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For weeks, the New York Liberty have been insisting that, despite their injuries and some baffling losses, they have enough in their locker room to beat any team in the WNBA.
At long last, they proved it on Tuesday night, leading the first-place Minnesota Lynx almost all the way and gutting out an 85-75 win.
Sabrina Ionescu made the play everyone will remember most — a deep three with 33 seconds left that turned a four-point lead into a seven-point lead and resulted in a flagrant foul on Maria Kliundikova for her closeout. As her teammates came over to help her up off the floor, Ionescu let out a yell, only drowned out by the 16,864 fans at Barclays Center doing the same.
“It’s contagious,” Jonquel Jones said. “Her playing with that type of energy is a catalyst for us to go out there and really finish games out and we use that energy to push us forward.”
That wasn’t the only time on Tuesday that Ionescu gave the Liberty a needed push. Just three minutes earlier, Ionescu locked up Bridget Carleton on the other end, trapping her in the corner. When Carleton knocked Ionescu to the ground, she was whistled for an offensive foul.
Ionescu’s reaction was similar and so was the crowd’s.
“It’s been great to watch her development,” Liberty coach Sandy Brondello said of Ionescu’s defense. “The focus that she has on that side of the ball, [I’m] very proud, but she had a hell of a game tonight on both sides of the ball.”
Ionescu finished the game with 17 points and 11 assists, marking the second time in her career that she tallied more assists than the entire opposing team (the Lynx had 10).
Even more impressive, her teammate, Natasha Cloud, revealed after the game that both she and Ionescu were dealing with illness. In a season where the Liberty have too often come out of the halftime break flat, the Liberty were the aggressors in the third quarter despite Ionescu vomiting at halftime.
It was a satisfying result, especially after the Lynx let it be known they have no love for the Liberty. Minnesota won the first three contests against New York this year, but the Liberty defeated them in the 2024 WNBA Finals.
Earlier in the week, the Lynx’ Courtney Williams called New York a “punk a** team.”
“Minny loves to talk about us a lot,” Cloud said. “We live rent free.”
The Liberty showed what a full 40 minutes looks like
New York’s victory was more than the result of two great plays by Ionescu. It was the product of 40 minutes of communication and assertiveness on both ends of the court. It was the type of game that Liberty players have continually said they are capable of but hadn’t been able to deliver.
The timing couldn’t be better. Not only did New York salvage the last of the four games between the two best teams in the league, all played in a three-week span, they set themselves up to snatch the 2 seed from the Atlanta Dream, whom they face in Atlanta on Saturday.
The Liberty talked about what they wanted to do schematically, but most of the discussion was about themselves. “Us vs. Us” was a mantra mentioned several times throughout the night — a reminder that even without Breanna Stewart, the Liberty have plenty of answers.
“We were super decisive on what we're doing before we caught the ball,” Ionescu explained. “I think some of the other games we're trying to make decisions after we caught the ball, and in turn it kind of stalled our offense and I think tonight you saw a team that made decisions really, really quickly…and over time, it wears teams down.”
And, when the Lynx made a run, New York didn’t let its mistakes snowball. Instead, the team stuck to its principles on defense, knowing that one missed assignment didn’t need to determine the next several minutes of game time.
“One of our strengths as a team is to be able to dictate defensively and use our length, and we did it for 40 minutes,” Ionescu said. “We did it through lapses and through messed up coverages, but that stayed consistent, continuing to apply pressure and force turnovers that they don't normally make.”
With the win, the Liberty moved into a tie with the Dream in the hunt for the 2 seed. They host the Chicago Sky on Thursday night where they’ll look to win back-to-back home games for the first time this month.
