Heartache, near misses and an elusive title dream: An oral history of the Liberty’s tortured past
Credit to Author: Michael Voepel| Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:11:28 EST
Rebecca Lobo was at Sunday Mass in a cathedral near Madison Square Garden in 1997, the first season for the WNBA and her New York Liberty. It was time for the Sign of Peace ritual.
“I turn around, I shake this guy’s hand and say, ‘Peace be with you,'” Lobo told ESPN. “And he says, ‘You need to be tougher on the boards.'”
There’s devout faith, and then there’s the Liberty faithful. Some true believers have been members of the team’s congregation for all 28 WNBA seasons. They’ve seen 19 playoff appearances, Hall of Fame players, celebrity fans courtside, some incredible games. But they haven’t seen a WNBA championship.
The Liberty are one of three original WNBA franchises still in the city where they began. The others — the Los Angeles Sparks and the Phoenix Mercury — each have won three WNBA titles. Not the Liberty. Five times, they have played for a WNBA title. Five times, they have lost.
New York is hoping this is the year that changes.
After falling short to the Las Vegas Aces last year, the Liberty rolled to a 32-8 regular-season record and No. 1 seed in the 2024 playoffs. Then they avenged last season’s WNBA Finals defeat by taking down the Aces in the semifinals.
Yet heartache has always been part of the Liberty legacy: coming close to the ultimate prize, yet never quite getting it. Thursday’s opening game of the 2024 WNBA Finals was the latest example of falling short in Liberty lore: A stinging overtime loss on their home court after leading by 15 points with just over five minutes left. New York evened the series Sunday as it shifts to Minneapolis for two games.
The WNBA has drawn unprecedented attendance, viewership and ratings this season, with many new fans tuning in. But the new fans might not know the tortured history of the Torch — that the Liberty have been the WNBA’s most star-crossed franchise. Teresa Weatherspoon’s half-court heave to win at the buzzer in Game 2 of the 1999 WNBA Finals is a signature shot for the Liberty and for the league itself. But the next day, New York lost the series.
After losing in the 2002 Finals, New York didn’t return to the championship series until last year, after a two-decade gap. ESPN spoke to Weatherspoon, other current and former Liberty players, executives and owners, plus players and coaches around the league about New York’s history, and why this season might be different.
Now with a team including two former MVPs in Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones; the league’s active career assist leader, Courtney Vandersloot; the franchise’s most recent No. 1 pick, Sabrina Ionescu; a championship coach in Sandy Brondello; and the WNBA’s most glamorous mascot, Ellie the Elephant, the Liberty are again chasing their long-awaited happy ending.
THE NBA LAUNCHED the WNBA in 1997 with eight franchises — New York, Charlotte, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Sacramento and Utah — affiliated with NBA teams. The NBA was a billion-dollar business. The WNBA — though it had network television contracts, sponsorships and the NBA’s backing — was a startup.
New Jersey native Carol Blazejowski, one of the greats of 1970s college basketball and the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League, was the Liberty’s first general manager. She was hired in January 1997 with an enormous to-do list ahead of the inaugural game in June.
Carol Blazejowski, Liberty GM, 1997-2010: “We had no staff, no players, no uniforms, no name, no logo, no coach. My first office at Madison Square Garden was a closet right off the freight elevator. People would be making deliveries every day, and they’d say, ‘Hey, lady, do you know where so-and-so’s office is?'”
Rebecca Lobo, Liberty forward, 1997-2001: “Blaze was everywhere. She was at practices. She was at all the games. She would be in the locker room. I’d see her and think, ‘There’s the boss.'”
Blazejowski: “I was working at the NBA at the time in licensing [when] they said, ‘Would you like to be a GM?’ And I had no idea what those duties included. While I was getting players, I was juggling a million balls.
“We had multiple names [to consider], but ‘Liberty’ made the most sense. I was looking at logos and remember not being happy with any of them. A designer was showing me mock-ups and was ready to leave. And one actually fell out of the jacket pocket of one of those big portfolios. It had the color green in it. I picked it up and said, ‘How did we miss this one?’ It was perfect.”
