WNBA Finals: What Liberty are learning from veterans' championship and postseason experience
NEW YORK — Courtney Vandersloot didn’t realize it would be so emotionally draining. Or how much mental toughness the moment necessitated. Before she had lifted the WNBA trophy with the Chicago Sky in 2021, she couldn’t know what winning a championship would truly require.
“It’s really talked about a lot how going into the playoffs is a new season, but you don’t really understand it until you’re in it,” Vandersloot, a 12-year veteran, told Yahoo Sports.
The New York Liberty roster built with immediate eyes on taking home the 2023 trophy is a team of wide-ranging experience. Vandersloot and Breanna Stewart, the two star free-agent signings, have won WNBA championships as has reserve center Stefanie Dolson. Jonquel Jones, who the Liberty acquired in a trade with the Sun ahead of free agency, has come close twice.
Betnijah Laney and Kayla Thornton reached the playoffs multiple times in their seven-year careers, but never made it past the first round. And rookie contract-level players like Sabrina Ionescu, Jocelyn Willoughby and Marine Johannès have only the taste of the Liberty nearly upsetting the Sky in Game 3 of last year’s first round. Nyara Sabally is a rookie, and Han Xu is not with the team due to an overseas commitment.
The group is now three victories from lifting a trophy together. New York, the only original franchise to never win a championship, will tip off the 2023 WNBA Finals against the Las Vegas Aces on Sunday (3 p.m. ET, ABC).
As their regular season wound down, players held a meeting in which the veterans went over what to expect in the postseason. They discussed what they had learned through their own playoff journeys, both successful and not, and how to approach this new season.
“This is like a roller coaster if your mental isn’t in a great place during the playoffs,” said Stewart, who has never missed the postseason in her seven-year career. “It’s going to be really difficult for you and that’s why we talked about staying together in all of this.”
Head coach Sandy Brondello, who has been on both sides of a Finals result, spoke of mentality and mindset all semifinals in pre- and postgame news conferences. Players stressed in their meeting the need to be at the top of their games in every way.
“You talk about the physical part of how hard the playoffs are, that you have to take it to another level physically [and] you have to be playing your best basketball,” Vandersloot said. “But what’s not talked about enough is how mentally sharp — more sharp — you have to be and how emotionally draining it is.”
It came into play early for Vandersloot, who wants to lead by example in how she locks in, responds and remains confident. The veteran point guard didn’t shoot well in Game 2 of the first-round series with the Washington Mystics. She said afterward she kept the mentality that if her team needed her to make one play, she’d be in the right mindset for it.
She scored on two consecutive buckets in overtime to push a one-point lead to five and the Liberty won to avoid a winner-take-all game on the road. It would have been played fewer than 48 hours before Game 1 of the semifinals.
“Every game is important,” Dolson, who won the 2021 title alongside Vandersloot, told Yahoo Sports. “We know how the playoffs is like its own season. We just make sure we’re harping on the fact that anything can happen, and that we have to play every game extremely hard and with the intensity that we have played our last.”
The Liberty added All-Stars Vandersloot, Stewart and Jones to a starting five with Laney and Ionescu. It was an up-and-down season on both sides of the ball as they found their stride and chemistry under second-year leader Brondello. They went 32-8 to earn the No. 2 seed, taking the race for No. 1 to the final day against the reigning champion Aces.
“We had a really good regular season,” Vandersloot said she told the team in the meeting, “but it doesn’t mean anything.”
The message was all the more important since their road to the Finals had to go through an almost-fully healthy Mystics team that had caused them trouble in the regular season. The always playoff-ready Connecticut Sun were a hard out in the semifinals and were one basket from forcing a Game 5. The Liberty’s 4-0 record against Connecticut in the regular season was essentially meaningless.
“The things that you were doing in the regular season, they don’t necessarily translate,” Vandersloot said. “You have to do something different. You have to do something better. And that’s on all aspects. So I just really wanted to make sure that everybody understood that there was going to be hard times, too. This isn’t going to be all fun and games. We’re going to enjoy it at the end, hopefully. But right now it’s going to be a grind and we have to be ready for it.”
