The Liberty longed, lost, and learned, leading to a championship. Hopefully the Knicks were paying attention

Picture it: June. Game 7 of the NBA Finals. At Madison Square Garden. The stuff of dreams. Now picture Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns shooting 5-of-34 that night. Nightmare fuel. 

There are those who insist one cannot pass into Heaven unless they have seen Hell. To which the New York Liberty nod, knowingly. The WNBA champs would not be on top of the world this fall if they hadn’t fallen the way they did one fall ago, against the Las Vegas Aces. The lessons they learned coming up short gave them the wisdom to address their weak spots. A year ago they’d never survive Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu combining to miss 29 of 34 shots. That they did this year is why they’re champions.

An infinitude of lessons the Knicks can take from the Liberty exist. Here are four.

Who’s the Fiebich to their Vandersloot?

When the Liberty lost in the 2023 Finals, a difficult question had become inescapable. Four of their starters were plus-shooters, plus-defenders or both. Courtney Vandersloot was good enough that season to finish tied for 11th for MVP, but all three playoff opponents – Washington, Connecticut and Las Vegas – featured quicker, more athletic guards who exposed vulnerabilities in her defense. And while she shot better from three in the playoffs (38%) then she had in the regular season (29%), not all threes are created equally. With the season on the line and the Liberty in need of a basket, their final shot was one the Aces were happy to concede to New York’s weakest shooter.

Vandersloot isn’t just some dude, though. She’s a first ballot Hall-of-Famer, two-time champion, five-time All-WNBAer. She still has plenty of game. But at the highest level of competition, she creates two obvious vulnerabilities. The Liberty, like the Knicks, didn’t have much cap space, certainly not enough to sign the kind of big name to justify benching the woman with the second-most assists in league history. And unless they’d had the top pick in the draft and chosen Caitlin Clark (spoiler: they didn’t), there wasn’t a rookie they could plug into a role as high-stakes as Vandersloot’s.

Instead, New York signed two-time Spanish League MVP Leonie Fiebich for one-third what they paid Vandersloot. All Fiebich did was make the All-Rookie team alongside four of the top seven picks from the 2024 draft, finish second for Sixth Player of the Year, then start all 11 playoff games, go from 20 minutes a game all year to 30 in the postseason and raise her shooting splits from 48/43/72 to 54/52/100. 

Coach Sandy Brondello took a big risk changing up a starting five that’d been set in stone for two years. The payoff’s been enormous: not only this year’s title, but unlocking a look that could extend the Liberty’s reign. There are reasons Tom Thibodeau should consider Brondello’s example. It could pay dividends for the Knicks in the regular-season and, in two ways, in the playoffs.

In crunch time of the do-or-die championship game against Minnesota, Brondello went to a lineup she’d never used before, a jumbo five of Jonquel Jones, Nyara Sabally, Stewart, Fiebich and Ionescu. If you translate their heights to NBA standards (the average NBA player is six inches taller than the average WNBA player), Jones becomes 7-foot, Sabally 6-foot-11, Stewart 6-foot-10, Fiebich 6-foot-10 and Ionescu 6-foot-5. This was an enormous (literally) advantage over the Lynx’s core, which adjusts to Alanna Smith at 6-foot-10, Napheesa Collier and Bridget Carleton (both 6-foot-7), Kayla McBride (6-foot-5) and either Courtney Williams or Nitasha Hiedeman (6-foot-2). The Liberty rode five players who impact both ends all the way to a parade.

The Knicks need to keep Jalen Brunson as fresh as they can games 1-82 so he can be Superman in the push for the final 16 wins. He’s the most durable of the league’s top point guards, the irony of which is the best way to help him retain that label is to lower his workload. Brondello lost Vandersloot for nearly a month, while another starter in Betnijah Laney-Hamilton missed a third of the regular season. She took advantage of those absences to test Fiebich in different roles and in different combinations. It paid off when the stakes were the highest. For Thibs, there’s a happy medium of how he can try to win every single game while also looking toward the future.

The Knicks can play jumbo lineups a few different ways, all of which involve letting Brunson rest. Deuce McBride stands just 6-foot-2, but has a 6-foot-9 wingspan; his length, defense and shooting mean he presents problems for the opponent. He’s obviously not on the level Ionescu is, but in the Liberty’s supersized five she alternated ball-handling and point guard duties with Stewart. There wasn’t really the need for a pure point to dictate the offense, not when everyone on the court is a scoring threat. You can pair Deuce with Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby and Towns for a lineup that defends, shoots and works off-ball. You can go bigger: McBride, Bridges, OG, Precious Achiuwa and Towns. All about shutting teams down? Hart, Bridges, Anunoby, Achiuwa and someday Mitchell Robinson (fingers crossed).

These jumbo options could not only cause a lot of grief for a lot of teams in the regular season, they’d let the Knicks see how some of these player combinations work enough to have a sense of what’s worth busting out in the postseason. Also, McBride can work as a stand-in in some ways, as it’s not like Brunson is a bad defender; as Drew Steele dug into, he’s actually quite effective. When the competition hit its crucible, the Liberty went huge – but huge was also talented. The Knicks have the talent to play all kinds of ways. One thing that’s never changed in basketball since its beginning, from the playground to the pros: size plus skill equals success.   

