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There is no panic in the New York Liberty locker room.
The reigning WNBA champions have hit a prolonged rough patch, losing six out of nine games after starting the season 9-0. Their first-year point guard and quick fan favorite Natasha Cloud had a message for the fanbase after their latest loss, a 79-70 defeat at home against the Seattle Storm on Sunday.
“So there is zero panic from this f***ing team, zero,” she said. “There's zero panic on this team. We're gonna be fine.”
The context to the losing streak is important, as 2024 finals MVP Jonquel Jones missed all but one of those losses. Leonie Fiebich, a 2024 All-Rookie Team member, was also absent for five New York losses as she represented Team Germany at Eurobasket. Former No. 1 draft pick Sabrina Ionescu missed one game as well and was visibly battling a neck injury in a couple others. Cloud herself is listed as questionable against the Las Vegas Aces on Tuesday night after taking a blow to the hip on Sunday.
The Liberty point guard preached patience to the fanbase.
“I just want everyone to take a deep breath with us, just understand that we're missing two starters for like the last few weeks,” she said. “That's about 35 points off the board. That's about 20 rebounds off the board, and we're still missing a 20-point double-double player out of our starting lineup. So if you take any two starters out of any other starting lineup in this league, they're gonna have the same turbulence.”
But the Liberty’s problems run deeper than the injury bug, which worsened on Sunday as well when Isabelle Harrison went down in the second half with a knee injury. She will not play against the Aces.
Too often over the past month, head coach Sandy Brondello has criticized the team’s effort or energy. Cloud herself has called out the team for its slow starts. At the beginning of the streak, those came in the first quarter, but the past two games they have been in the form of lackluster starts to the second half.
After Sunday’s game, Nyara Sabally called out the team’s defense for letting the game get out of hand while the Liberty struggled to score. She said the team has been too reactive focusing on their own man rather than anticipating that the Storm would pound the ball inside.
“That’s really on us and we need to be better,” she said. “Everybody just has to give a little more, do better, and, figure it out [until Jones] gets back.”
Sabrina Ionescu knows Liberty must do more than ‘show up’
Part of being a No. 1 draft pick is often that you are part of some bad teams early in your career. Ionescu has been on awful Liberty teams and last year’s championship squad, so she has seen the full spectrum.
Mostly, she knows that the name on the front of the jersey doesn’t guarantee a win — no matter your championship pedigree.
“It's not just gonna be easy when you're down that many starters to just show up and we win because we're the New York Liberty,” she said. “You're gonna have to find a way to win and dig really deep and it's been tough.”
Though losing can have a negative impact on the locker room, Ionescu insists that isn’t the case in New York. Other players even confirmed the team planned to decompress from their most recent loss by watching a movie together. One contingent has even become obsessed with this season of Love Island, giving them something to bond over.
“I wouldn't say that a win or a loss has really divided the locker room or really even put any type of bump in the road between us,” Ionescu said. “I'd say we understand the pieces we've had missing. We understand the games we've lost and how we've lost them, and to be honest, a lot of the time we've beaten ourselves.”
