How New York Liberty Became the Hottest Team in Town

From left: Stefanie Dolson, Marine Johannès, Kayla Thornton, Breanna Stewart, Courtney Vandersloot, Jonquel Jones, Betnijah Laney, Nyara Sabally, Jocelyn Willoughby and Sabrina Ionescu in the Liberty weight room at Barclays Center.
Photo: Dina Litovsky

It has been a rough month to be a certain kind of New York sports fan. Baseball playoffs are on the horizon, but both the Mets’ and Yankees’ once promising seasons have collapsed, and it’s highly unlikely either team will be taking the field come October. The Giants lost their first game in a record-setting 40-0 blowout, and a much-hyped Jets season kicked off in typically devastating fashion, when the recently acquired star quarterback Aaron Rodgers blew out his Achilles tendon on just his fourth snap in the Meadowlands.

But go to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center to see the New York Liberty and the energy is electric. The WNBA team had a breakthrough 32-8 season — the franchise’s best-ever record and the second best in the league — and cruised into the postseason with triple-digit percentage growth in ticket sales. Outside its first playoff game of the 2023 WNBA postseason last Friday, the sellout crowd was buzzing with something like optimism — even bravado. Trent King, a 25-year-old draped in a polyester Lady Liberty tunic and a foam crown, posed for photos while he waited for his brother to arrive in a matching outfit.

“If we can make it, we’re here,” said King, who started going to games last season and plans to spring for season tickets next year. “Not for nothing, it’s the best team in New York right now.”

This kind of conversion happens easily and frequently at Liberty games. Even in low-stakes contests this season, the crowds are exuberant. During game one, in which starting guard Sabrina Ionescu’s record-setting seven three-pointers paved the way for a 90-75 win, head coach Sandy Brondello attempted to participate in an in-game interview with ESPN and found she couldn’t even hear the announcer’s questions in her earpiece.

“Damn, it’s so loud in there!” the upbeat Aussie tells me after a team practice the following Sunday. “In the timeouts, I had to yell.” Barclays, Ionescu says, has become “a tough place for teams to play.”

It’s a hard-earned return to glory for one of the WNBA’s original franchises. Led by Rebecca Lobo and Teresa Weatherspoon, the Liberty came out of the gate strong in the 1997 inaugural season and made it to four of the first six league finals. But they never won the title, and by 2018, they were decidedly suffering after years of neglect under longtime owner James Dolan. That season, Dolan banished the franchise from its home at Madison Square Garden to a small multipurpose arena in Westchester as he looked to offload the team;…