For Liberty and fans, many years of frustration transform into cheers up Broadway
Canyons create echoes.
They amplify and replicate, and carry sound long after you’ve stopped speaking.
And though the stretch up Broadway in lower Manhattan isn’t that type of canyon, as ticker tape rained down on the Liberty on Thursday morning, it was impossible not to see the parallels.
It’s deceptively simple on its surface: The Liberty, a superteam built for specifically this purpose, defeated the Minnesota Lynx in a grueling five-game series to capture the franchise’s first WNBA title. No longer can anyone say they’re the only original WNBA team without a championship.
The Liberty also are the first major professional New York team to have a ticker-tape parade since the Giants in 2012, the first New York professional basketball team to win a title in nearly a half-century and the first New York City professional basketball team to win a title in more than a half-century.
But there’s that far-reaching echo again. Because this team isn’t just about how well Sabrina Ionescu and Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones play basketball. And this victory isn’t just another piece of hardware for the waves of fans in sea foam green buttressing the Canyon of Heroes on a workday.
It’s a ritualistic release of the mounting frustration that has cast its shadow on the Liberty’s 28-year history.
Until last week, every season had ended in heartbreak. Every past superstar had come up short of vanquishing the beast of this franchise’s deferred dreams.
“It means everything, everything,” Jones said, standing atop the steps at City Hall. “Just look at everybody out here, look at the parade, look at New York City . . . We have the ultimate prize. We have something that can never be taken away from us.”
It was a crowning achievement for Stewart, who signed here as a free agent with more than one mission. In assembling her team of Avengers, she followed a blueprint long established in the NBA and one that loudly reminded everyone of the seriousness of the women’s game.
In doing so, she and her teammates were some of the most influential voices in the ongoing fight for respect: better salaries, charter flights for long road trips and more rights for expectant mothers and retired players.
Add the fact that her superstardom, the irrepressible talent of players such as the Aces’ A’ja Wilson and the excitement around rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have propelled this sport to new heights.
It’s even possible that some of the same people who, once upon a time, would comment “who cares” or “get back in the kitchen” on every WNBA post instead were commenting on whether Clark should have been on the Olympic team this year. After all, reaching new ratings records and league-wide attendance highs means at least a few minds have changed.
This isn’t about the detractors, though. Not Thursday. Not when little girls along the route held up cardboard cutouts of Stewart and one even hoisted a handmade replica championship trophy (her dad made it for her, she said proudly).
No, on this day, as Liberty fans feted their players, you couldn’t help but remember how tough this road really was. And we’re not just talking about the 40-game season and the playoff gantlet that took them through the defending WNBA champion Aces and a gritty, indefatigable Lynx team.
We’re talking about the years spent playing in front of a sparse crowd at Madison Square Garden — Liberty lifers who have supported this team for three decades, even when it wasn’t popular. We’re talking about the dark days playing at the Westchester County Center, little better than a glorified college gym, and 30 miles upstate.
We’re talking about Teresa Weatherspoon, Rebecca Lobo, Cappie Pondexter and Tina Charles — women who fought so hard to will this franchise to victory but fell short through no fault of their own. On Thursday, between the Stewart and Ionescu jerseys, there were faded Weatherspoon jerseys, and even a Leilani Mitchell.
These were the players who gave their prime years to the Liberty, and save for Pondexter with the Mercury, none ever achieved the ultimate goal. At 35, Charles is the only one still playing.
“This trophy was earned by the blood, sweat and tears of these women,” owner Clara Wu Tsai said. “I know they’re also playing on the back of our incredible Liberty legends . . . We stand on your shoulders.”
In fact, this team’s history is littered with almost but not quites: Before clinching Sunday, the Liberty had captured three conference championships and been to the WNBA Finals five other times. This title called for five rounds of bare-knuckled brutality that culminated in an instant classic: They were down 12 points in the first half, needed two late free throws from Stewart to send the game to overtime, and did it mostly without Ionescu, who faded in the deciding Game 5.
Afterward, Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve took shots at the officiating and even Wu Tsai and her husband, Joe Tsai, who were fined in 2022 for charter plane use that went against the league’s collective bargaining agreement.
And you know what? Good. Rivalries help grow sports, and male coaches get away with far more stinging comments. Next year, when the schedules come out, we’ll have the Liberty-Lynx rematch highlighted and underlined in red.
Because this is what it means to ride through the Canyon of Heroes and to join the legion of other successful local teams that came before you. It means creating history and building a future. It means people will pay attention and that you won’t be forgotten.
In this city, it means New York’s championship drought is over, and it was a powerhouse of a women’s team to do it.
It also means that years of frustrated screams have echoed into the cathartic release we witnessed at Barclays Center last Sunday. On Thursday, they transformed into cheers up Broadway.
“My first WNBA game was a Liberty game,” said Stewart, a born and bred New Yorker. “To be able to have a full-circle moment, to come here, come back and bring a championship here — I appreciate you so much.”
And the impact of all that? We’ll be hearing it for a very long time.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.