Commissioner's Cup Win Means Nothing, Yet Everything, For Surging Liberty

The triumph in the WNBA Commissioner's Cup is a major milestone for the surging New York Liberty but the team is well aware that there's more to come.

There's no time for a parade down the Canyon of Heroes, no time to raise a banner.

Heck, there was barely time to pop champagne: less than 48 hours after the battle for championship hardware was won, the New York Liberty had to go right back to the scene of the triumph in question, Michelob Ultra Arena, to resume regular season activities. 

That has more or less defined the Liberty's luck over the half-decade: New York has seen nearly every team and individual professional women's basketball accolade honored or earned since it took the floor as one of the WNBA's original franchises in 1997 ... with the exception of hoisting the trophy awarded at the end of the WNBA Finals. 

After 21 years, however, the Liberty's trophy case will finally be re-opened: on Tuesday, the bearers of seafoam prevailed in the third edition of the WNBA's in-season competition, the Commissioner's Cup, vanquishing the Las Vegas Aces 82-63. Earned through the results of 10 games against conference-based competition, the Liberty made a statement on a nationally streamed stage, handling business against Las Vegas for the second meeting in a row.

The Cup final was perhaps a microcosm of the Liberty's resurgent season: signature grit arose in an opening act that saw nearly four minutes of game time eaten up before one side got on the board. Different heroines rose at different portions, as bench stars Marine Johannes and Kayla Thornton built and preserved the lead. When the time came to mark the victory in pen, the assembled All-Stars put their signatures on it to seal the deal.

Sabrina Ionescu shot from deep. Betnijah Laney could've run to Reno with the distance she covered. Jonquel Jones patrolled Brooklyn-based paint better than Basquiat. Courtney Vandersloot made her bid for best passer in quarterback-hungry New York. Breanna Stewart ... well, this paragraph's long enough.

Everyone hoisted New York's first trophy.

Brandon Todd, NY Liberty

"I think this Commissioner's Cup is definitely a step in the right direction for us as a team, to be able to put the pieces together and move towards the ultimate goal, which is to win a championship," Jones, granted MVP honors for her championship showing, said in the aftermath. "Anytime you're able to be a part of a (team's) first is always a special thing. To be able to do that. For New York City ... I think it really just gives us some extra confidence to be able to do it for a second time. We know exactly what our level of play is and what we can do on the court."

The ability for us to kind of lock in and see what we had and see where we were right now, in August, is something that I'm really proud of, but the fact that we're able to bring some hardware home to New York is huge," Stewart, a North Syracuse native, added. "This is why we all came here: we came here to win games. We came here to contend for the WNBA championship but one of our goals was to win the Commissioner's Cup (first) and we did that."

The Commissioner's Cup triumph stands as Liberty's first brand of victorious hardware earned as a team since their most recent WNBA Finals appearance in 2002 (when championship participants were still determined by conferences). Though unspoken, questions and concerns about the, for lack of a better term, legitimacy of a championship won in August rather than October. 

But, from the minute Liberty management assembled women's basketball's Avengers, they made it clear that their intent was to obtain any form of hardware available to them. 

"I think to bring this piece of hardware to New York will just continue to show our fans, franchise, organization what success tastes like and what we're trying to reach for and what we're trying to do," Stewart declared. "We know this is like a one-game championship, a one-game tournament right here. Everything is on the line."

Mere existence was an issue for the Liberty in the final stages of the prior decade: the emancipation from their NBA brother, the New York Knicks, was a slow, painful, process. It was a dirige highlighted by relative exile from the eponymous World's Most Famous Arena to Westchester County Center, an Art Deco-adorned relic nearly an hour away from their adoring Manhattan public ... and that was without the famously packed metropolitan traffic that gets particularly congested for 7 p.m. ET tip-offs.

Brandon Todd, NY Liberty

When a haven came in the form of Brooklyn Nets ownership, the Liberty were on pace to move into open the decade at Barclays Center at the start of the decade ... this decade, one that began with the Liberty and their 11 sisters packed into a bubbled setting in Florida. 

