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The only stat that matters is the final score, and when the buzzer sounded at Barclays Center on Sunday night, the scoreboard showed that the New York Liberty are WNBA champions.
With their 67-62 overtime win over the Minnesota Lynx, the Liberty captured their first championship in franchise history. And as one of the WNBA’s original teams from 1997, it’s been a long time coming.
“I’ve been manifesting this moment for a while and there’s no feeling like it,” Breanna Stewart said in the postgame press conference, champaign in hand and goggles atop her head. “To be able to bring a championship to New York, first ever in franchise history, it's an incredible feeling and I can't wait to continue to celebrate with the city because I know it's gonna be bonkers.”
Stewart, a Syracuse, NY native, added that the first WNBA game she ever saw in-person was a Liberty game at Madison Square Garden. Sunday night represented a full-circle moment for her career.
The city has already announced that it will host championship celebrations in Manhattan and Brooklyn with details to come on Monday.
In the seconds after the game ended, confetti rained down on the team and reality set in. WNBA Finals MVP Jonquel Jones admitted she was at a loss for words and sobbed into Stewart’s shoulder as the two embraced. Sabrina Ionescu, who endured one of the worst shooting games you’ll ever see (1-19 FG), laid down at mid-court, letting the victory wash over her. Teresa Weatherspoon, the Liberty legend who had hit the biggest shot in franchise history until Game 3 of this series, teared up on the sideline.
It took the stars and the subs for the Liberty to win a championship
People will remember the celebrations from Sunday night. They won't remember the two free throws that Stewart missed with 38 seconds left and a chance to tie the game. Nor will people remember that as a team, New York shot 2-23 from three-point range (Ionescu alone went 1-10).
Instead, Ionescu can look back on her four years in New York and know that she played a major role in ending a 28-year drought. Her game-winning three with one second to go in Game 3 in Minnesota will go down as one of the greatest moments in WNBA Finals history, and her performance against the Las Vegas Aces to close out the semifinals put an end to the dynastic run of the league’s supervillains.
“That’s what it takes to win a championship,” Ionescu said after she and her husband were finally pulled away from the postgame celebration. “I’m just really proud of our team…. This has been one of the better series that there’s been. We're a great basketball team and I feel like we gave the world everything that they wanted.”
The Liberty don’t win this championship without Ionescu.
The same is true for Stewart, who shot a woeful 25% from the field in the final two games of the series while missing all seven of her three-point attempts. But the Liberty aren’t even in position for Ionescu to save them in Game 3 if she didn’t go on her own personal 13-0 run and score 30 points to dig the Liberty out of a 15-point hole.
Jones was the right choice for MVP; she was consistently strong on both ends during the series and kept the Liberty in Game 5 early when nothing seemed to be going right. But if Jones was MVP of the series, Nyara Sabally was MVP of the deciding game. With the Liberty trailing by seven at the half, head coach Sandy Brondello made a bold decision: She went with a lineup in the third quarter that had zero minutes of experience playing together. That meant putting Sabally on the court with Jones, Stewart, Leonie Fiebich, and Kayla Thornton.
“[Sabally] has that X factor, her ability to make one-on-one plays,” Brondello said. “She’ll rebound the ball, she’ll play great defense, all of it. And then to finish plays…. The biggest game of her career and she really rose to the occasion. For a young player, that really says a lot about her.”
The much-ballyhooed super-team needed a player who averaged fewer than five points per game to bail them out, and that’s exactly what she did, scoring 13 points, nine in the third quarter.
The Lynx played suffocating defense all night, as the Liberty’s hideous offensive numbers will show. Sabally didn’t seem to care, forcing her way into the lane to either score or get to the line.
As with any championship team, its stars recognized the role the subs played. Stewart interrupted the presser to throw some unprompted praise at the 24-year-old whose career to this point has been stifled by injury.
“I think what's incredible about [Sabally] is the fact that if you look back at the semifinal series, she didn't really play and then she stayed ready and knew that in the Finals, her time would come,” Stewart said, before turning directly to Sabally. “She continued to stick with it and when we needed her most, you were the X factor… We're so proud of you.”
That’s the support that Sabally has felt since the Liberty drafted her fifth overall in 2022.
“I feel like throughout the whole season, there's just been unwavering support, whether it's from Sandy or my teammates,” Sabally said. “Everybody in this organization has always believed in me. They drafted me knowing I had to sit out a year, that just shows how much trust they have in me. And I feel like this whole season, every time I'm on the floor, my teammates have my back, telling me to just keep going, work hard.”
For the Liberty, the fans were ‘all they need’
If one moment could show the importance of homecourt advantage in the playoffs, it came with 7:46 left in regulation and the Liberty clinging to a 47-46 lead. The Lynx called a timeout and players in both huddles were able to hear the Barclays Center fans begin to chant the words that have carried the Liberty through the second half of the season.
A call-and-response “We all we got!” “We all we need!” chant breaks out here from Liberty fans, echoing the mantra introduced to the huddle by Jonquel Jones. Awesome moment. pic.twitter.com/KHAai9jOB2
— Myles (@MylesEhrlich) October 21, 2024
“We all we got. We all we need.”
That started as a mantra for the players, but once the fans caught on, it became a rallying cry in Brooklyn. It boomed across Barclays Center, which was, again, filled to the brim.
“It means a lot to just know everyone has been behind us,” Betnijah Laney-Hamilton said. “Our crowd has been amazing, and so I'm just happy that we were able to win it on our home court.”
The fans have been there all season. While last year, they mostly stuck to the lower bowl, with upper-level seats occasionally opening for big games, there were fans in the upper level at all 27 home games this year. That might not seem like a major accomplishment, but consider that just five years ago, this team was playing in the 2,000-seat Westchester County Center.
Sunday night could not have possibly been more different. Not only was the building packed to the gills, but celebrities from Spike Lee to Aubrey Plaza (who gave the jumbotron the double bird at one point) were front and center. Fat Joe handled halftime as the latest major artist to earn the honors in the postseason — Ja Rule and Jadakiss performed in earlier games.
This is what the Tsai family had in mind when they purchased the team at a point where it was near financial collapse. They then moved them to Brooklyn, drafted Ionescu, acquired Jones, Stewart, and Courtney Vandersloot. When that wasn’t enough to win a championship, they added to their bench, bringing in rookie sensation Leonie Fiebich, who worked her way into the starting lineup.
Brooklyn has been along for the ride every step of the way, from the group of men who show up to every game dressed as the Statue of Liberty to the young girls who arrive early to get an autograph during warmups.
The fans turned Liberty home games into more than basketball in 2024. They made them an event. The basketball was championship caliber, but every timeout was electric, whether the fans were doing the Ellie wave or raining MVP chants down on Stewart, as they did periodically throughout the year.
Yes, the Liberty had a chance to close out this series in Game 4 in Minneapolis, but it wouldn’t have felt right if it happened that way. Ionescu realized right away when the team returned home after that game that they were in the right place.
“There was a buzz in the arena, even when we came back after this road trip,” Ionescu recalled. “The staff [at Barclays Center] and everyone, it was like, we’re back in New York and we’re doing it here where we deserve to win a championship in front of this crowd.”
It turns out “we all we got, we all we need” applies to the entire Liberty community —players, coaches, administrators, and fans.
They had all they needed. Now they got a championship, too.
