The New York Liberty have played five games in the last eight days, and in that time, they’ve learned how to draw on contributors up and down the bench.
The Liberty needed nearly everyone available on Sunday in their 93-88 grind-out win over the winless Washington Mystics at Barclays Center. It was their seventh win in a row and put them at 11-2 on the year, but it did not come easy.
Washington continues to play the Liberty tough, and it took a 12-0 fourth quarter run for New York to finally take control. Jonquel Jones had a Liberty career high 29 points and Sabrina Ionescu added 19.
But in the second day of a back-to-back, the team was gassed down the stretch.
“No one cares if you’re tired. I don’t care if I’m tired,” Ionescu said after the game. “There's a million excuses as to why I could have taken today off, but, mentally, physically, I wasn't gonna let that affect my mentality.”
The Liberty went 5-0 in the last week, despite being short-handed in each game. Nyara Sabally (back) has not played since May 31 and Courtney Vandersloot has missed the last three games due to a personal matter.
That has forced head coach Sandy Brondello to mix and match with her bench.
“It’s necessary,” Brondello said of her bench’s performance. “Obviously we trust everybody. [Leonie Fiebich] really took a big step up. Kennedy [Burke] has made the most of her minutes.”
Fiebich in particular shined bright. Over the past week, she has gone from an afterthought to a key rotation piece and scored a career high 12 points on four made threes on Sunday. She also played a career-best 25 minutes.
The rookie is admittedly more comfortable than she was at the beginning of the season, when the early onslaught of games made practice time minimal. Constant game action, however, has been a good substitute.
“Just getting to know my teammates better, how they want to play, where they want the ball, and which player is good in which action, and just kind of playing off of them,” Fiebich said after Sunday’s win. “I think really helps us all together on the court and I just like to bring energy, honestly. And I think that helps the team.”
Ionescu praised the entire bench, knowing that with the team short-handed and in the middle of a daunting stretch, it could not be the starters alone who carried the load.
“They come in every single day ready,” she said. “Leo came in and hit some huge shot for us, got some huge rebounds. Ivana comes in and is just steady, and without [Vandersloot], that's something that we're gonna need to continue to rely on and she's done that. She's a pro, she understands what it takes.”
For Dojkic, that doesn’t mean scoring. She hit her only three in her eight minutes of playing time Sunday, but was also that steady presence that the team was missing without Vandersloot.
“I thought Ivana [Dojkic] had really good minutes for us because I thought we needed another handler out there,” Brondello said.
Liberty have some deserved time off
The Liberty are idle until a Saturday WNBA Finals rematch at the Las Vegas Aces. It’s a rest that they’ve earned.
“We were tired, I would admit that,” Brondello said. “Mentally, we were all over the place.”
The team returned from Connecticut Saturday night after defeating the Sun, and Jones said that by the time the team was on the bus, attention had already turned to the next game.
“Everybody’s kind of just using whatever time we have to recover and be ready for the next game,” she said. “But we understood that regardless of the situation we're in, we can use every game, every opportunity to get better and be ready, so that in the playoffs, we'll be able to say that we've kind of been tested in various situations.”
This could have been a trap game for the Liberty, facing a winless team that was also shorthanded (Shakira Austin and Brittney Sykes did not play). But while the game was sloppy at times and closer than the standings indicated it should have been, the Liberty were able to find another gear down the stretch.
“I think we have veterans, and it shows that people understand the moment,” Jones said. “I think we lock in, and we take it to another level. I think our area of growth is gonna have to be just trying to find those moments a little bit earlier in games to get out of those situations.”
Now that the Liberty have finished this stretch, Ionescu is looking forward to the next few days.
“We have a couple of days off now and can relax and I can just kick my feet up and sleep in and do a whole lot of things that I've just been like wanting to do,” she said. “But the job wasn't finished. We needed to come here tonight, we needed to take care of business and do it the right way and get that win.”
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