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This version of the New York Liberty — the one without three rotation players, including former MVP Breanna Stewart — is good enough to beat the bottom of the WNBA. They established that once Emma Meesseman joined the fold last week and the team beat the Connecticut Sun and Dallas Wings twice.
They can also hang with the very best in the league, as they showed for much of their game Sunday against the Minnesota Lynx. But another bad third quarter, leading to a 25-4 Minnesota run, doomed New York as the Lynx beat them, 83-71 at Barclays Center.
The Lynx have now won the first two meetings this season against the team that beat them in last year’s WNBA Finals.
“There was just a down shift from us,” Natasha Cloud said. “So that's on us to be better, but overall, we know we're right here. We have everything that we need in our locker room.”
That down shift was filled with what has become a hallmark of the 2025 Liberty when they're at their worst. There were careless turnovers, poor transition defense and a series of mistakes that snowballed so that by the time New York pulled itself out of its rut, it was too late.
On the other side, Minnesota was everything New York was not. The Lynx played with discipline. They made open looks. Most of all, they made every action the Liberty attempted in the half court a hassle.
“We didn't make them feel uncomfortable and they made us feel really uncomfortable,” Liberty coach Sandy Brondello said. “And we lacked a little bit of discipline…we weren’t on our front foot.”
She added that the Lynx “played a little harder” and were “more intentional” than the Liberty.
Tactically, Liberty players and coaches were quick to give the Lynx credit. Jonquel Jones, who had a quiet game by her standards (11 points, six rebounds, five assists) pointed out that with how many times these two teams have faced each other the last couple years, New York knows what Minnesota wants to do to them defensively.
“Historically, when we played them even last year, they do a really good job of just congesting the paint, making us make that skip pass, and I think tonight we didn't,” she said. “I don't think we made the skip pass, maybe two times, and we tried to force them into the paint, and I think that's why we had so many turnovers.”
The Liberty need to find answers down the stretch
Next, the Liberty head on a west coast swing. With 13 games to go, New York is in a battle with the Atlanta Dream and Phoenix Mercury for the 2 seed in the WNBA Playoffs, and with it, home court advantage until the Finals.
Brondello has criticized her team in the past for a lack of urgency. In the course of a 44-game season crammed into the same amount of time that they played fewer games last year — with an Olympic break to boot — some of that could be forgiven.
Then again, at some point you are what your record says you are, even amid injuries and adversity.
Would the Liberty have lost on Sunday if Stewart, Kennedy Burke and Nyara Sabally were all playing? Maybe not. But the team had lackluster efforts with them in the lineup too.
There’s no question about the team’s desire to win or to perform their best. These are professional athletes. You don’t get to where they are without that hunger. But there’s a switch that the team needs to find as a whole. They need to find that switch, flip it and not let it go back the other way.
Soon, these losses will start costing them playoff positioning.
