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NEW YORK — In a league where everybody knows everybody — personally and professionally — there's nowhere to hide in the WNBA, especially from yourselves. The New York Liberty have lost two straight games, and they haven’t looked good in the process. At least, not like the team that went to the WNBA Finals last year. Their players got a chance to see it all, in vivid detail, watching back the tape from their 84-67 loss to the Minnesota Lynx on Saturday.
“Video don’t lie,” head coach Sandy Brondello said after the team’s Monday afternoon practice. “We showed a lot of it. It’s not what we’re supposed to be doing and then we stopped playing [against Minnesota]. It won’t always be perfect, but we gotta keep playing.”
Brondello stressed that the team needs to be more connected on the court, something one wouldn’t expect to hear from the coach of a team who kept its entire starting five intact from a year ago.
But it’s still early in the season. It takes a little while to get used to playing with each other again, particularly in the WNBA where the offseason is more than six months long and many athletes play for other teams over the winter.
“We're a way better team than what we showed. We just gotta get back to our identity and how you do that is just getting back on the practice court and tidying up some things.”
Liberty ‘spacing was terrible’
Jonquel Jones and Breanna Stewart know that losses are part of the WNBA experience. Stewart stressed that it was better to have them now in the opening weeks of the season than later, when there's less time to correct any issues.
The Liberty have struggled on both ends, but Jones identified one area on offense that the team can’t afford to repeat against elite defensive teams like Minnesota.
“Our spacing was terrible,” she said. “We were on top of each other. Every time someone had an opportunity to go one-on-one, somebody else was right there. And so their defense is just congesting everything and then you couple that with the fact that we weren't shooting the ball well, and now it's a game that's kind of out of hand that doesn't feel like, New York Liberty basketball.”
It wasn’t a lack of effort. After the team’s loss to the Chicago Sky, Stewart raised the point that when they fall behind, players tend to try to get it all back in a hurry, rather than continuing to play their game. Jones saw that in film.
“I felt like everybody was trying to do something but sometimes doing nothing is OK,” she said. “Sometimes it's just spacing, waiting for things to develop instead of just screening down for no reason or moving for no reason.”
It would help for the Liberty to get out in transition, either scoring on the fast break or starting their offense before their opponent has time to set up.
It's no coincidence that as the team’s sets have crumbled, their shooting percentage has suffered as well.
Despite starting 4-0, the Liberty are eighth in the WNBA in points per game (83.3) and 10th in three-point percentage (30.4). Last year, with the same starting five, the Liberty were the best three-point shooting team in the WNBA (37.4%) and only trailed the eventual champion Las Vegas Aces in scoring (89.2 ppg).
“I’ve missed a lot. I know [Sabrina Ionescu] wants to shoot better,” Stewart explained. “It’s going to work itself out. We’re going to continue to do what we do and take the shots that we take and have confidence.”
Getting downhill
One problem that helps explain the poor shooting numbers is that the Liberty have not been able to find easy baskets. They’ve been out-rebounded in their last two games and the Lynx and Sky combined to shoot 47% from the field compared to 41% for New York. That means the simple act of inbounding the ball has slowed them down.
“If we have to take the ball out of the basket every single time, it's hard to get downhill,” Stewart said.
In that way, defense will need to lead to better offense.
“I think that defensively we need to be setting the tone more and really [be] on the same page,” Stewart shared. “We're not rotating out and moving on a string. And then from there, we know, once we get stops, our offense really flows.”
Jones and Stewart have both spoken about how the Liberty coaching staff prepares them for the upcoming opponent, going through film or simulating matchups with the scout team. It’s a tough balance to strike, though, between following the scouting report and responding to the game around you.
Stewart acknowledged that could have been a problem on defense.
“I think that sometimes we're a little bit caught up on our matchups and especially in transition,” she noted. “Somebody's got to get the ball and somebody's got to protect the basket, and the rest of you figure yourselves out and have a positionless mindset on defense.”
The Liberty have a chance to get right on Wednesday night at Barclays Center. They allowed the league’s best three-point shooting team to shoot 50% from long range last time out, and they get the Mercury — the second best 3-point shooting team in the WNBA — next.
Stewart said that if the team comes out of the gate controlling the boards on both ends and can “get downhill” defensively, it’ll be a good indication that the team is back where it should be.
If not, then it’s back to the drawing board again. But with an unforgiving stretch ahead of seven games in 12 days, there won’t be much time to hit reset.
