The New York Liberty has won six of seven going into a potentially needle-moving weekend.
BROOKLYN—As the New York Liberty worked through the testy drama of the WNBA trade deadline, franchise star Breanna Stewart was working through a whole different countdown.
“We’re potty training right now,” Stewart, a mother of two alongside wife and fellow WNBA vet Marta Xargay, said with a smile as the Liberty reconvened in Brooklyn after the trade embargo was officially enforced. “Marta helps me a lot … It’s hard because you don’t want to like cross that line, right? You don’t want to bring work into home and that type of thing. But she knows how important it is for me to be able to like compartmentalize and handle things, so she helps me.”
Stewart has had her share of help on the floor as well: after a June swoon bled into July to the tune of a 2-8 stretch, the Liberty has won six of seven leading into what should be a sensational Sunday showdown against the Las Vegas Aces (12:30 p.m. ET, ABC). It’ll cap a three-game Barclays Center homestand for the Liberty, which took two of three on a preceding road trip, the only defeat coming in Sin City on July 30.
Over each WNBA team’s last seven games, the Liberty (19-13) places third in scoring and second in rebounding while Stewart is the fourth-leading point-earner of the stretch. Though far from perfect, it’s a little closer to the brand of contending basketball many expected the Liberty to play as they seek revenge for a disappointing follow-up to their 2024 championship.
“I think we’re starting to realize how to win together,” Sabrina Ionescu, she of 21.7 points a game since July 11, said after the latter win over the Storm. “We’ve been up in games, we’ve been down in games, we’ve come back from big deficits late in games, and we’ve continued to put ourselves in so many different scenarios that you can really only do when you’re out there playing.”
“Early on, I don’t think they went our way. We didn’t really know what it felt like to win some of those games, what we were running. The lineup kept changing. People were out with injury, and I think now that we’ve had the ability to stack some games with the same starting lineup … We’re starting to figure out like late game [scenarios], what are we trying to get to, and in what situation.”
Breanna Stewart’s last 7 games:
24.9 PPG
9.1 RPG
4.3 APG
2.0 BPG
1.0 SPGLiberty are 6-1 in that span. pic.twitter.com/TZPpO811ee
— Underdog WNBA (@UnderdogWNBA) August 6, 2026
All They Got
The respective All-Star “breaks” of Stewart and Jonquel Jones were busier than most WNBA front offices, at least if the official transaction ledger is anything to go by.
Despite sizable metropolitan speculation as it bides time for the presumed returns of Leonie Fiebich and Satou Sabally, New York stood pat before the transactional freeze. Going into the homestretch with the same dozen women they envisioned working with at the start perhaps perfectly personifies the “all we got, all we need” mantra that Jones popularized on the road to the 2024 title.
The Liberty was a popular pick among the amateur general managers and their subsequent inactivity raised eyebrows. In contrast, it was “business as usual” at Barclays, where players are perfectly fine with the concept of this being the group that makes the transition from summer to fall.
“The vibes were exactly how they’ve been before,” Jones said of the prep for the Seattle series. “I think we understand right now how important it is to win games and how important it is to stack wins and really kind of build our momentum and continue to build on our foundation as we now look towards the playoffs. So I think everybody was locked in on this game. Nobody was really thinking about the trade deadline.”
“This is our group. We’re all about togetherness and and making sure that we’re on the same page and what we’re trying to do as far as schemes and assignments,” Stewart concurred. “I’m not too privy on all of the deadline, the trade situations, but obviously we know we have enough here. [We’re] continuing to kind of build that confidence with all the players that we have, and it’s kind of like one of those things where it’s like, all right, this is it. Now let’s move forward. There is nothing else, and let’s keep it going.”
The Liberty lineup took another sense of finality less than 24 hours after latter win over the Storm: the team made the monumental decision to release lasting veteran Betnijah Laney-Hamilton from her metropolitan tenure on Thursday, ending her six-year term in seafoam.
Though the latest stages of her Liberty career was marred by injury, Laney-Hamilton was one of the original Brooklynites next to Ionescu upon the team’s full-time move from Manhattan/Westchester in 2021. Laney-Hamilton had been a healthy scratch over these last seven but her service to the organization can never be sidelined.
She leaves New York ranked in the top 15 in the franchise’s all-time listings for points, assists, successful three-pointers, and field goal percentage. Her 20-point effort in Game 2 of the 2024 Finals changed the course of the championship series against the Minnesota Lynx, one that yielded the Liberty’s first postseason championship.
