Farewell to the 2023 New York Liberty

In which our Liberty reporter reflects on the year that was — for the team, for herself, for so many of us

An original WNBA franchise. A blockbuster offseason. A job unfinished.

This is the conclusion of the New York Liberty’s 2023 season, a final result that was much different than the end of the 2022 campaign. Last year they sailed out of the playoffs on August 23, 2022, after a 90-72 loss against Candace Parker and the Chicago Sky. Marine Johannès, Sabrina Ionescu, Betnijah Laney and Stef Dolson held onto their seafoam and GM Jonathan Kolb pushed to secure the Sky’s very own Courtney Vandersloot as well as Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones.

With the pieces assembled, Sandy Brondello sat at the press conference podium before the start of what would be a historic season and said that their ultimate goal of winning a championship would not happen in May. What she couldn’t know then, though, was that it wouldn’t even happen this year. 

As the New York Liberty stumbled their way through a season-opening loss, growing pains, and awkward plays, I found my footing with words and with work. I would snap open my laptop and formulate articles that would only go on to be torn apart in edit. Run-on sentences and missed punctuation on my end, turnovers and stumbles for the Liberty. Both of us reside in Brooklyn, both of us are working everyday towards a greater common goal.

(Editor’s note: The tearing apart was always meant with love!)

For the Liberty, they want to be the one to hoist the WNBA Trophy, they want to fly a banner in the rafters of Barclays, they want to be the ones to bring a basketball championship back to New York. When was the last time a pro basketball team won a trophy in the city? As a reader of The Strickland, a New York Knicks publication, you probably know: The Knicks, securing NBA titles in 1970 and 1973. The New York Americans, the team that became the Brooklyn Nets, won two championships that same decade while part of the American Basketball Association, but these occurred in Teaneck, New Jersey. 

While the Liberty look to bring glory to the city, I look everyday to advance women in sport. Now, since I stated that, I feel the need to back up the above examples, clearly a historical insight into male sports in New York, in an article that is meant to be dedicated to a women’s sports team. However, it is a great example of the impact this Liberty squad has had on media coverage for the WNBA in NYC. 

Recently, a sports personality I will not give time to by naming them said that any good high school boys’ team could beat a WNBA team. This entire season, any WNBA content I put out garnered ample negative attention from people claiming “No one watches” and other unfounded comments that continue to epitomize the ignorance and  disrespect many people have for the W. Given the fervor of hate surrounding womens’ professional basketball, I bring up the New York championships, first in homage to this publication and second to set the scope for what the Liberty accomplished this season. 

From my first season covering the Liberty three years ago to now, the growth of the squad has been tremendous. This is the same team that barely made the playoffs when I first started covering them and most recently lost a Game 4 of the WNBA Finals that came down to the final shot. Furthermore, and perhaps just as significantly, they hosted packed crowds of fans. On a radio appearance I did on a Las Vegas sports call-in show, I shouted out the fan engagement crew at Barclays for their work with Ellie the Elephant, the Timeless Torches, and the absolute rowdiness of fans. I pointed out that men in their twenties piled in the upper bowl of Barclays dressed as the Statue of Liberty, families poured in, little girls painted their faces blue, and celebrities lined the cushioned courtside seats.

The torch that was ablaze during starting lineups burned high for each name called, and the Liberty started and ended their games on the torch logo across the parquet floor. This team fired up fans, and its assembly ignited national attention. Their demise, their eventual loss, sparked the opportunity for further conversation about the intersection of race and sport, evident in a Chicago Tribune article that made reference to Lauren Dreher’s opinion:

“The trash talk is fine,” she said. ”The response to the trash talk is the issue. In women’s sports we often point out male fragility and we can point out misogyny with a fine-tooth comb because we understand the basis of it. But we can’t understand racism. We can’t understand that when you have a women’s league that is dominated by Black women, it comes into play. You can’t have one without the intersections. It played out at the end of the women’s college basketball season, and I see it here.”

A women’s hoops and lifestyle content creator, Dreher references the skewed criticism of Angel Reese’s hand gesture after her LSU Tigers won a national championship over Caitlin Clark and Iowa. As Zillah Eisenstein put it back in May, “Caitlin Clark is not a masquerade, but the elevation of her stardom is as much white privilege as it is white excellence. On the court in the final game between Iowa and Louisiana it looked like Jim Crow-era segregation, Black against white.”

Within the scope of women’s sports, conversations like these can always happen more than they do now. This Liberty squad, victorious in their regular season and the first two rounds of playoffs, stands as a finite case study in a perpetually important conversation. Many fans pointed out the implicit preference shown by some fans and news outlets for the Liberty’s white stars in Ionescu and Stewart and a lack of love for the Black women consistently being the reason they went 32-8, especially for Laney and Jones. The bias in coverage is something I had to check, and I found myself genuinely asking many times whether I was being journalistically sound and covering the team to the best of my ability. My final conclusion?

I, like the Liberty, can be much better.

With the end goal in mind of advancing girls and women in sports, this was a historic season to be part of, not just for the amazing runs by Vegas and New York, the eventual post-game celebration by the Aces, or even for the crowds of people I got to witness pile into Barclays. Although these moments were exceptional to see in person, I think that the most important takeaway from this 2023 season is how much it has stood for and how many tough conversations it has garnered. Some conversations have been about the business, media, or fan engagement aspect of the WNBA, but many are about the pure basketball side. So many people talked about the Liberty this season, and it will go down in history as one of the most multifaceted seasons in history. It was great to cover it.