How Liberty coach Sandy Brondello steered superteam into WNBA Finals

This seemed like an easy coaching job.

The team acquires three four-time WNBA All-Stars in the offseason. Send them out on the court with two others with past All-Star credentials and watch them win.

Sandy Brondello indeed watched her Liberty win most of the time with Breanna Stewart, Jonquel Jones and Courtney Vandersloot joining holdovers Sabrina Ionescu and Betnijah Laney.

The Liberty put together the winningest regular season in the franchise’s 27-year history, going 32-8. They also took the Commissioner Cup’s championship game in Las Vegas and won five of the six games in the first two rounds of the postseason.

Add it all up and the tab comes to 38-9.

And so here they are, ready to play Game 1 of the best-of-five WNBA Finals on Sunday in Las Vegas against the defending champion Aces, hoping the franchise’s first league title will be waiting on the other side of the series.

Sure, it helped to have superior talent. It wasn’t so easy, though. Brondello had to get this star-filled mix to mesh. It wasn’t instantaneous, but it happened.

“This is a great group of people, but it’s not necessarily an easy coaching job despite the fact of the names that are on this roster,” general manager Jonathan Kolb said after the Liberty beat the Aces in their last meeting in late August at Barclays Center. “She’s done a great job of getting this team to buy in.”

This team got trounced on opening night in Washington and dropped home games to Chicago and Atlanta during a modest 6-3 start.

After losing against Dallas in Brooklyn on July 19 in the first game after the All-Star break, they were 14-5. Then they really took off, looking like the superior team they were advertised to be.

Now they’re on a 24-4 run, including that Commissioner’s Cup victory on Aug. 15. Since falling on the Aces’ court two nights later, the Liberty are 13-2.

“I only spoke about championships Day One and then it was over because that’s the end result,” said Brondello, who has her husband, Olaf Lange, by her side as an assistant coach. “You have to do a lot of hard work. I always continue to be a process-driven coach. I think we have to make sure we win every day and going in to get better and better.

“It was a journey. I think early [on], people just think you snap your fingers, it’s going to work. It takes time. We had a whole five new players trying to learn to play with each other. We had some injuries and trying to get them fit. But after the All-Star break, we grew as a team.”

Brondello used to play this game quite well.

The 55-year-old former shooting guard is in the Australian Basketball Hall of Fame. She played for that country’s Olympic team four times. Two silver medals were the high points.

She had a 17-year-old pro playing career in Australia — where she was an MVP in 1995 — Germany and the WNBA. She spent five seasons in the league, becoming an All-Star in 1999 with Detroit and finishing with Seattle in 2003.

Now she’s the seventh-winningest coach in WNBA history and has made the playoffs in all of her 11 seasons with San Antonio, Phoenix and the Liberty.

Brondello came to New York after eight seasons, two Finals appearances and one title with the Mercury, which came in her first year in 2014.

Brondello is the fourth-winningest coach in WNBA postseason history. So how does she squeeze the most out of her teams and get them to rise at the prime time of the season? Ask people around her and it comes back to the same theme — her personality and approach.

“She’s just very even keel,” Kolb said. “She has a way about her where she’ll get on the team if she needs to and she’ll be positive if she needs to. She knows when to strike that balance. She’s great at forming relationships with players and instilling trust in players.”

Laney has played a pivotal role in this season’s success story at both ends. Asked about Brondello’s impact on her, she simply said, “I think just allowing me to play and play my game.”

Reserve Jocelyn Willoughby has seen how Brondello handles adverse times.

Take the last series.

The Liberty dropped their semifinal opener at home to the Sun, then really needed to win Game 2, not wanting to go to Connecticut with the season on the brink. They ended up going there after a split.

“I think one of the things that makes Sandy great is her experience, and she’s obviously been in the situation,” Willoughby said after the morning shootaround of Game 2. “Coach Sandy is not a person that gets high or low . . . She’ll speak with more urgency and more frustration. You can sense it in her tone and her voice. But she’s not a yeller.

“She’s not coming in throwing chairs, raising her voice. That’s not who she is.”

When the Sun came up empty on their last possession last Sunday in Game 4 at Mohegan Sun Arena and the Liberty had clinched their ticket to the Finals, two emotions washed over Brondello.

“It was a relief but joy,” she said. “This has been the most fun I’ve had, coaching these players.”