The New York Liberty, whose title defense officially ended on Friday night, weathered injuries all year from just about everyone. The trend continued into the playoffs when Breanna Stewart suffered an MCL sprain in overtime of the Liberty’s Game 1 win.
She did her best to compete in Game 2 — a blowout loss at home — but was ineffective, scoring only six points.
Then Friday came, and it was a winner-take-all Game 3. Yes, the Liberty lost, 79-73 to the Phoenix Mercury, but Stewart gave a performance for the ages as she tried to prolong the season.
“Her ability to continue to shoot, pass, rebound, defend,” Sabrina Ionescu marveled after the game. “[She’s] one of the greatest to ever play the game and she’s still playing it.”
Stewart scored 30 points and grabbed nine rebounds in a game that, at any other time of year, she certainly would not have been playing in. She went 12-15 from the line, taking matters into her own hands after a frustrating first quarter when the team felt it wasn’t getting calls.
Her stat line is the perfect encapsulation of what made Stewart successful all year. It’s not that she can’t shoot the three, it’s that she needs to pick her spots. She did that on Friday, making two of her three attempts. And when she took it to the basket, she either scored or got to the line.
On defense, she added two blocks and two steals, playing 35 minutes with her sprained MCL.
“It's an honor to be able to watch what she does every day, how she leads by example, how I can have a player to look up to like her on my team and go to war with her every day,” Ionescu continued. “There isn't a player who I would admire more and would love to play alongside for the rest of my career because of how she comes out every single day for practice, for games, for anything.”
Breanna Stewart and the Liberty want to run it back
The 2024 Liberty won the WNBA championship. The 2025 team, with arguably more talent, just didn’t have it, for whatever reason.
Regardless, the core of the team plans to be back for 2026.
“I’m coming back,” Stewart said, just minutes after Ionescu insisted she wanted to be her teammate for the rest of her career.
“The team never looks the same every single year and I think that's what's really special about what you have in your locker room,” Ionescu added. “You can never really replicate that year in and year out, but I think we understand our core players, the players are committed to wanting to be here through the good and the bad.”
That extends to their head coach as well. The buck stops with Sandy Brondello, so she faced some fair criticism as the Liberty scuffled to the 5 seed in the WNBA Playoffs. Her players, however, have her back.
“I mean, to anybody that kind of questions Sandy being here, this is a resilient group,” Stewart said. “And she has our back and we have hers.”
“We're not going to be a team that points fingers,” she added. “There's a lot of us that could have done better this season. But we're still going to fight and show up for each other every single day. And I think that's what's the most important part.”
Over the coming weeks, general manager Jonathan Kolb will need to go back to the drawing board and make some tough decisions — including whether he wants Brondello to return. Then he will have to decide what pieces just didn’t fit on the roster, who he wants to protect in the upcoming expansion draft and what holes the team needs to plug.
The core of the 2026 team might be the same as 2025, but as Ionescu said, there will be differences. Those differences will determine if the next season is as frustrating as this was.
