jones’ face. Sabrina Ionescu jumped up and down, throwing her arms to the rafters, and Stewart let loose a smile to end all smiles.
“New York, we did it!” coach Sandy Brondello screamed.
The Liberty needed a total team effort to win. Their two biggest superstars, Ionescu and Stewart, had their worst offensive games of the playoffs. Ionescu scored only five points and shot 1-for-19. Stewart finished with 13 points, shooting 4-for-15, but made two clutch free throws with 5.2 seconds remaining to force overtime.
It was Jones, often considered the third of the three superstars, who came up the biggest, scoring 17 points against a smothering Minnesota defense. The Liberty also got big points from Fiebich (13) and Nyara Sabally (13), who played 17 minutes off the bench.
Jones was named the MVP of the Finals after averaging 18 points and eight rebounds in the five-game series, which featured two overtime games.
“I never could have dreamed of this,” Jones said as she was handed the trophy on the court.
Indeed, it was a dream ending to what has been a dream season for the league. In many ways, there couldn’t have been a more perfect finale to what has been a transformative season for women’s basketball than for the teams with the two best records to take the final game into overtime.
Consider what had taken place in the past 12 months leading up to Sunday. First, Caitlin Clark pushed interest in the women’s college game to previously unimaginable heights and then carried those new fans into the WNBA, helping to fill arenas and bolster television ratings.
Then, after the United States Olympic women’s basketball team won its sixth straight gold medal, a record number of fans turned their attention back to the WNBA. After viewership records were set in the regular season, viewership peaked at 2 million in the Liberty’s Game 3 win over Minnesota, making it the most-viewed WNBA Finals game in league history.
The game has proved to be so popular that this will be the final five-game series in the Finals. The league has announced that it will move to a best-of-seven format next season.
“Close games, high-level basketball being played. I think we just showed to the world in this series what the WNBA is,” Ionescu said. “It’s turned a lot of heads.”
The Liberty’s win was made even sweeter by the fact that it took place on their homecourt, the same place where they had lost in four games to the Las Vegas Aces in last year’s WNBA Finals. The memory of that painful loss had driven the Liberty all season. It had been their motivation in posting the WNBA’s best regular-season record of 32-8.
This was the championship the Liberty dreamed of when they signed Stewart two years ago to form their superteam.
“Oh my God! This is incredible,” Stewart said in a postgame interview with ESPN. “I knew I was going to make it for this city. This is something special right here.
“It means everything. I wanted to come here, and I wanted to be the person. We fought through because we wanted to bring it home for this city and this crowd.”
Yes, it happened. It finally happened.
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.