Laney-Hamilton’s departure paves the way for rising depth star Marine Fauthoux to land a standard contract as she nears the maximum restrictions her developmental contract carries: presuming she dresses for Sunday’s anticipated showing, Fauthoux will have partaken in 12 games with second unit standouts like Marine Johannes and Han Xu, the most afforded under such a deal.
It’d be hard to view Fauthoux’s rise amidst the Liberty’s streak as a coincidence, as this streak began with her unexpected double-double in relief during a one-point win in Dallas. Her defensive rating in the seven is 10th among reserves averaging 15 minutes.
All They Need
New York’s wins wouldn’t exactly impress a hypothetical WNBA playoff selection committee.
The most impressive win in the span is an overtime triumph over a Paige Bueckers-less Dallas group. That tipped off a stretch of thrillers where the Liberty defeated the Wings, Chicago Sky, Los Angeles Sparks, and pre-Kelsey Plum Phoenix Mercury by a combined eight points. To its credit, New York took Las Vegas to the brink in the July closeout before falling victim to A’ja Wilson’s antics.
They won part one of the Seattle series by a healthy dozen on Monday but Wednesday’s rematch was far testier, even with a six-point advantage on their side by the end. Monday saw the Storm shave a double-figure lead down to three before the Liberty restored metro sanity with 17-2 run that removed all doubt.
Defensively, New York is making an MVP case for Fiebich in absentia: in her first eight games (all wins), the Liberty had the second-best defensive rating in the league. It has fallen to eighth since then and an 83-point surrender on Monday against the Storm was seen as a positive development. That was just under a week after New York escaped from LA with a 113-109 win, albeit one that tied for the most points allowed in a regulation win by any WNBA squad this year.
But the Liberty saw value in the dramatics, teaching a group attending to keep up with the new and old blood of the W how to win again. Monday’s win, for example, was the first where the Liberty never trailed since May 29.
“You’ve got to learn how to win ugly, and you got to know how to close out games when you’re down and when you’re up,” Ionescu noted. “If you win every game by 15, then you don’t know how to win a close game. If you lose every game, you don’t know how to win. So for us, it’s just understanding that we’ve been put in so many situations when we’re down and digging ourselves out of a hole … They’re all just experiences that we’re able to have in the regular season that should set us up for the postseason.”
Part of that is cohesion among an adjusted starting five, one that’s a literal AA meeting next to the big three: on-again, off-again New Yorker Rebecca Allen has provided length and clutch shots while Pauline Astier continues to carry a starring role after taking over for an injured Ionescu in the early going. While leaving a bit to be desired defensively, that group has a 129.2 offensive rating in 90 minutes together, tops in the league for a five-woman group working that long (h/t Databallr). Among starters averaging at least 20 minutes in the last seven games, Astier and Allen rank eighth and 16th in the same department.
“We know what Bec Allen’s going to do every single night,” Ionescu said of Allen, the team’s lone remnant from its Madison Square Garden iteration. She’s so consistent with her effort. She knows her role really well. She understands what she needs to do, what she needs to bring to this team, especially when she’s in the starting unit. She’s trying to set good screens, she’s trying to get us open, and then she knows, in turn, she’s going to be able to be wide open because they’re trapping or double-teaming, and then she’s able to hit really big shots for us. So she’s done a great job with Leo out, just being really consistent. Defensively, she’s guarding the best wing every single night in the starting unit, and then offensively she’s hitting shots and being aggressive.”
“This lineup is just getting really comfortable with one another,” Stewart noted. “Having injuries and people being out and in early on made it tough for us to kind of find our rhythm. But to have our starters be pretty much set, it gives the bench like a better idea of how to feel comfortable when they’re going to go in. I feel like the flow of the game is at a really great place right now, and we just try to continue to take advantage of that. [Allen], she’s a vet, so when you slide her in, she knows where she needs to be.”
Metropolitan mettle will undoubtedly be tested over the final weeks of the season: the Liberty is seeded seventh heading into a chaotic couple against Las Vegas and Indiana. That tips off a dramatic dozen that features seven games against the league’s current top five, including two each against contending conference sisters Indiana and Atlanta.
“The fact [these games] are turning into wins is obviously huge. But we know we’re not even close to where we want to be, and I think that’s the exciting part,” said Ionescu. “There are many games ahead of us that we can continue to get better and build in the direction that we want to go to, to peak when playoffs come.”
Geoff Maglioccchetti is on X @GeoffJMags