Players who had spent years in professional leagues overseas were thrilled to compete in the United States. Sue Wicks, who was 6 years old when the Knicks won the 1973 NBA title, New York’s last pro basketball championship, was a Long Island native. But players from all over the country made up the rest of the roster: Lobo (from Massachusetts, Weatherspoon (Texas), Crystal Robinson (Oklahoma), Vickie Johnson (Louisiana), Kym Hampton (Kentucky) and Becky Hammon (South Dakota). All seven are in the Liberty’s Ring of Honor.
Wicks joked that they all quickly became New Yorkers, especially Weatherspoon, a point guard from tiny Pineland, Texas, who had won an NCAA championship at Louisiana Tech.
Sue Wicks, Liberty forward, 1997-2002: “The DNA of the Liberty was Spoon. There are different types of stars. With Spoon, it was about grit, hard work, passion, give everything you have to your teammates and to the fans. Because the audience in New York is part of the whole thing.”
Teresa Weatherspoon, Liberty guard, 1997-2003: “We had the opportunity to live in the city then, too, so we got the feel of the city, the grind of it. We wanted our team to be like the city. We wanted New Yorkers to feel we were grinding just as hard as they were.”
Crystal Robinson, Liberty forward, 1999-2005: “Spoon pushed you to knock down the wall that kept you from being great.”
The Liberty played at Madison Square Garden, and the atmosphere for their home games was a hallmark of the WNBA’s early days.
Sandy Brondello, WNBA guard, 1998-2003: “It was just an aura, something about that arena and its history and just the way it looked when you walked in. The fans were really into it and got really loud. And I wasn’t used to playing in front of famous people. Especially being from Australia, I thought, ‘Wow, this is interesting.'”
Lobo: “Rosie O’Donnell was a season-ticket holder. Tyra Banks would be courtside, Gregory Hines, Joan Jett, Penny Marshall, Billy Baldwin. It felt like a party, like the fans were there to celebrate and have fun.”
But the Liberty’s on-court identity was also defined by near misses. In the league’s inaugural season, Houston beat New York in the championship game on Aug. 30, 1997. Lobo said she and her teammates went out after the game and later returned to their hotel to hear the news that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car crash in Paris.
Lobo: “That put things in a different perspective, obviously. But as for the loss itself, none of us at that point had any idea how hard it was going to be to win a championship.”
Richie Adubato replaced Nancy Darsch as coach in 1999. That season, Weatherspoon’s famed half-court shot won Game 2 of the WNBA Finals, but the Comets won Game 3 to take their third championship. Weatherspoon said that for years she couldn’t stand to see footage of The Shot: It reminded her not only of the series loss but also of the death of her nephew in a car crash earlier that year. She had dedicated that season to him.
Houston again beat the Liberty in the 2000 Finals. Then in the 2002 Finals, the Los Angeles Sparks defeated New York. It would be the Liberty’s last trip to the Finals until last year.
THE LIBERTY ADVANCED to the Eastern Conference finals in 2004, 2008 and 2010. They lost each time.
Pat Coyle, Liberty coach, 2004-09: “If you looked at pure talent, we maybe didn’t have as much as some other teams. We did have terrific chemistry. But the league was good, it was really just so hard to win.”
Along with losses on the court, the Liberty experienced personnel misses, too. They traded guard Hammon to San Antonio in 2007, and she subsequently had the best seasons of her career with the Stars.
Becky Hammon, Liberty guard 1999-2006: “They thought I had hit my ceiling. But it ended up being the best thing ever for me personally and professionally, because it connected me to the Spurs and Gregg Popovich, and my path to coaching. I was pissed at the time, because I didn’t know it was coming. I was playing in Spain, and I had messages on my phone. I called Blaze, and it was like a 30-second call, ‘Thanks for your services.'”
Blazejowski: “You’ve got to do what you believe is right at the time. It turned out it was a disastrous move on my behalf, but it worked out perfectly for Becky.”
New York had the No. 1 pick in the Sacramento Monarchs’ dispersal draft in 2009. The Liberty opted for Nicole Powell, who stayed in New York three years. No. 2 selection Rebekkah Brunson, who is now a Lynx assistant coach, spent nine seasons with Minnesota, winning four championships.
Rebekkah Brunson, WNBA forward, 2004-18: “At the time, I remember thinking, ‘Well, New York is closer to D.C., where I’m from. That would be pretty cool.’ But sometimes things just happen the way they’re supposed to.”
