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The best players on the New York Liberty haven’t changed. Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones are still former MVPs who have had MVP-like stretches. A neck injury has cost Sabrina Ionescu her last two games, but she is still one of the most electric guards in the game.
Yet the Liberty are visibly much better than they were in the opening month of the season.
Part of that is cohesion; Stewart admitted in May that the team needed some time to get used to playing with each other again. More importantly, however, it’s the supporting cast.
Leonie Fiebich averaged fewer than two points per game in the Liberty’s first five contests. She is now a starter while Betnijah Laney-Hamilton recovers from a knee injury. On Thursday night, she scored 16 points and grabbed seven rebounds in 29 minutes as the Liberty beat the Dallas Wings for the second time in three days, 79-71.
The rookie was an unknown in May. She was a game-time decision on Thursday with a rib injury, and head coach Sandy Brondello even admitted after the game that she “probably shouldn’t have played.”
But Fiebich knew that the team was already shorthanded. She was no longer that bench piece who could spell one of the stars for a few minutes. The Liberty needed her.
They got her. In a game in which the Liberty missed 50 shots and 22 threes, she was 4-9 from deep.
“She saw other players were down, so she’s pretty tough,” Brondello said. “To do whatever she does to help the team win, it was more like ‘OK, I’m gonna give it a shot.’ That’s what she told me….I think that shows a commitment and they’re the kind of players we have.”
Brondello said Ionescu might be able to go on Saturday when the Liberty host the second-place Connecticut Sun. Laney-Hamilton isn’t far behind with an ETA sometime on the team’s west coast swing next week.
That will relegate Fiebich to the bench, where she will sit alongside Kayla Thornton and Kennedy Burke, who have both been starters in their careers. Next to them will be Fiebich’s Team Germany teammate Nyara Sabally and rookie Jaylyn Sherrod. Sherrod electrified the Barclays Center crowd on Thursday, using her speed, handle, and confidence to get to the basket and make plays.
“She did a great job,” Brondello said of Sherrod. “We needed it, to get some energy out there…It just gave us another guard that we thought could put a little bit more pressure down the court and it got us into our stuff and handle the pressure they were putting on to us. She gave us what we needed.”
Talk yo talk, @JaylynSherrod!! 🙏 pic.twitter.com/aS22oz7MEj
— New York Liberty (@nyliberty) August 23, 2024
No other team has that type of depth.
Jaylyn Sherrod is with the Liberty for a reason
With a healthy Liberty roster, Sherrod would be maybe the fifth player off the bench. The rookie played with the Liberty during training camp before the team waived her and eventually brought her back on a series of seven-day contracts.
It’s a tough spot. Injuries have given Sherrod the golden opportunity to showcase her skills and solidify a roster spot. On the other hand, without more than a few days of job security, one mistake could send her to the bench and eventually off the team.
Yet she doesn’t see it that way.
“They brought me here for a reason,” Sherrod said. “If I’m not the hardest working, most passionate player on the court, I’m not doing my job. I never held myself to the standard of scoring 30 points or putting up numbers. It just simply, I gotta be the hardest working.”
Her teammates have taken notice. The Liberty are amid a stretch of playing every other day for the remainder of the month. Already short-handed, it meant Brondello needed to be careful with her stars’ playing time. As a result, Sherrod played important minutes in the third quarter while the Wings refused to go away.
“I love playing with Jay, I feel like she has the right approach,” Jones said. “Any time she gets an opportunity, I'm happy for her because the things that y'all see her do out there on the court are the things that she does every day in practice.”
That's the energy the Liberty needed.
