NBA

Can The New York Liberty Find Their Championship Form?

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By
Lucas Kaplan
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Lucas Kaplan Sports Editor

Lucas Kaplan, a lifelong hoops addict, has been a credentialed reporter covering the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty for three seasons apiece. He joins the Basketball Insiders team as an insightful league-wide analyst, bringing X's and O's expertise as well as a background in NBA Draft scouting to the table. Once taunted Jerry Stackhouse after making a clutch free-throw at his summer camp.

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Sports Editor

Updated2 hours ago on August 28, 2025

New York Liberty

On August 17 of last year, following a decisive win over the two-time defending champion Las Vegas Aces, I wrote the New York Liberty had “the juice.” They had been talented enough from the moment Jonquel Jones, Breanna Stewart and Courtney Vandersloot arrived in New York prior to the 2023 season, but it was clear they now had the requisite “it” factor, the juice, to come out the other side of the WNBA playoffs a champion. The marketing team thought so, too:

Two months later, the Liberty raised their inaugural WNBA Finals Championship Trophy inside Barclays Center.

One year later, they do not seem poised to pull off a repeat. Capable? Sure. But after a 9-0 start to the season, the Liberty have gone 14-15, entering their Thursday night matchup against the Washington Mystics as the No. 5 seed. If the regular season ended right now, they would open the playoffs on the road, a scenario absolutely unthinkable until — after injuries, mistakes, bad bounces, lackadaisical play and more injuries — it suddenly was.

Alas, the regular season is not over. Stewart has returned from a month-long injury absence and now, the Liberty have six games to get it right, to not only improve their playoff seeding but to find the best version of themselves. In short: 2025 does not feel like their year. It’s not over yet, though.

Do The Liberty Have Another Gear?

No other question matters if the answer to this one is not a resounding “yes.”

Prior to returning to the Liberty lineup Monday against the Connecticut Sun, Stewart revealed the top priority for the Liberty, cliché as it may sound.

“I think the first thing that we can do is continue to focus and lock in on effort plays. You know, 50/50 balls, loose balls,” she said. “Those are things that are controllable. Whether the ball goes in the basket or not, you can’t always control, but making sure that we’re on a string, we know that we’re ready to fight.”

This is not the message you want to hear from the leader of a contending team so close to the postseason, but it is the right one. In 2024, the Liberty led the league in defensive rebounding percentage; in 2025 they are second-worst. They’ve also slipped from the fifth-best offensive rebounding team to the very worst. If rebounding is an effort stat, New York just isn’t trying hard enough.

“Our inconsistency at times is mind-boggling,” head coach Sandy Brondello said after a dispiriting August 21 loss to the Chicago Sky in which they surrendered 20 second-chance points.

But is it?

Every rotation player has missed time with either injury or overseas commitments, including the entire big rotation. Jones played just nine games before the All-Star Break while Stewart missed nearly the whole month of August. Nyara Sabally’s knees have been a no-go for much of the season and the surprising Isabelle Harrison has been in concussion protocol for the team’s last seven games. Midseason arrival (and pseudo-savior) Emma Meesseman was asked what the Liberty really needed from her after her team debut August 3 and she half-jokingly replied “a body.”

Worse yet, New York is in the midst of the thickest post-All-Star schedule of any WNBA team with 23 games. The Liberty are fighting for playoff position but on many nights, there’s not enough gas in the tank. Understandable or not, it’s unacceptable for a team trying to repeat as champions.

When it comes to rebounding, that doesn’t (just) mean they visibly give up on box-outs or let their opponents beat them down the floor. More often, mistakes compound. Whether those mistakes are caused by fatigue doesn’t change the outcome. On this instructive possession, one snafu on the perimeter leads to Angel Reese securing great position down low and from there, it’s over:

Nobody is hot-dogging here. It’s not a lazy possession. The next “gear” for the Liberty won’t just show up in the form of elbows bloodied by heroic dives for loose balls, but fewer defensive mistakes like the above.

How Much Can Breanna Stewart Fix?

Another explanation for New York’s dreadful rebounding season: Stewart and Jones, thanks to injury, have shared the court for just 224 minutes this season, down from nearly 1,000 last season. The Liberty deploy a variety of ball-screen coverages and will often call them out on the fly, which includes switching with either one of the bigs. When both share the floor, rebounding behind the switch becomes a much less arduous task:

Including the July 26 contest Stewart got injured in, the Liberty went 5-9 in her absence. It was the nadir of a trying season for the defending champions and though a measly two-point win over a 9-27 Connecticut Sun team in her return doesn’t signal perfection, she does make the Liberty whole again. But does she save them?

“I mean, that’s not gonna happen and that’s not realistic, you know?,” Sabrina Ionescu said. “I think it’s understanding, like, how we can help her, how she can help us and how we understand when we’re all collectively doing our part, this thing goes.”