Blazejowski’s last major acquisition, via trade, was guard Cappie Pondexter in 2010. Blazejowski was fired after that season. After 14 seasons with one GM, the Liberty entered an eight-season period with three GMs. Two of them — John Whisenant and Bill Laimbeer — also coached the team.
New York traded for another star, center Tina Charles, in 2014. But the Liberty never found the right combination to win it all.
Sue Bird, Seattle Storm guard, 2002-22, and Long Island native: “Later in my career when I was in free agency, it’s fair to say I considered New York. I could have finished my career in a Liberty uniform. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere else. But I decided to stay in Seattle.”
In 2015, Isiah Thomas controversially was appointed Liberty president despite his involvement in a sexual harassment lawsuit the Knicks had lost while he was the team’s president. Still, the Liberty had the league’s best record and advanced for the eighth time to the East finals. They took a 1-0 lead in the best-of-three series against the Indiana Fever and held an 18-point lead in Game 2. But they lost that game and then scored a season-low 51 points in a Game 3 loss, another crushing end to a season.
Tina Charles, Liberty center, 2015-19: “What happened? Tamika Catchings is what happened. [Catchings scored 16 of her 25 points in the second half to lead Indiana to a 70-64 win.] She dominated, being the experienced player with the killer instinct she had.”
Tanisha Wright, Liberty guard, 2015-16, 2019: “I don’t know if we were just gassed [for Game 3] or it was just coming off the bad loss and losing momentum. All the things that could go wrong went wrong for us.”
IN 2016, THE WNBA went away from splitting the conferences for the playoffs and instead seeded the top eight teams by record, with the first two rounds being single-elimination games. New York lost in the second round in 2016 and 2017. But rumblings about the franchise’s future had started even before then.
Kiah Stokes, Liberty center, 2015-21: “My rookie year after being drafted by the Liberty (2015), I heard people saying, ‘If we don’t do well, they’re going to close this franchise.’ It was just whisperings, but it was still kind of a shock. I mean, this is New York.”
In November 2017, owner James Dolan announced he wanted to sell the Liberty, which he and his family had owned since the WNBA launched. Laimbeer left to coach Las Vegas, which had moved from San Antonio.
During the 2011, 2012 and 2013 seasons, the Liberty were displaced from the Garden while it was being renovated, and played at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. Then, while waiting for new ownership, the Liberty were exiled in 2018 and 2019 to the Westchester County Center, which was 90 years old and held fewer than 3,000 fans. The Liberty went from averaging nearly 10,000 fans per home game in 2017 to 2,239 in 2019. Stewart, then a visiting player with the Seattle Storm in 2018, called it “a quiet atmosphere, weird for a basketball game.”
Lobo: “The ‘forgotten’ years. I never saw a game in Westchester. It was like, ‘What the heck is going on with this franchise?’ I could remember when the Liberty were regularly getting 12,000 to 15,000 people a game and the city really, really cared.”
Courtney Vandersloot, Liberty guard, 2023-present; then with the Sky: “We were thinking, This is insane. This is s—ty, to be very frank. I understood that, hopefully, it was temporary.”
Breanna Stewart, Liberty forward, 2023-present: “My memories of that place were, ‘Why do we have to go up three flights of stairs to get to the locker room?’ Pregame and also halftime and also postgame.”
Brondello, then coach of Phoenix: “I was wearing high heels, and I was like, ‘Just leave my flip-flops at the bottom of the stairs. I’m not doing that in heels.'”
Katie Smith, now a Lynx assistant, was a Liberty assistant from 2014 to 2017, and then head coach for the Westchester seasons. The players lived near the Westchester Center in 2018 but in Brooklyn in 2019, which brought its own logistical challenges.
Katie Smith, Liberty head coach, 2018-19: “The commute, all the driving … just handling business. Not ideal, but everybody understood where we were at that moment [as a franchise.]”
The Liberty’s trajectory changed dramatically in January 2019 when the owners of the Brooklyn Nets, Joe and Clara Wu Tsai, bought the team and vowed to upgrade everything about the franchise.
