Liberty's newly formed superteam a boost to the WNBA
Clockwise, from top left: Sabrina Ionescu, Jonquel Jones, Courtney Vandersloot and Breanna Stewart all will play for the New York Liberty this season. Credit: Getty Images
A pro basketball superteam at Barclays Center? What could possibly go wrong?
As we have seen with the Nets during the past few seasons . . . plenty.
But what the Liberty are doing feels different, more akin to the NBA trophy-producing Miami and Golden State All-Star jubilees of the 2010s.
Maybe even more so, given that the WNBA has less than half as many teams as the NBA, making for an even denser concentration of talent at the top.
It has been a wild ride of late for what at times has been a sleepy franchise that never has won a championship, last reached the WNBA Finals in 2002 and as recently as 2019 was playing at the 5,000-seat Westchester County Center.
The Liberty already had Sabrina Ionescu. Then they traded for Jonquel Jones of the Connecticut Sun last month.
This past week, they landed free agents Breanna Stewart and Courtney Vandersloot, who have rings representing three of the past five WNBA championships.
So make that four 2022 WNBA All-Stars in the presumed starting lineup, setting up the Liberty for a march to a potential Finals showdown with an even more imposing superteam in the Las Vegas Aces.
The defending champion Aces added free agent Candace Parker to the four All-Stars they already had.
Do the math: Seven of last season’s 10 All-Star starters will be on two teams — and one of the other three, Syosset’s Sue Bird, has retired.
“Superteams are the new thing, as you can see,” Stewart told ESPN on Wednesday, and that was before Vandersloot came aboard.
Is this concentration of power good for the WNBA?
This sort of question makes for a complicated debate in the major men’s leagues. For the WNBA, it is a no-brainer, slam-dunk positive.
The league has battled for attention in the crowded sports and media landscape for a quarter-century, and this will bring a wave of it.
When the Liberty and Aces are on the road, fans will turn out to see the visiting stars play and to root against them.
When they are home, they will draw crowds in markets full of celebrities eager for courtside face time and to be part of a happening.
The Nets’ Kevin Durant tweeted after Stewart signed: “Aye, don’t call my phone looking for tickets this summer, they gone. Let’s get it @nyliberty.”
If the Aces and Liberty meet in Brooklyn in the Finals come October, there will be sellout crowds, tabloid back pages and lead stories on “SportsCenter.”
The Stewart bombshell Wednesday made some troglodytes on social media and in the media business itself feel compelled to tell the world how little they cared.
That’s fine.
Soccer has dealt with that for decades in the United States and has outlasted skeptics to the point that there no longer is any point in debating its popularity.
The WNBA’s television audiences are not exactly a threat to the NFL, but they far exceed much of the time-filling stuff on sports TV.
The league provides valuable sports content, especially during the mostly quiet summer months, so it is not going anywhere.
Last season, ratings were up all over ESPN’s various outlets, including a 20% rise compared with 2021 for the regular season. The regular-season average of 352,000 viewers was the WNBA’s best since 2008.
(The NHL is averaging 373,000 viewers on ESPN and TNT this season, Sports Business Journal reported on Tuesday.)
I will go out on a limb and predict the Aces and Liberty will do better than that 352,000 mark when they meet at Barclays for the first time in the 2023 season on Aug. 6.
The rivals first will play on June 29 in Las Vegas, but they will have an unofficial meeting back in Vegas on July 15 — at the 2023 All-Star Game.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
