It took an incredibly ugly win to get the New York Liberty to the most beautiful place in franchise history.
This Game 5 of the WNBA Finals was not exactly a grand title coronation from childhood blacktop dreams. That is not to suggest it was boring: If anything, it was frighteningly the opposite, full of drama until the end. It was the first time that a WNBA winner-take-all championship game required overtime. But none of it came easy. The Liberty fought their way back from a double-digit deficit against the Minnesota Lynx. Even with the benefit of extra time, New York scored fewer points than it had in any victory this season, ultimately winning 67–62. The Liberty came very close to being the first team ever to win a Game 5 without a single three-pointer. (They finished 2-for-23 from beyond the arc: It was the worst distance shooting performance of the year for the team that made the most threes in the league.) There were missed free throws and bad looks and many dubious foul calls. But none of it mattered in the end.
The Liberty were the last of the WNBA’s original franchises still waiting to win a championship. They had made five previous trips to the Finals. They had lost them all. But on their home floor, in front of a raucous, sellout crowd, in the best worst game they might ever play, the Liberty changed that on Sunday.
“It wasn’t pretty,” said New York guard Sabrina Ionescu. “And that’s kind of the beauty of it.”
There was perhaps no better messenger for that sentiment than Ionescu. She finished an astonishing 1-for-19. (It likely goes without saying that it was the worst shooting performance of her professional career.) Yet she had eight assists, seven rebounds and two steals, and her only basket of the night was a critical one. Ionescu sank the Liberty’s first three of the game with just over three minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, stretching the lead out to four points, their biggest of the game yet.
This was not how New York was built to win. This group was not supposed to grind and claw and brick its way to a championship: It was built to dominate. This was the first true superteam in the WNBA, the product of fresh ownership that wanted to spend, bolstered by a new system of free agency that meant spending could actually pay off. New York built around 2020 No. 1 draft pick Ionescu. Before last season, management stocked the roster around her with stars, bringing in a future Hall of Fame point guard (Courtney Vandersloot) and a pair of MVPs (Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones). They were meant to deliver a title immediately.
But it did not happen in their first season together. After a wrenching loss to the Las Vegas Aces in the 2023 Finals, this roster had months to consider where it had gone wrong, how it needed to grow, what it had to change. And the Liberty needed all of those lessons to grit their way through a championship series a year later.
This was the closest Finals in the history of the WNBA. Every single game featured what is statistically known as “clutch time”—a margin of five points or fewer with five minutes remaining in the fourth quarter. Two games went to overtime. There were three comebacks of double digits. The Liberty fell behind 0–1 after suffering the worst blown lead in Finals history in Game 1. (They had been up 15 with less than five minutes to play.) They failed to close the series out in their first try in Game 4. Still, when they had no choice, they battled through on Sunday.
What this group learned from last year was how to play together. And so the Liberty’s performance in an ugly Game 5, in a remarkably tense Finals, felt oddly fitting. Maybe this was not how they had originally been constructed to win. But it was how they managed when it counted.
“It wasn't going to come out and just be this, like, crazy win,” Ionescu said. “It was going to be us just sticking together. And that’s what we did.”
Joe and Clara Wu Tsai purchased the franchise in early 2019. The billionaire owners got in at the nadir. The Liberty were coming off the worst season in franchise history to date. Previous owner James Dolan had pushed them out of their original home, Madison Square Garden, and parked them at the much smaller, dingier Westchester County Center. It put them not just metaphorically but literally miles away from their early success as a franchise. That gave the Tsais a lot to work on. They started by hiring a general manager.
Jonathan Kolb was in his early 30s. He’d never led a team. But they found his skillset compelling. He had a law degree and had spent the previous five years working in operations for the WNBA. The role had made Kolb a league resource for teams seeking advice on the salary cap, and it gave him a detailed understanding of the collective bargaining agreement, too. They liked the way he spoke about roster construction and relationship building. But they especially liked his vision. Kolb sketched out a plan for New York to return to the playoffs within three years and “level it up from there,” he says.
Which is more or less exactly what happened. And when the Liberty decided to level it up, Kolb and the Tsais made sure they shot all the way to the top floor, stocking their roster with established stars. Yet the process did not feel quite as dramatic from the inside as it may have seemed from the outside.
“That’s something also that kind of gets lost with this iteration of the Liberty,” Kolb says. “This has been a steady build. It wasn’t like, Oh, let’s just change out all of our parts… It was calculated.”
