The most maddening moments the New York Liberty have to offer are not the bad ones—not the turnovers, the biffed layups, the “just vibes” possessions on offense—but the moments here and there when things click and the whole team starts to play well. Those flashes of competence suggest there’s a switch that can be flipped for these nominal championship contenders. The maddening part is how rarely the Liberty seem inclined to flip it.
If we learned anything from their 84-74 win over the Phoenix Mercury on Wednesday, it’s that booing can flip the switch. A usually forgiving Brooklyn crowd started to grumble when the home team came out of halftime looking lifeless. It worked! The Liberty’s full-court press forced nine Mercury turnovers in the quarter, and they ended the third on a 23-0 run. It was enough to snap their three-game losing streak and bring them back to .500 on the season.
What’s also frustrating about the Liberty is that you can make lots of reasonable excuses for them, even going back to last season. The team finished with a 27-17 record in 2025, after a 9-0 start, but in none of those losses did Jonquel Jones, Sabrina Ionescu, and Breanna Stewart all play from start to finish. This year, the revolving door is still an issue: Ionescu has missed time with foot and back injuries; Leonie Fiebich joined the team late due to playing in the Spanish league; Betnijah Laney-Hamilton missed a few games for a personal reason; and free-agent addition Satou Sabally, whose injury history is extensive, has been in and out of the lineup because of a cyst.
However many problems the team has, it’s hard to separate the real from the circumstantial. Neither Jones nor Laney-Hamilton have looked quite like themselves when they’ve played, which might mean they’re bound for some positive regression, or might also mean they’re getting old. The perimeter defense has been bad, but the team isn’t built to do much perimeter defending without Fiebich and Laney-Hamilton playing. While the starters are going through it, New York’s role players have kept the team afloat. For a team with so many older stars on big contracts, it’s important to find good rotation players at little cost, and the Liberty front office fortunately remains very good at putting together a bench. Rebekah Gardner, the Liberty’s best defender at the point of attack so far, has taken a big scoring leap. French guard Pauline Astier, a 24-year-old undrafted rookie, gets downhill with ease and has been a ton of fun to watch in the early going.
The unenviable job of knowing what’s real falls to new head coach Chris DeMarco, a former Golden State Warriors assistant who replaced Sandy Brondello this offseason and is in his first season working in the WNBA. “I’ve probably ordered every book on the New York Liberty that you can find online,” he said at his introductory press conference in December.
DeMarco so far has looked like a coach who doesn’t know the team very well—turns out you can’t really find books about the New York Liberty online. His lineups in some of the early games have been wonky, and he can be slow to adjust in-game. Marine Johannès, for instance, probably should not be trying to guard Paige Bueckers. In DeMarco's defense, the Liberty have been so injured and unavailable that he hasn’t had many opportunities to get to know them. And who among us has not been briefly hypnotized by Marine Johannès?
On Wednesday, DeMarco started to push the right buttons—or, finally, he had all the right buttons to push. “We had a bad start to the third, which we know that’s one of our Achilles heels. We have a few right now,” Stewart said after Wednesday night’s victory. Ideally, a team doesn’t have multiple Achilles heels—at that point, your mother may as well not have dipped you in the River Styx—but the Gardner/Fiebich/Laney-Hamilton combo that DeMarco hadn’t had the chance to play all year broke the team out of their third-quarter rut. So did a little old-fashioned motivation in the huddle, Stewart said. “Chris called a good timeout—basically, like, ‘get the fuck together’ type shit.” From there, they cruised.
By dint of their talent, the Liberty might always be held to an unfair standard. This win gets less impressive the longer you consider it: The Mercury were 14-of-22 at the line, Johannes hit seven threes, and Phoenix is its own special mess right now. My WNBA season preview is not aging perfectly. If it pains me now that I babbled on and on about Alanna Smith being the greatest free-agent signing of all time or whatever, my thoughts on the Liberty do still stand: This team is annoying and hard to figure out. Let’s just check back on them in July.
