Liberty Commissioner's Cup Repeat Would Hit Differently
Modern summer entertainment is all about making sure that the sequel outdoes its predecessor. Armed with mostly the same cast, the New York Liberty has a chance to pen a championship follow-up at Belmont Park.
The WNBA's 2024 Commissioner's Cup final will be staged at UBS Arena on Tuesday night (8 p.m. ET, Amazon Prime Video), with the Liberty's defense of in-season glory moved from Barclays Center to the home of the NHL's New York Islanders thanks to NBA Draft prep.
The Liberty and their fans have had about a week to air their grievances over abandoning Atlantic Avenue but both sides have made their de facto peace with it: the Liberty have viewed the switch as simply new panels of hardwood amidst their annoyance and have kept the faith that their fans will be willing to make the 20-minute commute from Barclays' grassy roof.
"We're not making any excuses," head coach Sandy Brondello said. "We have a commitment to each other, a commitment to being the best team they can be and that's what we're always going to focus on. We always want to come out and give our best effort ... they always bring it and they always want to be on the court and win."
The Liberty's ultimate desires obviously linger upon the fall but a chance to make history is nonetheless tantalizing: New York can become the first team to win two Commissioner's Cup titles since its introduction in 2021 and can add some company to the first banner they raised at Barclays Center last late summer. Standing in their way is a Lynx group that stands as one of the three teams that actually got the best of the league-leading Liberty (15-3) so far this season.
New York has been rolling since that 84-67 defeat on May 25, winning all but one of their ensuing dozen, including a perfect 5-0 Commissioner's Cup pool play slate against their Eastern Conference sisters that landed them in another final.
Adjustments to this year's CC process, made with the month-long hiatus for the Summer Olympics in mind, cut the slate in half, going from five home-and-home couples to a direct round robin. That also moved the final, which was previously used to herald in the WNBA's post-All-Star slate, up to early June.
The Cup, at least for the time being, thus no longer stands as a playoff appetizer and perhaps rewards those who get off to hot starts. While last year's mid-August tilt between New York and Las Vegas served as a de facto WNBA Finals preview, the NBA imitator saw its own in-season champ, the Los Angeles Lakers, ousted after a mere five playoff games.
The loss in those Finals perhaps provided a bit of a bittersweet aftertaste to the CC win, but it nonetheless proved euphoric for a Liberty group that previously ended its nomadic affairs by becoming Brooklyn lodgers at Barclays Center. Homegrown franchise face Sabrina Ionescu, who partly endured the Liberty's two-win slate in the Bradenton bubble and throwaway playoff trips in front of fledgling crowds, knew how much it meant to those who stayed with the team since her entry at the turn-of-the-decade.
"The most satisfaction I got was just seeing the smiles on the faces of those people that were here during (the early 2020s)," Ionescu said in the aftermath of last year's 82-63 triumph in Las Vegas. "The front office, to our GM, those people that had believed in me and in when they drafted me, they understood what we were going to be able to accomplish if we stuck with it and got the right pieces."
Style points would never factor into any game-planning or offseason strategy, but it was worth wondering what the Liberty could do for an encore in the wake of what transpired amidst a busy slate in women's basketball. Once the Liberty accepted defeat as graciously as they could, they more or less faded into the background, leasing the headlines to the champion Aces, offseason triumphants, and collegiate heroines like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and JuJu Watkins.
With its relative dirty work done in the offseason (inking forceful two-way women Betnijah Laney-Hamilton and Kayla Thornton to multi-year extensions), New York kept quiet, renovating its depth pool to stockpile decorated athletes like Kennedy Burke and Leonie Fiebich. Backcourt depth like Ivana Dojkic also arrived and the project was completed with first-round pick Marquesha Davis brought aboard as a project.
Still stocked with their assembly of All-Stars, it was worth wondering exactly how New York would respond to the immediate aftermath of a heartbreaking defeat and their unity doubted. The revamped second unit only added to the questions the bearers of seafoam would face, the answers to those queries banking on a gambit that a year of chemistry and collaboration was the missing ingredient.
For all intents and purposes, the team is cashing in, and that's fully apparent by the early scheduling this time around: whereas last year's group of newcomers required name tags and a few stagings to get to know each other, this group came out firing, thanks to a new sense of chemistry and camaraderie the nothing yet everything 2023 campaign brought about.
"Going through it together with your core group, there's a different level of expectation and understanding when you get to year two," Ionescu said of the chase for a second banner. "Nothing's going to catch us by surprise, there's not going to be any more unknowns. It's understanding that we want to get back to that game. We understand how important it is ... it would mean a lot of us to have a group capable of doing that this year."
That second unit has served as metropolitan salvation and the sign of merged mindsets amidst health absences of both the physical and mental healthy variety: Fiebich and Thornton have stepped up in the clutch with Courtney Vandersloot mourning the death of her mother and Laney-Hamilton enduring knee woes.
Defending Commissioner's Cup MVP Jonquel Jones, who partly admitted to buying into some of the chatter of meandering mental connections believed a new kind of selfishness has emerged, one where individual talents create a better unit and one where supposed greed turns into an all-for-one triumph.
"I think we trust each other to make the right plays, to do what we're really good at," Jones said after a win over Las Vegas on June 15. "Sabrina (gets) downhill and (finds) people with 12 assists. Everybody's just doing what they're good at and understanding that it's not an individual thing. We're all there for each other, especially defensively, I think we were scrambling them around late, making them take a tough shot."
GEOFF MAGLIOCCHETTI
Editor-In-Chief at All Knicks