WNBA Season Preview 2019: For the Liberty, development today, wins tomorrow

The 2018 New York Liberty season just might have, by accident, been the most convincing case study in sports history about the importance of a home court advantage. For most of the previous two decades, going back to the early days of Rebecca Lobo, New York City showed out in the summers to see the Liberty, regularly packing Madison Square Garden with five-digit audiences. It hasn’t even mattered that the Liberty are the only franchise to (1) stay in the same city since the WNBA’s 1997 inception, and (2) never bring home the championship. New York fans have never stopped coming in to see the Knicks, even though the franchise has now put together nearly a straight generation of sub-.500 seasons. By comparison, it’s been easy to support the Liberty, who at least have made the postseason in 15 of their 22 years before getting knocked out just short of glory.

To nobody’s surprise: this is James Dolan’s fault. Hoping to sell the Liberty, Dolan effectively decided to kneecap his own franchise by kicking them out of the Garden and into the 5,000-seat Westchester County Center. Nothing against the suburban city of White Plains, but it was unsurprising that the 55,000-person town was unable to provide the same support for the Liberty that the Madison Garden faithful had done for so many years. In 2017, the Liberty’s 9,888-seat average attendance was a strong fourth-highest in the WNBA. The move to Westchester in 2018 caused the Liberty to drop all the way down to dead-last, bringing in only 2,823 fans per game. The Liberty’s wild plummet in attendance even threw off the rest of the league’s average attendance, which fell to an all-time low 6,721 in large part due to the Liberty’s uncharacteristic dip. (Keep in mind that the 11th-place team in attendance, the Atlanta Dream, also spent the year displaced from their regular arena.) The Liberty would have dragged down that number even if they sold out the Westchester arena, which seats only 5,000.

The on-court product mirrored the exact same collapse that happened in the stands. After a strong 22-12 playoff season in 2017, the biggest change the Liberty made to their team was replacing coach Bill Laimbeer with Katie Smith. This stood to be the most seamless possible coaching change: Smith had won the championship playing for Laimbeer’s Detroit Shock in 2006 and 2008, and had worked with Laimbeer for the entirety of his five-year tenure with the Liberty, both as a player (2013) and assistant coach (2014-2017). In 2018, the Liberty got off to a slow 7-14 start before the bottom fell out, with the team ending on a 0-13 losing streak. The resulting 7-27 record was the first single-digit-win season in franchise history.

No matter how seasoned a professional you are, it would undeniably mess with one’s head to be rolling into the world’s most famous arena for your home games one year, and then a suburban arena fit for a Division II squad the next. The move made it almost impossible to evaluate the true talent level of both coach Smith — who walked the sidelines with increasing nail-biting agitation over the season — and young players like rookie Kia Nurse, who finished second on the team in scoring average. After appearing to float through last season without a GM, Smith was forced to take a throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall approach, with all 12 players who ended the year on the Liberty roster receiving double-digit minutes per game.

The good news is that the future of the franchise looks incredibly bright, following the purchase of the team by international billionaire Joseph Tsai. Tsai’s first move was to hire an analytics-minded GM, Jonathan Kolb, straight from the league office. A month later, the draft board fell nicely into Kolb’s lap: the sudden announcement that junior Jackie Young was leaving Notre Dame allowed No. 1-caliber shooting guard Asia Durr to fall to the Liberty at No. 2. In the second round (which produces high-caliber players less often than even the NBA’s second round) Kolb appropriately took a shot on high-ceiling prospect Han Xu, a 6-foot-9, 19-year-old center from China. The move indicated Tsai’s global aspirations: if Xu hits as a prospect, it’s easy to see the Liberty gaining a rabid global audience in the same way that Chinese audiences supported Yao Ming’s Houston Rockets.

The thing is: none of these moves are due to pay off in 2019. Kolb was hired in March — or, after free agency had been underway for a month, limiting the veteran additions he could make to the team. Even if Xu does hit as a prospect, for this year she will only be the 10th-ever teenager to play in the league, and 2019 will be a year invested in her long-term development. Plus, the Liberty will be back in Westchester once again. Every sign points to the Liberty being back in the high lottery in the 2020 draft. However, unlike the franchise’s aimless 2018, the groundwork laid in 2019 could be the type of positive building that finally leads to the franchise’s first-ever championship.