Liberty ‘take out’ Aces in emotional semifinals Game 4

Actor and comedian Jason Sudeikis, Dallas Wings player and Nyara Sabally‘s sister Satou Sabally, former pro tennis player Rennae Stubbs, now-retired pro basketball player and Breanna Stewart‘s wife Marta Xargay and Stewart’s former UConn teammate and close friend Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis were all at a court side table taking in that Game 3.

An Aces fan heckled that group and proclaimed that the series was most definitely going 5 games. The group of five didn’t verbally engage, but instead just gestured to answer the fired up fan. They all flashed the number four with their hands.

Sudeikis and friends’ gut feelings was proved correct on Sunday afternoon. The Liberty defeated the Aces 76-62 in a Game 4-comeback that starred Sabrina Ionescu, a stat-stuffing afternoon from Stewart, hard-fought play from Jonquel Jones and Leonie Fiebich, who were both in foul trouble, and a game-saving 18 minutes from Courtney Vandersloot.

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“It was a little bit of a flashback of the old New York Liberty and the Aces in terms of the matchup,” Jones said about Game 3. “And so we went back to the film. We realized that that can’t happen again, and that we’ve grown too much for us to play that type of way. That way that we played last year.”

The Liberty sounded much more composed following the Game 3 defeat than when they lost at Michelob Ultra Arena almost a year ago. There wasn’t panic, but instead was accountability, disappointment and focus. So how did they prove that Sudeikis’ proverbial crystal ball would be correct?

Stewart and Ionescu came out punching

One Liberty adjustment to counter the Aces’ intense pressure on Ionescu was having Stewart bring up the ball and initiate the Liberty’s quarter-court actions. Ionescu could function off the ball and run through screens teammates set for her. The Liberty even ran pick-and-rolls between Stewart and Jones, which allowed for Ionescu to space and Jones to have a wide-driving lane to pick a part the mismatch she had being guarded by Alysha Clark on the switch.

“We’ve been continuing to develop [Stewart] as a handler, and they didn’t want to switch any kind of pick-and-roll, so why not use her in the pick-and-roll action?,” Brondello said. “I thought it was very effective for us.”

Stewart had 5 assists in addition to her 19-14 double-double and 4 blocks. Ionescu manipulated the Vegas defense by moving them around and she got herself open looks on pass-out plays. Her first shot of the game came off a high pick-and-roll with Jones that flowed into a drive and kick on the baseline to Fiebich who then saw Clark coming on the closeout and then passed it back to Ionescu who had enough time to shoot on a slower Jackie Young closeout. Ionescu scored 12 points in the first half on 3-6 shooting.

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Ionescu’s position coach Olaf Lange believed that she played the game with much more aggression.

“In the pick-and-roll game she did a much better job of coming off tight,” he said. “In some other games she veers to the screen and there’s a gap between the screener and her.” When Lange says tight, he means that the ball handler is shoulder to shoulder with her screener. That “tighter” angle creates much more separation between the ball handler and her defender.

The fourth quarter when it all clicked

After a sluggish third quarter for both teams, a switch flipped for the Liberty in the fourth. Up only 53-51 at the start of the final frame, the Liberty scored 23 points to the Aces’ 11 and did so with a variety of players scoring.

Fiebich and Jones, who dealt with foul trouble in the second half, each had 6 points, and Vandersloot scored 4 points to accompany 7 more from Ionescu. While the the two=time MVP in Stewart didn’t put points on the board, her contributions came in the form of 2 assists, 3 rebounds, and 3 blocks all in the fourth.

But the Liberty’s defense fueled the team’s pivotal fourth quarter.

” I think honestly, the difference maker was the way that we scrambled,” Stewart said postgame. “We might have put ourselves in a two on one situation, but in game 3, they got easy looks. In Game 3, they got walk up threes, and we had higher pickup points and made sure that no matter what we want, to give them a contested shot.”

According to Vandersloot, the recipe for effective “scramble defense” is effort, an understanding of the team’s objectives, and communication. Doing that with over 10,000 people screaming makes communication even more challenging.

“You got to talk louder,” Vandersloot told a group of reporters postgame. “It literally is you’re screaming, and you have to be able to have your listening ears on. You’re listening for cues. That’s the biggest thing, communication is both ways. It’s talking loud, deliberate, you don’t have time. It’s short, it’s loud. You don’t have time to talk it out. It’s just cues, and a lot of it is just kind of knowing too. It can’t always just be [verbal] communication because [the ball] is moving. We just have to understand knowing who’s next and being on a string.”

