With the Liberty’s two-time WNBA regular season and finals MVP Breanna Stewart still sidelined with a bone bruise in her right knee, sustained on July 26 in a 101-99 home loss to the Los Angeles Sparks, the team is 2-4 in its last six games. The defending league champion was on a four-game winless streak before back-to-back victories in a matchup with the Connecticut Sun (87-78) on the road on Sunday –– led by point guard Sabrina Ionescu’s sensational 36 points and 11 rebounds –– and 85-76 against the Dallas Wings at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Tuesday.
Stewart is averaging 18.3 points and 6.5 rebounds, both which rank second on the Liberty. The team has provided no timetable for Stewart’s return. After starting this season 9-0, the best opening in franchise history, the Liberty are 19-10, the second best record in the WNBA when the league’s schedule tipped off last night. The Minnesota Lynx were 25-5 and the Atlanta Dream were one game behind the Liberty at 18-11.
“It’s always tough when you have injuries too, particularly in the same position, so you have to play players out of position as much as we can and play rotations that we probably would not play together, but it is what it is,” Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello said before Tuesday’s game.
The team is also missing forward Kennedy Burke and center Nyara Sabally. Burke will be out several weeks with a strain in her right calf and Sabally has sat out 15 of the Liberty’s 29 games with knee and back issues.
“We don’t practice much. They’re professionals. We’ve got a great performance staff,” expanded Brondello. “They get all the recovery that they need. Even (on Tuesday) it was a walk-through. It wasn’t a shoot around, we walked to conserve energy as much as we can, and that’s what we will do as we go forward.”
Emma Meesseman, the 2019 league and finals MVP playing for the Washington Mystics, made her Liberty debut Sunday against the Sun, scoring 11 points in her first WNBA game since 2022. The 6-4, 32-year-old Belgian native, who has been playing in Europe for the past three years, followed up by scoring 13 points and blocking two shots on Tuesday versus the Wings.
Stephanie Talbot tied her season high with 13 points against Dallas in her seventh game for the Liberty. On July 21, the team announced the signing of the veteran forward from Australia one week after she was waived by the Golden State Valkyries.
The Liberty will play the Wings tomorrow (Friday) on the road and face the Lynx at Barclays Center, Sunday afternoon. New York will then play back-to-back road games against the Los Angeles Sparks next Tuesday and the Las Vegas Aces on Wednesday.