Adam Silver, NBA commissioner: “Joe and Clara Tsai embraced the opportunity to invest in women’s basketball in New York City and jumped in with enormous enthusiasm and passion. The results speak for themselves both in terms of the talented rosters they’ve assembled and their commitment to playing all home games at the Barclays Center.”
Clara Wu Tsai, Liberty owner, 2019-present: “We saw the business potential of a professional women’s basketball team, especially one in New York City. There was already a passionate Liberty fan base originating from the early days of the league. We believed we could build a championship-caliber team that would bring back the original supporters and attract new, passionate fans.”
The Liberty got new ownership, a new general manager (Jonathan Kolb), a new coach (Walt Hopkins) and the No. 1 pick in the 2020 draft (Ionescu).
But things didn’t turn around overnight. The 2020 season in the COVID-19 “bubble” in Florida saw New York hit rock bottom, as Ionescu suffered a season-ending ankle injury in her third game and the Liberty finished 2-20.
That is the fewest victories for a team in WNBA history, and it is the second-worst winning percentage behind Tulsa’s 3-31 season in 2011.
Sabrina Ionescu. Liberty guard, 2020-present: “It was the expectation and the weight of the world being a 1 pick. Looking back, it really shaped me into who I am. But during that time, it was tough. I didn’t even watch a lot of the games. I tried to turn the TV off and hope that the season would go by quicker so I didn’t have to feel like I was missing out on so much.”
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Ionescu is the only player from 2020 still with the Liberty. That was Stokes’ last full season in New York; she was waived midway through 2021 and picked up by Las Vegas, where she has won two titles.
Stokes: “I remember talking to Jonathan Kolb, and especially after we drafted Sab, he had all these things he wanted to accomplish and players he wanted to bring to New York. To see him complete that roster a few years later, I’m really impressed. It’s unfortunate they had to ship everyone out and basically bring in a new roster. But you have to do what’s best for the organization.”
With Ionescu back in 2021, the Liberty went 12-20 and lost in the first round of the playoffs. On Dec. 6, 2021, Hopkins was let go by the Liberty and Phoenix parted with Brondello, within a few hours of each other.
Brondello: “I’d known I was leaving Phoenix before that, and had heard through the grapevine New York might be open. I thought, ‘This is the job I want — in the biggest city, with a young team and really great ownership.'”
Things fully came together before the 2023 season in the most explosive free agency in league history. Stewart and Vandersloot signed with the Liberty, and Jones asked for a trade to New York, joining Ionescu and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton to form the most talented starting five the Liberty has ever had. New York now has gone 32-8 in back-to-back seasons and is in its second WNBA Finals in a row.
Jonathan Kolb, Liberty GM, 2019-present: “You put together what you can while knowing a different set [of circumstances] will present themselves in the future. We met with Stewie a year prior, when she was an unrestricted free agent. It didn’t work out at that time, but we preserved cap flexibility in the event that we would have another swing to take, which fortunately we did.”
Ionescu: “I feel like I’ve been able to help do here kind of what I did in college at Oregon: turning a team around and building it back from the ground up.”
Jonquel Jones, Liberty forward, 2023-present: “With the Liberty, I feel like I’ve learned a lot about myself. I’ve really been tested in terms of how much are you willing to sacrifice for a championship?”
Through nearly three decades, the Liberty have chased the championship dream. It’s Barclays and Brooklyn now, not Madison Square Garden and Manhattan. Some different celebrities sit courtside these days, such as Spike Lee, Alicia Keys and Jason Sudeikis. But the spirit of the fans and the Liberty’s pursuit remain.
Hammon, Aces coach, 2022-present: “As much as I want to beat them when we play them, it’s important for the league that New York do well. It just is. It’s a huge market, and they need to put a great product on the floor. Which they are.”
Lobo: “Being at a Liberty game now, I’m reminded, ‘This is what it felt like in the early days at the Garden.’ That’s how it feels now in Brooklyn. You never know what could happen. But this really could be their year.”
It won’t be easy. With the Liberty, it never is. After Game 1’s gut punch, Vandersloot was blunt.
Vandersloot: “There’s no way around it: We come into the locker room, and we feel like it was a missed opportunity for us. That hurts. First thing I say in there is, ‘We have to find a way to move on from this. We still have a great opportunity in front of us.'”