Liberty to begin season with eyes firmly fixed on WNBA championship
The clock struck all zeros seven months ago. But the bitter ending hasn’t been struck from Breanna Stewart’s mind.
Liberty down one . . . 8.8 seconds left . . . the frontcourt inbound feed to Stewart out of a timeout, with coach Sandy Brondello wanting the WNBA MVP to take the last shot … the quick double team by Las Vegas . . . Stewart passing the ball away . . . Courtney Vandersloot ultimately sailing an 18-footer from the left baseline over the rim.
The Finals were over. The Aces repeated after a 70-69 win in Game 4 at Barclays Center. The Liberty had finished two victories short of the championship after a 32-8 regular-season run, the winningest in franchise history.
“Honestly, it still sticks with me,” Stewart, the five-time All-Star and two-time MVP, said at the team’s media day earlier in May. “I don’t think it will not stick with me.
“But now it’s just looked at differently. I was really frustrated for a while, probably at least a few months. [It’s] just the way things ended and the last seconds on the court, me not shooting the last shot. But now it’s kind of like turning the page, and how can I learn from this?”
The page has turned for the Liberty, but the goal remains the same. They open season No. 28 Tuesday night at Washington and are again in pursuit of title No. 1. They believe they learned and that this version will be even better than the last.
The marquee starting five — 6-4 forward Stewart, 6-6 center Jonquel Jones, 6-foot guard/forward Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, 5-11 guard Sabrina Ionescu and Vandersloot, the 5-8 point guard — returns intact for its second season together.
So the Liberty’s optimism stems foremost from improved chemistry built across last season and the year as a group in coach Sandy Brondello’s system.
“It’s very important when you think about the journey of a lot of teams who have won championships,” Laney-Hamilton said. “It all took them some time. We were able to get there, not finish, but we were able to get there in just that one year.
“So with us having that chemistry and building off of that and just continue to grow together, I do believe that a championship is in our near future.”
GM Jonathan Kolb said he has seen them not thinking out there in training camp, just “playing really freely.”
“[We’re] very, very improved,” Ionescu said. “I think all of us individually have improved. But also I think collectively to be able to understand one another and know where we’re going to be on the floor, it just helps so much.”
Brondello didn’t love the Liberty being labeled a “superteam” before last season because, as she said, “we hadn’t done anything.”
She said she hopes the upgraded understanding will lead to the execution going “to another level.”
There’s another reason for optimism — improved depth.
“I think we rode our starters too heavy last year,” Jones said.
But they need to be able to count on the bench to produce more. Kolb put work into building that up in the offseason. That could also lead to better defense, especially on the perimeter, an issue in the Finals.
“I do think that there’s a narrative here that the Liberty last year didn’t guard, which I do have to say is completely false statistically,” Kolb said. “If you look, we had the third-best defense in the entire WNBA by rating. We had the best defensive field-goal percentage in the WNBA. Statistically, [we] guarded a Las Vegas team better than anybody else in the WNBA.
“I feel that is something we want to improve. We’re No. 3. We want to be No. 1, right? So in looking at that, we tried to get a little bit more athletic. [To be] a little bit longer off of the bench, have players that can impact us defensively to help sustain, if not elongate leads that the starting group builds.”
Kolb said 6-4 German wing Leonie Fiebich will be “a big part of that.”
Then there’s another newcomer, four-year WNBA veteran Kennedy Burke. The 6-1 guard/forward didn’t play in the league in 2023, but she did excel during her season in France. Burke said she can bring “a defensive spark.” And she’s thrilled to join the cause.
“You’ve got the best players in the world here,” Burke said. “ . . . The fact that they reached out to me saying they want me to be a part of it is such a huge deal. I didn’t believe at first. So I was in shock, but grateful at the same time that they thought of me.”
Kolb also drafted 6-foot Ole Miss guard Marquesha Davis with the 11th overall pick last month. Brondello said there will be “a big learning curve, but I think she can help in pockets. She has the ability to get to the basket and defend.”
Her aim?
“I would say to be a dawg on defense and also bring what I can do on offense and get out in transition,” Davis said.
Ivana Dojkic, a 5-11 Croatian guard who spent part of last season with Seattle and shot 41.8% on threes, was vying for a roster spot in the preseason.
Kayla Thornton is a 6-1 forward and a valued returning reserve.
Nyara Sabally, the 6-5 center who was the fifth overall pick in the 2022 draft, had a quiet rookie season last year after sitting out two years ago because of a knee issue. Sabally feels more comfortable. She said she’s focused on “being a little more aggressive” offensively after averaging 13.4 points for her Prague team in the Czech Republic.
So now the Liberty will try to take the final step.
“We got close,” Brondello said. “We learned from last year. We want to bring a championship, be the first [Liberty] team to bring that to New York. We know it’s going to be difficult, but we’ve got to embrace the difficult moments.”