In other words ... the days when a common hardwood issue like a packed schedule is their biggest concern have returned. The Liberty finally have the necessary hardwood to be at relative peace with it and they're not going to apologize for enjoying it.

"Being in New York, we've never really won any kind of trophies," head coach Sandy Brondello said. "Even though this is a mid-season competition, it's still important for us because it was an opportunity to play in a Finals-like atmosphere in one game on someone else's home court, where they hadn't lost. It's an opportunity that we're just going to embrace."

New York has never been one to embrace the supposed superteam label, route championship parades, or even look back on the tales of the glories of Liberties long, long ago. But in-season euphoria was a time to a time reflect on just how far this organization has risen from the throes of a two-win season in the aforementioned bubble campaign. 

"The most satisfaction I got was just seeing the smiles on the faces of those people that were here during (the early 2020s)," Ionescu, whose arrival as the top pick in the 2020 draft served as one of the original tremors in this hardwood shake-up, said. "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."

It'd be easy to pass off those "right pieces" as having undoubtedly come in the form of the literally historic talents that fell into New York's grasp since then: the Laneys, the Stewarts, the Joneses, the Vandersloots. It'd obviously be wrong to deny their obvious impact, such as Laney's defense and shooting, Jones' post-All-Star surge, Vandersloot's facilitation, and Sewart doing well, everything a basketball's box score has to offer.

Brandon Todd, NY Liberty

But the irony of the supposed superteam concept is that those groups are only as strong as their second unit is. That group, featuring Johannes, Thornton, Willoughby, Stef Dolson, Nyara Sabally, and Han Xu, has been equally vital to the cause with their own brands of unique experiences. Dolson has earned pretty much every team trophy an American basketball player can touch over the past five years. Young Sabally and Willoughby have endured and recovered from injury woes most players go their whole careers without facing. 

Yet, each has had her moment in shine in what's going down as the Liberty's brightest hour yet.

"I think over time we've seen different players click at different times," Kolb lauded. "I think you might have had Stewie to Sloot to Sabrina to Bee to JJ, and now you see (players like) Marine and KT being consistent throughout. So I think that's been really really fun to see play out."

Through it all, the Liberty have acknowledged that the Commissioner's Cup triumph isn't the ultimate endgame. One perhaps could hardly fault the team for at least putting the setting on cruise control, though that's far even the most distant realm of possibility of the accomplished veterans. 

New York has responded well to the challenges in the immediate aftermath: though the Liberty fell to Vegas in the ensuing contest, they've won each of their past three games each in more impressive fashion than the last in its own unique way, be it through unlikely comebacks in Connecticut or downright domination in Minnesota.

Individual history, or at least the potential for it, populates the Liberty ledgers: Ionescu has taken aim at the single-season successful triple record while Stewart has a chance to reach scoring heights no one has seen before, namely the top tally for most points in one WNBA campaign. 

Brandon Todd, NY Liberty

Brandon Todd, NY Liberty

That, however, pales in comparison to the ultimate goal: the end-season championship, one that has eluded New York's grasp for over two decades. Modern New Yorkers would trade in all the individual high grounds to get in that trophy's good graces ... though some of them might be necessary to get to that plateau. 

"I'm really not focused on any of the individual accolades that are that are happening," Stewart said, who has an extended chance at the WNBA's all-time single-season scoring record thanks in part to the first 40-game season. "I'm just continuing to make sure that we get wins and we put ourselves in the right position come playoff time."

"I'm in a competition with myself continuing to better myself each and every year on and off the court ... I've been injured and have gone through it all. So I'm just taking it day by day and enjoying it and I'm happy to have my family with me."

Hoisting a trophy and already wanting more ... because it's the Cup.

New York returns to action on Friday night against the Connecticut Sun (8 p.m. ET, Ion)