For two hours, Sandy Brondello sat and watched and evaluated.<\/p>\n
What transpired directly in front of her reinforced what she believed to be true.<\/p>\n
And so, when Brondello and Jonquel Jones and Emma Meesseman met with \u00a0reporters \u00a0at Barclays Center Tuesday night a few minutes after the Liberty\u2019s 75-66 rout of the Mystics, the coach was sanguine about her team\u2019s prospects in the upcoming WNBA Playoffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can be really dangerous,\u201d Brondello said. \u201cI\u2019m really confident. I think the players are really confident just to have our full group back. Hopefully we\u2019ll just go out there and play our best basketball and anyone can beat anyone right now so we\u2019re going to be confident in what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The defending WNBA champion Liberty enter the playoffs as the fifth seed following a regular season in which they went 27-17. They will open the best-of-three first round series against fourth-seeded Phoenix Sunday at PHX Arena.<\/p>\n
The Liberty lost three of four regular season meetings with the Mercury (27-17). But as Brondello pointed out prior to the regular season-ending 91-86 win over the Sky \u00a0in Chicago Thursday night, the Mercury did not play the current iteration of the Liberty.<\/p>\n
\u201cI suppose they don\u2019t have as much film on us in that regard,\u201d Brondello said with a chuckle. \u201cPhoenix hasn\u2019t seen us at full strength. We won one and lost three, and some of those games we did not look very good at all, with some of our main players out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The unavailability of core components has been one of the primary themes of the Liberty\u2019s 2025 season. The Liberty were forced to use 18 different starting lineups due to injuries. The regular starting lineup of Jones, Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, Natasha Cloud\u00a0and Leonie Fiebich was limited to 12 games.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of the starting lineup, it\u2019s been a tough season for us [with]\u00a0the injuries and all that,\u201d Jones said after her 12-point, 11-rebound effort against the Mystics.<\/p>\n
That is a bit of an understatement.<\/p>\n
When the unit was intact, the Liberty were 12-0. When it was not, the Liberty compiled a 15-17 record.<\/p>\n
Moreover, due to the injuries, Brondello and her coaching staff were unable to settle upon playoff rotations over the course of the season. Instead, they were forced to use the final two games of the regular season \u2014 the wins over Washington and Chicago \u2014 to determine player personnel deployment.<\/p>\n
Certainly, it was not ideal for anyone associated with the Liberty to be limited to 80 minutes spanning two games to determine rotations. But as Jones pointed out, there are reasons to be confident entering Game 1 based upon what transpired against the Mystics and the Sky.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s good just for us to be able to look at not just the starting five but our entire team, and see that we have juggernauts coming off the bench,\u201d Jones said.<\/p>\n
The nominal starting five was outscored 52-48 and 61-42 in the wins over Washington and Chicago, respectively. But a bright spot was the play of the reserves in both wins.<\/p>\n
Specifically, Meesseman.<\/p>\n
Meesseman, whose signing was\u00a0announced on Aug. 1, scored a game-high 19 points in 19:47 against the Mystics, and finished with 14 points, six rebounds, three assists, one steal\u00a0and one block in 16 minutes in Chicago.<\/p>\n
In the 17 games the 2019 WNBA Finals MVP has played with the Liberty, Meesseman is averaging 13.4 points and 5.1 rebounds in 26.4 minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving Emma is amazing,\u201d Jones said. \u201cI had the pleasure of playing with her overseas for a number of years and so I know that she\u2019s not just a great player but a great person and she puts the team first. It\u2019s amazing that we have the opportunity to have her here and be a part of this.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all know that she\u2019s not a bench player but she\u2019s willing to do that for our team and it makes us stronger. It allows us to . . . half court is where we start to have a little lull and she can come into the game and change things so quickly for us. We understand that she\u2019s amazing and that we\u2019re happy to see her in a New York Liberty jersey.\u201d<\/p>\n
LIBERTY VS. PHOENIX MERCURY:<\/p>\n
Game 1: Sunday, at Mercury, 5 p.m.<\/p>\n
Game 2: Tuesday, at Liberty, 8 p.m.<\/p>\n
*Game 3:\u00a0Friday,\u00a0at Mercury, TBD<\/p>\n
*-if necessary; TV: Games 1 & 2 ESPN, Game 3 ESPN2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For two hours, Sandy Brondello sat and watched and evaluated. What transpired directly in front of her reinforced…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":223947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[1520,62,67,132,68,232,1707],"class_list":{"0":"post-223946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-new-york-liberty","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-wnba","14":"tag-womens-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115197841628878483","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}