Liberty Ready to Go With or Without Breanna Stewart
The New York Liberty's injury report for their next game against the Phoenix Mercury carries seven All-Star showings, three WNBA championships, three Olympic gold medals, and two MVP awards earned from both regular season and Finals work.
The impact of Breanna Stewart is anything but "questionable" but that's her designation as the Liberty seek a closeout victory over the Phoenix Mercury in the WNBA Playoffs' best-of-three opening round.
Stewart endured a lower-body injury in the overtime session of a 76-69 victory that secured Game 2's potentially clinching nature over the weekend and seemed to be in considerable pain upon her eventual departure. While Stewart did not partake in the practice leading up to Game 2, she walked without encumbrance save for a sleeve on the affected left leg and held several lively conversations with head coach Sandy Brondello and general manager Jonathan Kolb that included plenty of pointing to the court and video monitors.
Liberty practice is open to the media. Breanna Stewart currently watching to the side, speaking with Sandy Brondello. Left leg is sleeved.#WNBA #LightItUpNYL pic.twitter.com/wg9IcLGyzx
— Geoff Magliocchetti (@GeoffJMags) September 16, 2025
The Liberty's Regular Season Prepared Them For This Moment
The Liberty are relatively fresh off a stretch of little Stewart that partly contributed to its fall to the fifth seed: a bone bruise on her other knee forced her to miss 13 mid-summer showdowns and yielded only five seafoam wins. Nonetheless, there was an aura of confidence among Liberty reps that has them confident going into a closeout game.
Part of that is the relatively dire repercussions that could surface upon defeat: should New York indeed fall to the Mercury, they'll have to not only go back to Phoenix for Game 3 but a win there will force them to also face the winner of another first-round series on short rest. If the expected result of that other series, featuring the shorthanded Golden State Valkyries, comes to pass, the defending champion Liberty will face the league-leading Minnesota Lynx on the road in a WNBA Finals rematch.
But amidst the relative ugliness brought about the medically-induced departure of Stewart and several others, seafoam savants like Sabrina Ionescu found "beauty in the struggle" as their team made due.
"We're not seeing anything that we haven't seen, and I think that's [huge]," Ionescu said. "When we were talking about the beauty in the struggle during that time, it's kind of paid off to a moment like now. There's uncertainty and you're not sure what's going to happen, but this group has been able to continue to find different combinations and play with one another, and I've built great chemistry [with them]."
Among those rising this time around are newcomers like Rebekah Gardner and Isabelle Harrison, who were added to the championship cause in returns from injury and a term with the Chicago Sky respectively. Gardner is part of the primary eight-woman rotation that has taken the floor in recent seafoam efforts after biding her time on both the injury list and absentia while Harrison was mentioned as a name that could earn a bigger workload if Stewart's absence comes to pass.
It's part of the concept that the supposed superteam nature only goes as far as its depth stars and role players take them, highlighting the Finals finale breakout of the also-returning Nyara Sabally earlier this month.
"Stewie's in, Stewie's out, we're ready to go. We know what's at stake here. We've got to be a desperate team and take care. We don't want to go back to Phoenix, but they're going to come in hungry and we know that," Brondello said. "It's about staying ready, isn't it? It's always being ready for your opportunities. You never know what's going to happen. We know we have depth. In the playoffs, everyone shortens their rotations, but if you have to lean into the depth, we're confident that we can get it done."
Depth and primary women are alike are prepared to step up in Stewart's absence, as they did in the extra session required in Game 1: while prevailing in a sloppy showdown, one that saw New York lose 20 turnovers, the Liberty won the final five by an 11-4 tally, keeping Phoenix off the board for over three minutes and winning the rebounding battle as a whole by a season-best margin of plus-15.
"They're all leaders. They know what's at stake," Brondello said of her leaders, namely Ionescu and Jonquel Jones. "We know what we we're trying to accomplish here. It's great that we could get the win in Phoenix. Now we have to take care of our home court."
"I'll just be more aggressive, maybe have to shoot a little bit more sometimes ... I think sometimes I just got to be a little more aggressive in that space. We don't know what tomorrow's looking like, but we'll see when it when it comes," Jones said of what she can accomplish in the post if Stewart's out. "I feel like our confidence is pretty much the same [as it was last year]. It was just a new environment for us, to kind of be a lower team going into somebody else's house. You look back at Game 1, we put a good game together for the most part, there are still a little bit of areas where we could have kind of growth and learned from it."
Experience, perhaps even a subtle hint of deja vu, has played a role in experience coming back to raise the Liberty's championship prospects. That earned in the mire of struggles sans Stewart could prove to be equally valuable in the quest to add a companion.
Geoff Magliocchetti is a veteran sportswriter who contributes to a variety of sites on the "On SI" network. In addition to the Yankees/Mets, Geoff also covers the New York Knicks, New York Liberty, and New York Giants and has previously written about the New York Jets, Buffalo Bills, Staten Island Yankees, and NASCAR.