It may not have seemed that way. Over three weeks in the winter of 2023, New York orchestrated a five-team trade to land Jones and signed both Stewart and Vandersloot. The front office ultimately swapped out half of the roster that offseason. But those few weeks of activity were years in the making.
There were players who needed to buy in long before the superstars did. Kolb remembers pitching Betnijah Laney-Hamilton on his vision in free agency in 2021. “She bet on this before anybody,” he says. The Liberty had just posted the worst record in the league. All-Defensive selection Laney-Hamilton nonetheless signed on believing they could win a championship. There was also the work of building New York back up as a destination franchise, with investment in facilities, support staff and game-day environment at its new home of Barclays Center in Brooklyn. (The team invested even when it was against the rules: The Liberty were fined $500,000 for chartering private flights before it was permitted by the league.) And then came the logistics of planning ahead for cap space and roster spots.
These were the ingredients required to build their championship roster. It took strategic planning, long-term conversations and, of course, money. But one more ingredient was required to actually win that championship. It took some extra time.
New York posted its highest winning percentage ever in 2023. A roster that looked fantastic on paper was very often fantastic on the court. The Liberty went 32–8 and cruised to a berth in the Finals. There were six new players, including three starters and a top reserve, but they still played well together: They led the WNBA in assist rate. Yet there were signs they were not yet where they wanted to be. “We were kind of out-talenting people at times,” says Kolb. “We weren’t fully coalesced yet.” And that showed in the Finals. The Liberty failed to close out a tight Game 4 at home against the injury-compromised Aces.
It was a game they felt they should have won. (Stewart, in particular, agonized over the final seconds, when she had a chance to put up the final shot and instead decided to pass: “I want to be taking those shots,” she said.) The loss was painful. And it brought the roster together unlike anything else they had experienced in their first year together.
The group bristled at suggestions they were not a cohesive unit. (Aces guard Kelsey Plum had said as much after the Finals. “They’re really good individual players, but they don’t care about each other,” she told reporters. “And you can tell in those moments. They revert back to individual basketball.” The comment stung: “She’s not in our locker room,” Jones said a few days later. “I don’t care anything for it, to be honest.”) The Liberty felt like they had done everything right. They’d held regular culture meetings where they discussed how to support each other and reach their goals. They did care about each other. They certainly all wanted to win. Yet they not only came up short, they also found themselves publicly defending the idea that, in fact, this group was a team.
But that experience looks very different in hindsight. They were a team last season, but they know they have become a much stronger one over the last several months, and that has come with perspective. It was not that anything specific was missing last year. There was no team-building exercise or leadership activity that would have made a difference. Instead, what they needed was something they could not have sped up, a component for which there was no substitute. They needed to build trust, and they needed shared experiences, which meant they needed more time.
“You can say all these things about, Yeah, we have to talk to each other, we have to do this, we have to have each other’s back,” Stewart says. “But it’s like, specifically, what do you mean?”
So many of their conversations last year had been theoretical. They knew they could be a historically great team. But they needed some practical applications to understand how.
“Now, we’ve gone through some adversity together,” Vandersloot says. “At first, it was almost like we were trying to create it, because we knew that we were going to go through stuff. But you just have to do it.”
The experience of losing the championship last year helped foster that sense of togetherness. (The expectations had been so high, and the letdown so painful, that everyone carried it with them: “I felt like s--- after it, too,” Liberty coach Sandy Brondello said.) The veteran coach worked to frame the experience as scar tissue. “Scars heal,” she told her players. “It’s a reminder, but it’s not who we are.” This was something they could talk about. It was something they could grow from.
“Last year, people internalized a lot more,” Ionescu says. “We didn’t really understand what one another needed. And I would say this year—it’s the understanding of just being better teammates for one another. We know each other a lot better. There’s a lot more opportunity to be able to speak up about what you saw, what you’re struggling with, asking one another for help. I think that’s probably been the biggest difference.”
Ionescu was speaking at practice after the Liberty’s brutal collapse in Game 1. It was the kind of loss that might have sent them reeling last season. (“Oh, this time last year, we would have been in our own little spaces, in our heads,” said forward Kayla Thornton.) But they refused to let that happen this year. The film session was difficult. Yet it was more candid than anything they could have imagined doing a year prior. And it helped them weather a similar comeback attempt from the Lynx in Game 2.
“That's the trust,” Stewart says. “That's the chemistry, where you're getting even deeper into it, when you can say the hard things and know that nobody's going to take it personally.”
