Liberty Season Ends Despite Breanna Stewart Takeover
It got cold in the desert at the worst possible time for the New York Liberty.
Despite a heroic effort from an ailing Breanna Stewart, excessive misfires from deep ended the Liberty's first postseason championship defense, as the Phoenix Mercury took the third and final game of an opening round set by a 79-73 final to procure advancement to the WNBA's final four.
Dealing with an MCL sprain, Stewart put up a masterful 30-point, nine-rebound showing that kept New York afloat despite trailing by 12 early. Sabrina Ionescu had 20 after a tepid debut period, but Jonquel Jones, the defending WNBA Finals MVP and third member of the prime seafoam triumvirate, was 1-of-10 from the field, part of a New York contingent that sank only seven field goals beyond the aforementioned duo.
Phoenix's headliners either persisted or rose at the right time: Alyssa Thomas brought her triple-double prowess to the postseason with 20 points and 11 assists and rebounds each, while Satou Sabally had 23 points and 12 boards of her own. Though relatively muted on the box score, DeWanna Bonner and Kahleah Copper each put in big shots in the clutch while ex-New Yorker Sami Whitcomb made up for the supposedly lost tallies with 13 points off the bench.
Missing all but one of their final 18 attempts from three-point range will force the Liberty to watch the rest of the playoffs from home, as they endured their first opening round elimination since 2022. Phoenix now takes on the top-ranked Minnesota Lynx, the team the Liberty downed for their first postseason triumph last season, in a semifinal set that gets underway later this weekend.
What became the final stanza of the Liberty's season served as a microcosm for the tour as a whole: an early injury to Leonie Fiebich, who appeared to have Thomas duty in the very early going, took a Copper knee to the mid-section that forced her to leave early. Though Fiebich returned, Phoenix used her absence to embark on a 7-0 run that ended at the cusp of the period's end when Jones hit her lone shot from the field.
While New York matched Phoenix's physicality, it struggled to do so in a healthy fashion, as the Mercury sank all 10 of their first period foul tries and ended the first half with a whopping plus-12 advantage on the glass. Phoenix boosted the lead to as high as a dozen in the second but the Liberty managed to eke its way back into the game with a dozen-point period from Ionescu.
A tightly-contest third saw the Liberty take fleeting leads and narrow the gap to one by the end but Stewart's help was finally exhausted: she was the only New Yorker to score in the final frame and never let things advance beyond eight. But those larger leads came at inopportune times, along with shooting shortcomings on the Liberty end.
Sabally singles, for example, made it an eight-point game with three minutes remaining. A successful Stewart and-one and another double re-establish a single-possession set-up. However, Jones missed another three on the other end, setting the stage for Bonner's redemption after she spent most of the second letting Stewart have her way.
Stewart once again kept things close but Thomas immediately made up for a change against Jones with a steal of a Cloud pass, which eventually turned into a driving Copper double off a feed from Whitcomb at just over 32 seconds. Three-point misses from Ionescu and Jones more or less sealed the Liberty's fate, ending a heartbreaking campaign frequently peppered by medical interruptions.
Ironically, it was the ailing Stewart that led the way for New York in a year where "wait until they're healthy" was a recurring metropolitan mantra. Further struggles from the bench saw New York reserves Kennedy Burke and Emma Meesseman shoot 3-of-12, with the former going 0-of-6 from deep in 21 minutes.
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.