It wasn’t long ago that the Liberty were down bad. In 2017, owner James Dolan kicked the Liberty out of Madison Square Garden and sent them to the Knicks’ G-League arena in White Plains, New York, where they played in front of crowds that you would expect at a rural high school basketball game. The roster fell apart and between 2018 and 2022 they won 47 of 158 games.
What a difference a change in ownership makes. In 2019, Dolan sold the team to Joseph and Clara Wu Tsai, who moved the Liberty to Brooklyn in 2021. They immediately got to work turning New York into a WNBA super team, plucking MVP winners Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones out of free agency, teaming them up with 2020 No. 1 overall pick Sabrina Ionescu and champion point guard Courtney Vandersloot. The results in 2023 were everything they could have expected in the regular season. The Liberty’s quad-star lineup went 32-8 and they outscored opponents by an average of 8.6 points per game.
