Aces' Kelsey Plum criticizes Liberty following WNBA Finals: 'They don’t care about each other'
Featuring a star-studded roster, the Liberty enjoyed the greatest regular season in franchise history, going 32-8, but their championship hopes were dashed in the WNBA Finals by the Las Vegas Aces, who won the series three-games-to-one.
The Liberty’s season officially came to an end with Wednesday night’s 70-69 defeat at Barclays Center, and as the Aces were celebrating their victory, one of their stars took a shot at the Liberty as the team was pouring champagne.
Aces guard Kelsey Plum, who scored just seven points in Game 4 but averaged 21.3 points over the course of the series, criticized the Liberty’s chemistry after the win.
“I think we knew we hadn’t played our best basketball,” Plum told Cassandra Negley of Yahoo Sports. The Aces trailed by as many as 12 points midway through the third quarter in Game 4, but a 44-32 deficit swung all the way around to a 53-51 Aces lead by the end of the quarter. New York did not lead again the rest of the game.
“We also knew that, as much as they’re a team, they’re not a team, if that makes sense. They’re really good individual players, but they don’t care about each other. And you can tell in those moments. They revert back to individual basketball.
“So we knew we had to just keep chipping away, keep getting stops, keep getting rebounds, space the floor and people made good plays. But we were a team. And that’s been all year.”
As a team, the Liberty shot just 36.1 percent from the floor on Wednesday night, and two of their biggest stars certainly didn’t play their best. Breanna Stewart, the league MVP, went just 3-of-17 from the field for 10 points, though she did add 14 rebounds. Sabrina Ionescu, drafted by the Liberty first overall in the 2020 draft, had 13 points on 5-of-12 shooting.
The Liberty went out and added big names like Stewart, Courtney Vandersloot, and Jonquel Jones this past offseason as they assembled what looked to be a WNBA super team, but the group ultimately came up short of its ultimate goal.
