Liberty 77, Sky 76: Reunited and it feels so good
For the third straight game, the Liberty come out on top against a new star’s former team
The New York Liberty are 4-1 after Friday’s 77-76 squeaker over the Chicago Sky. The last Liberty to begin the season 4-1 were the 2021 team, who improved to 5-1 before collapsing like a dying star. Today’s Libs seem unlikely to suffer such a fate. This group has already shown if you knock them down, they get back up.
Take Kayla Thornton. The long-time Dallas Wing was a mere aftershock among all the seismic shifts in New York’s roster upheaval, but as the good book says “Thou shalt not live by big names alone, but by every sub who proceedeth off the bench.” On a night the Liberty were struggling into the second half, this Elizabeth Williams block could have left Thornton feeling it just wasn’t her night.
Instead, she responsed by scoring eight of her 12 the rest of the way, including a couple of 3-pointers; that dozen is the most by a Liberty reserve this season and led their bench to a 10-point edge over the Sky’s. Adding embarrassment to the riches, the Seafoam welcomed back international treasure Marine Johannés after she finished her season for Lyon in France with an homage from the French G.O.A.T. to the NBA’s:
She wasted no time reminding us what we’d been missing.
Most teams that don’t start Johannés are guilty of a crime. The Liberty have immunity in the person of Courtney Vandersloot, who continued the team’s reunion tour with her first game back in Chicago, where she spent her first 12 years and helped win the franchise’s first title just two years ago. She and Sabrina Ionescu had quiet nights, by their standards. This was a night for Thornton and Betnijah Laney lighting up the scoreboard. And for the sheer tectonic force of Breanna Stewart.
The Sky dominated the glass early, particularly on the offensive end, where they grabbed 29% of their misses in the first half, a rate that’d lead the league. Led by Stewart, whose seven rebounds after the break were 50% of the Liberty’s total for the half, the Sky only recycled 20% of the rest of their misses; that’d rank 10th among the WNBA’s 12 teams. Still, while a lot of the old names are no longer in Chicago, the winning spirit lingers after the body is gone. Courtney Williams hit from deep to put the Sky ahead in the final minute.
Of all the big moves and big names this year, Stewart is the engine, the fairy dust, the wind beneath the wings behind all the everything the Liberty hope happens. In the dying seconds, she reduced the game to its most ancient form: the team with the best player wins. Usually because of.
Afterward, Stewart said the game-winning play started with some misdirection. She could have been talking about the Liberty season so far. When New York lost the season-opener in Washington by 16, it’d looked like all the superteam talk had us forgetting that sorta thing doesn’t happen overnight. Since then, it looks like it may not happen overnight, but it can come together pretty nicely pretty quickly. Not only have the Liberty won four straight, but three of the games were potentially emotionally murky, with reunions of varying degrees for Vandersloot in Chicago and Stewart and Jonquel Jones versus Seattle and Connecticut in New York. Next game is tomorrow when the Sky visit Barclays Center.
