Liberty Year In Review 2024: Sabrina Ionescu

After 27 years, 40 games, 12 more playoff contests, and even a fateful overtime period, the New York Liberty finally stand as WNBA champions.

New York earned its first postseason WNBA title with a five-game series victory over the Minnesota Lynx earlier this fall, capping off a monumental season for the WNBA. For now, the championship serves as a culmination of a long-gestating plan put forth by Liberty leadership, one that brought home the first basketball team honor to the city in over five decades.

The Liberty’s path to a repeat comes at an exciting if not turbulent time on the WNBA timeline: rosters are set to endure tremors caused by expansion drafts (such as that of the Golden State Valkyries in December) and upcoming collective bargaining agreement discussions. 

With the season itself gone — but the memories never fading —Knicks on SI looks back at a victorious season that was and what’s ahead for the Liberty on a case-by-case basis.

Name: Sabrina Ionescu
Season: 5th
Key Stats: 18.2 points, 6.2 assists, 4.4 rebounds, 2.26 assist/turnover, 11.8 net rating

In terms of mere metropolitan roster longevity, Ionescu is more or less the one that started it all. New York’s new decade, one of the literally lowest low and highest high, began with the selection of Ionescu at the top of the 2020 WNBA Draft.

Having entered with a similar aura of hype that followed Caitlin Clark this past season, Ionescu was afforded some relative, if not macabre and painful, protection by outside noise and an ankle injury that shrank her Bradenton bubble experience to three games. She and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton have been the Liberty’s faces of the Brooklyn era ever since, having survived both the “hybrid rebuild” that yielded playoff cameos before the great splurge of 2023 that yielded Jonquel Jones, Breanna Stewart, and Courtney Vandersloot.

With her burden partly lifted by the Liberty’s triumphant trio, Ionescu got a chance to hammer home her status as the WNBA’s three-point queen, notably setting the Association’s single-season mark for most triples in a season at 128. She would play that success into a jaw-dropping showing at the WNBA’s 3-Point Contest at the All-Star festivities and later earned a showcase at the NBA’s edition when she did long-distance battle with Stephen Curry (falling by a narrow margin in February in Indianapolis, though a rematch is reportedly in the cards).

Perhaps fulfilling the glass-half-empty prophecy of modern basketball complaints, however, Ionescu maybe got a little too comfortable outside, hitting just 67 doubles during the 2023 season. That came back to bite when the Liberty faced the relentless perimeter defense of Las Vegas in the final, with Ionescu shooting less than 35 percent from deep in the four-game series.

A decorated year for Ionescu was bookended by rings: she married collegiate beau and fellow Oregon athletics legend Hroniss Grasu in March.

Marital bliss was the closest thing Ionescu had to an offseason, as she worked through both her Curry competition and proving her spot on the United States’ women’s national basketball team. With the country dazzled by her outside prowess, Ionescu engaged in a plan to become a more well-rounded player.

Her gambit paid off: Ionescu took over 30 percent of her tries from the field within 10 feet, over nine points than her prior campaign. The relative return of Ionescu’s mid-range game was part of surprise metropolitan playmaking, the breakout accompanied by Jones’ passing and Kayla Thornton briefly taking over an outside domain.

Ionescu also made a point to work on her defense over the offseason. Not only did she post a career-best defensive rating (96.6), it was good enough to rank 11th among all WNBA starting guards with a minimum of 20 appearances in the opening five.

The changes in Ionescu’s game helped define the Liberty’s finest hour: while critics have hardly hesitated to reference Ionescu’s 1-of-19 shot chart from Game 5 of the Finals, a deeper dive hints that New York was in position to earn the gritty 67-62 win thanks, at least in part, to the newfound facets of her game.

Ionescu’s final defensive rating of 74.3 was tied for third-best among Liberty starters and her playmaking helped New York stay afloat before Jones and Nyara Sabally led the comeback charge. Even on a brutal shooting night, Ionescu was within striking distance of a triple-double, tallying five points, eight assists, and seven rebounds (tied for second-most behind the 15 of MVP Jones).

Antics away from the scoreboard previously produced championship hardware for Ionescu during the Paris Olympics’ gold medal finale: with the Americans having trouble against host nation France, Ionescu was hardly rusty after spending the whole first half on the bench, picking up two key rebounds and dishing out two crucial assists in a run that helped the Americans permanently swipe momentum.

For all her newfound prowess, Ionescu turned to a familiar formula for what goes done as not only her most heroic heave but perhaps the most iconic shot that the hallowed history of New York basketball has ever seen.

Hollywood’s era of endless sequels and reboots had nothing on what Ionescu penned in Game 3 of the WNBA Finals: “The Shot Part II,” perhaps a working title to reference Teresa Weatherspoon’s original mastery, was taken a little closer than its predecessor but proved equally rewarding. Ionescu’s deep triple was a bullseye at Target Center, giving the Liberty their first–but far from only–lead in their otherwise checkered ledgers of the Finals.

“What I love about her is that she backs herself. Not everyone can take those big shots and make them. She can. So I trust her.”-Sandy Brondello after Ionescu’s Game 3 winner

“Sabrina is so professional, she wants to be great. She went away in the offseason and worked out, came back with more confidence. It’s the work that she put in Her first step got better. Something we really focused on was her ability to get downhill and finish mixing it up on hands. It’s a credit to the work that she’s done.”-Brondello on Ionescu’s biggest improvement from the prior year

This season ends on a fulfilling yet dangerous note for Ionescu.

Never one to shy away from criticism, Ionescu will no doubt carry the memory of her Game 5 shortcomings, likely refusing to use the later reveal of a UCL tear in her right shooting hand as an excuse. All signs point to Ionescu continuing to carry on this work in New York: she is the original member of a “big 3” the Liberty see leading both the present and future (alongside Jones and Stewart) and she’ll no doubt seek to further vindicate the metropolitan faith placed in her through her most dangerous means.

On the other hand, Ionescu shouldn’t have to apologize for expanding beyond her expected skillset and her transformation into a more well-rounded player could only expand the Liberty’s goal of competing not only now but later as well. Championship euphoria may well play a part in it but it feels like Ionescu’s metropolitan fate has been sealed, a key if not underspoken development of a new team popping up in her native Bay Area.

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