That required considerable individual leadership development. Much of it came from Stewart. Her talent meant she’d been a focal point on every roster she had ever played on. But her professional career had never required her to be a singularly vocal leader. Before coming to New York, she spent seven years with the Seattle Storm, all of them with veteran point guard Sue Bird. Those teams had needed Stewart to be a leader but never the leader. That had to change in New York.
“I’ve been really proud,” Brondello says. “I’ve seen her leadership grow, knowing when to speak up.”
Teammates can offer countless illustrations of this. Stewart has given pep talks, locker room speeches, reminders to get in gear. But the most indelible example came during these Finals. The Liberty trailed the Lynx for the entirety of the first three quarters in Game 3. Then the broadcast caught an emotional Stewart during a timeout: “We’re not f---ing losing this game!” she yelled. And it felt as if she had personally ensured they would not.
Brondello encouraged more vocal leadership from Ionescu, too. The coach spoke with the 26-year-old early last offseason about the areas where they wanted to see growth. The Liberty wanted her to work on her finishing, and they wanted her to develop her floater, and they wanted her to speak up more. The guard took that to heart.
“She really found her voice this year,” Vandersloot says. “I think last year, she maybe took a step back and was more of a listener, and trying to soak it all in. Just this year, she’s been able to stand on what she knows. … She's still young in this league, but she knows how to play the game, she understands at a really high level. So her voice is important.”
They had an incredible concentration of talent last year. But they did not fully understand how to play together. This had been the one ingredient missing from their superteam. And they eventually found it.
“What I've found now in hindsight—looking back at that and being in this—is that it just takes time,” Kolb says. “It takes time.”
When the buzzer rang, their championship finally official, Stewart ran to hug Jones. That was partially a matter of convenience: She was the player standing closest. But it was also fitting.
“I think it was picture perfect to be able to embrace J.J.,” Stewart said. “Really, what I was saying was like, she led us.”
On this roster full of standouts, Jones has not always been a prime focus. She did not arrive in the WNBA a ready-made star from college like Stewart or Ionescu. Instead, she came from a mid-major and had to gradually establish herself. She was not a lottery pick. She was traded on draft night. In her first several years in the league with the Connecticut Sun, she first won Most Improved Player, then Sixth Player of the Year and finally, in 2021, MVP. Jones built herself into an outstanding, versatile player, a powerful center in the paint as well as a capable passer and three-point shooter, too. The one thing eluding her in Connecticut was a championship. And so after multiple losses in the Finals, she decided to go elsewhere, and she ended up in New York. But that came with some very real adjustments .
Jones’s usage rate in two years in New York has been her lowest since her rookie season. She is a vital piece of the roster: She averaged 14.2 points and 9.0 rebounds per game this year. But she is not a singular fixture the way she previously had to be, and with so many formidable teammates, the spotlight has often ended up shining elsewhere.
“I feel like I've learned a lot about myself,” Jones said on the night the Liberty made it to the Finals. “Being here in New York, I've really been tested in terms of how much are you willing to sacrifice, you know? And it's not just about me, it's not about one person, obviously, but it’s been a learning experience.”
Yet in these Finals, it was Jones, again and again, who proved essential. She led the team in scoring in three of the five games. No one was more consistent. In this slog of a Game 5, with Ionescu struggling massively and Stewart unable to get her shot to fall, Jones led with 17 points and six rebounds, and she was the obvious choice as Finals MVP. She sobbed when Stewart hugged her at the buzzer. As she wrapped her arms around her teammate, overcome with emotion, she could not manage to get a single word out.
“I could never dream of this,” Jones later told the crowd when the MVP was announced.
She was surrounded by teammates who had dug in deep for this ugliest of games. Nyara Sabally averaged fewer than five points a game in the regular season and played sparingly in the early rounds of the playoffs. She delivered 13 points, seven rebounds and one critically important steal in her 17 minutes off the bench on Sunday. German rookie Leonie Fiebich is the only major player new to the roster this year. But with her defensive prowess, she played her way into a starting role by midseason, and she came up big in Game 5: 13 points, including an enormous three at the beginning of overtime, with her standard lockdown defense. The architects of this squad may not have pictured this particular box score when they imagined a championship. But that was telling in and of itself.
“If it’s going to be an ugly game,” Stewart said, “we will win ugly.”
They did. And what mattered most was that they did it together.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Justice for All: Liberty's Steady Build Finally Pays Off With First WNBA Title.