Vandersloot made her first postseason appearance in her third season and the next year reached the 2014 Finals, where the Sky were swept by the Phoenix Mercury. The point guard played in six postseasons before their championship year and understands the precarious nature of playoffs. In 2019, the Sky were on the wrong end of the Hamby Heave in the second round of the previous single-elimination format.
The pre-postseason meeting was to prepare players who haven’t been in that situation on how to bounce back. It was preemptive for what happened in Game 1 of the semifinals when the Liberty were dominated by the Sun on their home floor at Barclays Center. But that doesn’t have to bleed into the next game, or even the next practice. It can’t.
“A tough loss like that can change the course, but that’s why experience is so important knowing that there’s gonna be ups and downs throughout this process. It’s not going to be all highs,” Vandersloot said. “It’s about responding. It’s about moving forward and being at the top of your game mentally and emotionally.”
The Liberty responded to win Game 2 and rocketed out to a 37-point first quarter in Game 3 at Mohegan Sun Arena for the 2-1 series lead. In a far closer contest Sunday, they traded leads with the Sun late and did enough to advance by a possession. They have a full week off from games before playing the franchise’s first Finals in two decades. New York went to three of the first four and lost all of them.
Jones has a similar story of close calls. She has been here before. Twice. But the 2021 MVP walked away from both of those instances ring-less, and with a plethora of other close chances similarly gone.
“It’s just knowledge from a different perspective,” Jones told Yahoo Sports.
After missing the playoffs as a rookie in head coach Curt Miller’s first season, the Sun reached at least the second round in six of her seasons in Connecticut. In 2019, they were seven minutes of Game 5 away from winning the franchise’s first championship. Instead, the Mystics came back to win their first. A year ago, Connecticut held a lead with two minutes left in a must-win Game 4, nearly taking the Aces to a winner-take-all finale.
“As a Sun player, we’d say, ‘Next year, we’ll be back,’ after you lost, but you just never know for sure,” said Jones before her late-game performance in Game 4 prevented a Sun return to the Finals. “Teams change. Things change. And ultimately, opportunities change.”
She wanted to convey to the team the understanding that those opportunities need to be capitalized.
“[It’s] not the time to save anything for later,” Jones said. “Because nothing is guaranteed.”
Brondello knows about fleeting chances. The Mercury’s sweep of Vandersloot’s Sky in 2014 was her first year as the franchise’s head coach, and only her second in the position in the WNBA. Her 2010 San Antonio Silver Stars were swept in a best-of-three conference semifinals under the old format.
The Mercury reached the semis four consecutive seasons after their title. In 2017, it was her Mercury who knocked Jones’ Sun out of the second round to reach the semis. In 2018, Phoenix lost Game 5 of the semifinals to Stewart and the Seattle Storm. The Storm swept the Mystics for Stewart’s first title, and she added a second in 2020 over the Aces.
Vandersloot and homecoming free agent Candace Parker ended the Mercury’s quest for the 2021 title, and ultimately closed Brondello’s Phoenix chapter. Olaf Lange, a Liberty assistant coach and Brondello’s husband, was also on the Sky championship coaching staff.
“It’s just reminding them this is going to be a dogfight and we have to be ready to come out [and] we can’t be complacent,” Brondello said. “That requires a lot of mental focus as well as being physically ready to go out and execute at a high level.”
Hours before the final buzzer of Game 4 brought a sigh of relief from Brondello, she told reporters she only spoke about championships on Day 1. Her focus through the season was on the day-to-day, game-to-game journey of getting better collectively. She never shied away from the fact it would take time.
The regular season was its own roller coaster. Even single games were an up-and-down wild ride. But Sunday in the bowels of Mohegan Sun Arena, Liberty players could be heard yelling and cheering in celebration.
“These things aren’t easy. And getting to the Finals is not an easy thing,” Stewart said. “I just want everyone to really enjoy it and embrace it and understand that this is the biggest moment of our entire season.”
They’ll enjoy it, flip the page and reset the mind for a grueling final set of games. The postseason is only two-thirds of the way over, as Vandersloot knows.