Stewart’s part, of course, is massive. Ask a Liberty player or coach what the team missed most in her absence and you’ll deservedly get some incredulous version of “everything.”

Her defense is unimpeachable; there is no doubt she’ll be flying around the backline in help or mauling opposing guards at the point-of-attack once the playoffs begin.

And yet, the Liberty may have missed her even more on the other end. Stewart is shooting just 20 percent from three this season, continuing a worrying trend that’s developed since her bricky 2023 WNBA playoffs. Every time she raises up from deep, the Liberty faithful will be holding their breath, and they should be, especially with Natasha Cloud now in the backcourt, an iffy shooter teams are willing to help off.

But none of her teammates, snipers as they are, can replicate her ability to put pressure on the rim in any situation. New York’s free-flowing, five-out offense means the ball gets from side-to-side and roles are quite fungible. One player may set a ball-screen and roll to the rim, flowing out to the opposite corner if they don’t get the pass. A few seconds later, and they’re careening around the arc, receiving a dribble handoff from the wing.

Add in Stewart’s cutting and she is a constant threat to make something happen, as she showcased in her return Monday:

Ionescu has missed her star teammate greatly.

“[Her return] gives me the opportunity to kind of be able to play on and off-ball,” Ionescu siad. “Set her up in any way that I can, help her get downhill. But we play so well together, whether we, like, invert the pick-and-roll to me setting it for her or her for me. I think it just continues to bring so much to this offense because it’s hard to guard. Like, you don’t really know, there’s no predictability.”

Maybe that’s exactly what the Liberty and Ionescu need.

One Big Lineup Question

The 2025 Liberty are not just a rerun of their championship campaign. After Betnijah Laney-Hamilton suffered a season-canceling knee injury during the offseason, general manager Jonathan Kolb acquired the aforementioned Cloud. There were obvious pros and cons. The 2024 Liberty benched small, pass-first point guard Courtney Vandersloot in favor of the 6-foot-4 Leonie Fiebich, moving Ionescu to full-time lead ball-handler duties and becoming a bigger, more switchable team in the process.

Ionescu’s plate was suddenly full. Her improvements as a ball-handler meant she could manage it and the Liberty defense reaped the benefits. Cloud is a fine defender but not the sharpshooting wing Laney-Hamilton is. New York’s identity once again shifted but perhaps Ionescu would benefit with some easier looks.

Though searching for definitive cause-and-effect is hard, given so many injuries, Ionescu’s life has decidedly not been easier in 2025. Per PBP Stats, her shot quality is its lowest since a three-game rookie season in 2020; just 61.6 percent of her shots have come from three or at the rim. Ionescu is right New York’s best offense is unpredictable but the way opponents defend her with Cloud on the court is not:

This is where the 6-foot-4 Meesseman enters the picture. The midseason signee, who has spent most of her time since winning the 2019 WNBA Finals MVP destroying various levels of European competition, can shoot threes on low volume and possesses world-class touch and vision. Can the Liberty conceivably run a huge, slightly slow-footed lineup with Ionescu, Fiebich, Stewart, Jones and Meesseman?

“We worked a little bit on the big lineup today,” Brondello said at Wednesday’s practice. “We’ve just got to learn by the minutes that we’ll have in these next games.”

In something of a test drive, that big lineup played just two minutes during Stewart’s return against Connecticut. Though Brondello called it “clunky,” it didn’t discourage her.

“The big lineup wasn’t that good for us but it will be,” she said. “We just need repetition, you know, you need experience to learn.”

It’s a gamble the team has to make but a gamble nonetheless. Meesseman has the hands and size to provide moderate versatility in ball-screen coverages but is much slower than Cloud — and Laney-Hamilton, for that matter. Clinical offenses like the Minnesota Lynx can take advantage of her via off-ball actions like this:

Those kinds of miscues have already been killing the Liberty lately. Why make Meesseman defend in space more often? Wouldn’t that negate the size and rebounding advantage she theoretically brings over Cloud? All are valid questions but the upside of having Meesseman on the floor next to other great players is too tantalizing to ignore:

I cannot take credit for noticing the parallel between this year’s Liberty team and the 2014 Miami Heat, which dragged themselves to the NBA Finals in search of a three-peat, despite obvious exhaustion, some of which was age-related. Of course, New York also has a rival looking to avenge a Finals loss from the previous year: the 30-7, top-seeded Lynx.

The Liberty are not dead yet, though they occasionally look it. They’ve been injured, they’ve been trying to integrate new players and they’ve been playing a grueling schedule. I am not the grand arbiter of acceptable effort level for professional athletes, but to me, this well explains their subpar play over the last two months.

But somehow, they need to find the juice. Otherwise, Stewart’s return will be but a blip on their way to an early playoff exit and a giant lineup with three of this generation’s most skilled bigs will be a fun piece of trivia, nothing more. The Liberty have the tools to save their season but it has to start now.