Longer Practices Conditioning Liberty for Fourth

Assistant coach Olaf Lange's "longer" practices have helped the New York Liberty get off to a decent start in their final playoff push.

Brandon Todd, NY Liberty

BROOKLYN-The WNBA's All-Star/Olympic break was anything but for the New York Liberty.

A third of its 12-woman roster, as well as its head coach Sandy Brondello and athletic trainer Terri Acosta, was in Paris for the Olympics while a fateful eight remained in Brooklyn to keep the seafoam churning en route to what the franchise hopes is its first WNBA title.

Left in charge of the operation was assistant coach Olaf Lange, the former top man of Russia's women's basketball program and Brondello's husband. During the month-long hiatus, New York slowly got back into the swing of things before getting back to work at Barclays Center's practice courts. Lange led the charge while Brondello was leading her native Australia to a bronze medal on the Paris podium.

Perhaps keeping with the theme of summer, those who stayed behind had a near-unanimous assessment of comparing Brondello and Lange practices: the seafoam sun stayed out just a bit longer under Lange's watch.

"It's a little longer, but it's good," reserve Kayla Thornton said. "We were in an Olympic break, so we kind of got to get our conditioning and stuff back. He did a good job while Sandy was gone."

"There was a lot of conditioning going up and down the court," fellow depth star Kennedy Burke concurred. "It was about having us conditioned well and it showed on the court."

Brandon Todd, NY Liberty

Lange boasts the boosted resume necessary to be trusted with the firepower New York currently carries: in addition to a prior stint as a Brondello assistant in San Antonio, he was the top man with Russia's women's national team and also held an associate head coaching role at, ironically enough, Liberty University.

The WNBA's second half tip-off afforded an immediate chance to test Lange's work: the league-leading Liberty (27-6) was dealt eight games over 16 days, including a dangerous six-in-twelve stretch that ended on a Western swing through Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Seattle. With the aforementioned Olympic band (featuring gold medalists Sabrina Ionescu and Breanna Stewart) working off Parisian fatigue, conditioning carried greater importance, especially with potential top-seed opportunities lingering.

While there were some undeniable hiccups, the Liberty emerged through the slate mostly clean at 6-2 and maintained a three-game on its closest pursuers from Connecticut and Minnesota for No. 1.

The final periods have worked in Lange's favor: New York won the fourth in each of the six wins and scored at least 20 points on all but one occasion. New York has also averaged 10.3 rebounds in the quarter since action resumed on Aug. 15, tops in the WNBA in that span. Advanced ratings have been equally rewarding, as the Liberty's net rating stands at 23.3, nearly eight points ahead of runner-up Indiana.

Starter and All-Star Jonquel Jones praised Lange and fellow assistant coaches Roneeka Hodges and Zach O'Brien for utilizing the time well, noticing a significant boost in the team's conditioning from the get-go: the packed stretch opened with a 103-68 blowout victory over the Los Angeles Sparks and Jones, allowing New York to pick up right where it left off before and build some margin for error when "slippage" surfaced in later dates.

"I don't think it was like a difference in the people that were running practice, I think it was a difference in the amount of time that we had and what we wanted to work on," Jones said. "We kind of treated it as like another training camp. I think it kind of really showed when we started the (second half). I was expecting to feel like a little bit more winded against LA, but I felt like we were running so much in practice, and we were good when the game started."

"They worked really, really hard. I think I was really proud of the focus and the intensity that they bought for that little Olympic break training camp," Brondello said of the collaborative works between her players and assistants. "Now it's about fine-tuning, making sure we do enough, but not overdo it, because you want to make sure that we're peaking at the right time."

Following Friday's win over Seattle, the Liberty got nearly a week off to prepare for a visit from that same Storm, which lands on Thursday night on Atlantic Avenue (7 p.m. ET, WNYW/Amazon Prime Video).

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