Be the change you want to see in the world

It was clear a year ago Vandersloot’s role was where the biggest change was needed. It couldn’t have been easy for a 14-year pro to step back, but it may have been easier as someone closer to the end of their career than their prime, maybe more so for one who’d already won a ring — but elite athlete she is, Vandersloot cared more about her next championship than her last one.

Hart is 29 and has yet to reach a conference final. He’s said he’s “lost” and “has no idea” when it comes to his current role. This isn’t the first time he’s expressed an existential crisis; it’s not even the first team it’s manifested with. The struggle isn’t just part of his journey; it’s the land where he lives.

Vandersloot’s role changed right as the playoffs began. Even if she had advance notice about being moved to the bench, this is a woman who’s started every game she’s played since 2017. It couldn’t have been easy. But this team, this 2024 team that was different and could be better than 2023’s, needed less of some things from her and more of others. It was an absolute luxury in the playoffs bringing in a floor general off the bench who did more being asked less: the number of Vandersloot 3-point attempts per game fell by almost half, but her accuracy leapt from 27% to 39%.

Hart hopefully has an advantage having a whole season to adjust to a new role. He need look back no further than last spring to see how much things have changed – back then he was asked to play every minute every game, score 20 and grab 12-15 rebounds. Health-permitting, the Knicks will never need that from him again. But smaller, concentrated doses of his kitchen-sink kinesthetics could culminate in a Canyon of Heroes celebration.  

These Knicks have at least one more heartache in ‘em

With the obvious caveat that injuries do happen, and should Jayson Tatum or Jaylen Brown suffer a particularly gruesome hangnail next spring, the Knicks certainly could be in position to take advantage, beat the Celtics and wear down whoever survived the Western playoffs to win it all . . . let’s also concede that the most likely outcome to a Knicks/Celtics conference final would be the Knicks losing. Not only is this not lacking faith in the Knicks, it’s having faith in a time-worn truth, one that gave the Liberty both scars and smarts.

The Liberty were farther along in 2023 than the Knicks are now. They started two recent MVPs, an annual All-WNBA Second Teamer, a living legend at point and the full-spectrum brilliance that is Betnijah. Before they’d ever played a game together as a superteam, they were already a superpower in a league with only two. These Knicks are good; they’re not that good. And that’s not an indictment. If the WNBA had 30 teams, their stars would be dispersed and no team would be a superpower. The point is, better teams than your fave have come up short when hopes were high. It’s how the Liberty lost that matters.

They were up at the half of Game 4 in the ‘23 Finals, and they smelled blood. The Aces, who’d already lost Candace Parker for the year earlier in the season, were without Point God Chelsea Gray and starting center Kiah Stokes. If the Aces lost Game 4, they’d have to play a winner-takes-all game at home shorthanded against a team that would have won two straight and three of their last four regular-season matchups against the Aces, including the Commissioner’s Cup Final. If.

Champions – repeat champs, especially, which the Aces proved they were – are the one team that has an answer for everything. Vegas went to their bench and their bench delivered. They won the title – short-handed, on the enemy’s court – because they were a true championship team from top to bottom. Which brings us to this year’s Liberty, and the question posed at the start of this piece about the Knicks.  

The Liberty were the team who had an answer for everything this time. Just as the Aces never could have guessed they’d be down so many important pieces when the season was on the line, the Liberty could never have imagined that in the biggest game of the season, Stewart and Ionescu would join forces to become a two-person Houston Game 7 John Starks. Optionality is king/queen. Do the Knicks have enough 1-12 to answer every question thrown at them? This piece has mostly talked about players. There is, of course, another person who comes into play here.

What will Thibs do?

We talked in the season preview roundtable about adjustments we’d like to see from Thibodeau this season. It’s fair to ask the same question of the coach that we do of the players – what are the vulnerabilities in Thibs’ game? Where would changing things up make him and his team tougher to counter come winning time? This is his 13th year as an NBA head coach. It’s only the third or fourth time he’s led a title contender, the first – depending on your view of the 2015 Bulls – in 10-15 years. We’ve seen him evolve in so many ways from the grim Frank Grimes coach said to hate young players and scoring with every chamber of his black heart.

The Liberty gained what they needed to win by losing, something Thibs treats like the plague. Can that obsession, however well-intended, deprive him and his team of a necessary suffering? Brondello threw fastballs and changeups almost exclusively the past two seasons – you can live like that when you’re a super team – then busted out her first-ever screwball pitching up one with a 3-2 count and the bases loaded against her in the ninth inning. If Thibodeau plays around with lineup looks, doesn’t overwork Brunson and doesn’t let the trees blind him to the forest, the only other professional basketball team New York cares about could enjoy a ticker-tape parade too. And if they don’t? If the Celtics are just too good? That’s not failure. That’s wisdom.