There's plenty of hype around playoff basketball in New York City, with championship vibes flowing at a unique pace after earning victories over a green-branded foe.
Also, the New York Knicks are on a heck of a run against the Boston Celtics.
A literal banner day awaits the New York Liberty, the city's WNBA franchise set to embark on its latest Brooklyn endeavor: when the Liberty tips off its 2025 season on May 17 at Barclays Center, the team will receive its championship rings and eternal commemoration of the five-game WNBA Finals victory over the Minnesota Lynx will be raised to the rafters before a matchup with the Las Vegas Aces.
It will be the culmination of a plan set forth by Liberty general manager Jonathan Kolb, who has overseen the team's roster since 2019. Amidst the dark years of the team's transition from Manhattan-to-White Plains-to-Brooklyn, Kolb crafted a plan that eventually manifested in the team's return to the WNBA Finals in 2023 before completing the journey last fall.
Kolb has made no secret of his plans for a sequel, which unofficially get underway on Friday night with a preseason game against the Connecticut Sun (7 p.m. ET, WWOR). But amidst the Liberty's training camp activities, he took last moment to personally reflect on the prior season's journey, a thrilling trek that saw New York go 32-8 before mastering Minnesota.
"I learned to win at the highest of levels," Kolb said when asked what he learned from the historic postings. "You need top end talent with depth, those are the ingredients. You need health. You need all those things to go your way, but that's what I learned, mostly as a basketball decision maker.
"I think I learned, also as a person, [about] patience. You're not going to win a title in game one or game 30 but you do start to win it from those habits, and you start to form a snowball effect, where it gets faster and faster and faster towards the end. You just want to make sure doing it right along the way, so that I'd say that's what I learned."
Kolb earned euphoric reality when arriving to the Liberty's championship parade in Manhattan, which saw thousands of fans pack the streets of Manhattan for a mere glimpse of the triumphant New Yorkers.
"I was on the bus with my wife heading to it, and I turned her I was like, I hope people show up, you know?" Kolb recalled. "We got on the float and turned a corner, and it was thousands of people. It was then that it really landed the impact of this. That's what that was for. That was checkbox one."
Kolb's long-gestating plan hit the jackpot when the Liberty acquired historic WNBA talents Jonquel Jones, Breanna Stewart, and Courtney Vandersloot during the 2023 offseason. Those moves and more helped Kolb win that season's Executive of the Year title before the New Yorkers earned their rings last time around.
Though the headliners remain the same, the Liberty will look a little different when they take the floor next weekend: Vandersloot and Kayla Thornton have respectively moved onto Chicago and Golden State and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton is essentially done for the season after undergoing knee surgery.
Kolb kept busy in the offseason, trading for Natasha Cloud while retaining depth star Kennedy Burke and longtime holdover Marine Johannes, who returns to Brooklyn after spending last season overseas. Transactional news, which also included the signing of Isabella Harrison, worked alongside the reveal that the Liberty was in the process of building a new training facility in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn with a scheduled opening of 2027.
All that and more is part of Kolb's continued vision to turn the Liberty into a "legacy" organization.
"I've always said the vision here, the philosophy here, is, if we didn't have any financial obligations, if we didn't have any bills to pay, would you show up here for free? Is this a place that you would really love to come to work?" Kolb said. "I feel we're at a place right now that's really special in that regard. So I think that's an area of growth that I'm most proud of."
Geoff Magliocchetti is on X @GeoffJMags
