New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart is here to play basketball. She’ll tune everything else out.
The reigning MVP gave a performance befitting a superstar in her prime on Thursday night. As a result, the New York Liberty downed the Sparks, 103-68, in Los Angeles to return from the Olympic break with a flourish.
Stewart needed only 20 minutes to shoot 10-15 from the field and score 27 points. Perhaps the most encouraging sign came in a one-minute stretch in the third quarter. Stewart hit three threes, seeming to forget her shooting woes from the first half of the year.
“I'm gonna just keep doing what I do. I think that when you get hot like that, it's obviously a feeling of when you shoot, it feels like the basket is the ocean,” she said. “I'm not really worried about what anyone else is saying or thinking or whatever the case might be.”
Stewart might not be paying attention, but her wife is. Five hours before game time, Marta Xargay defended Stewart on X after an ESPN writer speculated she might be “aging out of her prime.”
“STOP WITH THE DISRESPECT!!!!” she wrote. “Aging out? She’s the reigning MVP on best team in the league!”
Even the official Liberty account piled on, quoting Xargay and adding “LET ‘EM KNOW MARTA.”
Stewart didn’t address the story directly, but did acknowledge a Liberty tweet later in the night that read “AGING LIKE FINE WINE. When you speak on @breannastewart put some RESPECT ON HER NAME 🅿️,” quoting it with a wine glass emoji.
At 29 years old, Stewart is a three-time Olympic gold medalist, four-time NCAA champion, two-time WNBA champion, and two-time WNBA MVP. The next item to cross off her list: delivering a championship to the New York Liberty, the only active original WNBA team without a banner.
And if this is her aging out of her prime, it looks awfully good. Stewart is averaging 19.3 points and a team-high nine rebounds per game. While her shooting percentages are down, her assists (4.0) and steals (2.0) are both up.
It would be foolish to draw too much from one game — or one third-quarter stretch. But if she has found her shot again, she can still be the best player in the league on the best team in the league down the stretch.
“Everything that we did the first half of the season was great, but now we are starting fresh and we want to be better than what we were in the first half of the season,” Stewart said.
The Liberty showed no signs of rust after the Olympic break
The Liberty had four players competing in Paris — Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu for Team USA, and Leonie Fiebich and Nyara Sabally for Germany, while head coach Sandy Brondello led the Australian national team. The rest of the roster had to fend for themselves, staying sharp by going up against each other or their practice players while their teammates were overseas.
The team has still yet to practice together since the Olympics ended.
It did not look that way at all. The Liberty moved the ball seamlessly on offense, passing up good shots for better shots. Courtney Vandersloot, wearing a face mask after a practice player broke her nose during the break, knew where her teammates were going to be, seemingly before they did.
On defense, the team moved as one and held the Sparks to 10 points in the first quarter. It was the lowest first-quarter output for any New York opponent since 2019.
“I think we made it look a lot easier than it was,” Stewart admitted. “We were just playing, we weren’t really getting bogged down by running sets. We were just going to play basketball.”
Thursday was the first time the Liberty have played together in a month, but the schedule ramps up from here. They’re off to Las Vegas next to face the defending champion Aces. Then, starting next Tuesday, they enter a 12-day stretch of playing every other day.
“We know what the goal is and really from the start of the season, we didn't want to make any excuses,” Stewart said. “That's going to continue to carry over to the second half of the season.”
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