Vandersloot’s 18 minutes, 10 of which came in the fourth, were “instrumental” according to Lange. Her impeccable decision making as a ball-handler was invaluable along with her defensive effort. The Liberty struggled to score in the third quarter because they were “milking” a two player elbow action between Stewart and Ionescu out of a desperation to score the basketball. Lange thought that Vandersloot gave the team a “different look” on their horns actions and as a result the Aces refused to help on her especially when Stewart or Jones were setting her screens that got her enough separation on the Vegas guards that were defending her.

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“It was really, really important for her to get downhill, to get these layups, just to punish them, which loosens up the defense on [Stewart],” he said. “She was huge, and she played really good defense on [Kelsey] Plum.”

Fiebich’s two fourth quarter scores came on a backdoor cut and a steal and score. The New York rookie had a new focus in the fourth quarter after spending a lot of the second quarter and a potion of the third on the bench due to foul trouble.

Her approach in the fourth was to help her team slow the game down and use her length to get deflections and make an impact on the glass. Four of her total 7 rebounds came in that fourth quarter.

Once Fiebich drew her fourth foul with 3:59 left in the third quarter, her approach to the game’s physicality had to change. Throughout the first three quarters, the Liberty didn’t lean into the physicality of the game but instead got frustrated by the calls that both were and weren’t called. In that fourth quarter, the Liberty decided to match the Aces’ physicality. They brought more ball pressure without fear of what the officials would or wouldn’t call.

“I feel like [Stewart] set a great example for how you deal with that physicality,” Fiebich said. “She’s guarded by Clark the whole game, and she was on her, like in her shit, and she just went through the contact. I don’t know how many times she was on the floor, but she just went through it and she knows what it takes to get there.”

Stewart’s moments of growth after not playing her best against the Aces less than a year ago continued to take center stage in the final moments of this series. New York’s coaching staff had told Stewart following last year’s postseason that she had to become more contact seeking instead of adverse, and in Game 4 less than a year later, Fiebich could point out the example she set of embracing the physicality rather than rejecting it.

For the second straight game, Jones was also in foul trouble. She picked up her fifth foul with 4:49 left in the fourth quarter, but Brondello trusted her center and Jones played the entire fourth quarter and stayed in the game. Jones took pride whenever she got switched onto the Aces guards and in particular moved quickly to get closeouts.

The key to Jones’ poise on Sunday afternoon were the ways that her teammates stayed in her ear and provided support. That was evident when she hit two big threes both with under five minutes left in the game. During both scores, the entire Liberty bench was up including extra celebrations from Sabally who was jumping up and down.

When Jones walked off the floor having helped her team advance to a second straight finals, Liberty GM Jonathan Kolb had his arms out waiting to give a bear hug to his 6’6 center. Smiles were wide and joy was effervescent. When Jones came off the court, the words swirling through her mind were just “Let’s fucking go.”

‘They made us a better team’

The Liberty’s demonstrative emotional state didn’t just come once the final buzzer sounded. The first trace of the fact that the Liberty were really feeling everything about Game 4 deeply was when Ionescu hit a 26 foot trey on and out of bounds play with under six minutes left in the fourth to give the Liberty an 11-point lead.

Once she heard the whistle signaling the Aces had called a timeout, she let out a battle cry while pumping her fists up and down.

Ioenscu spoke postgame about how the Aces made her Liberty better. This rivalry that has supercharged the WNBA has given the New York franchise a sparing partner to challenge the Liberty’s reintegration on top of the WNBA pecking order. But the Liberty have separated themselves from the Aces this year in the way that they’ve just thought about themselves.

When Ionescu was asked about the Aces representing a hurdle, she replied that her team has approached their ultimate goal, winning a WNBA championship, as “New York vs. New York”. It’s a contrasting tagline and motivator to the infamous Aces vs. Everybody.

When the Liberty fell in Las Vegas last year, Aces head coach Becky Hammon had proclaimed in the Barclays Center visiting locker room that the Liberty were a team that “was put together to take” her team out.

That tagline returned from Hammon on Sunday afternoon, but this time in a different context and was a function of a different result. It wasn’t being used to motivate her team but instead to explain Hammon’s reflection year over year. “This team was put together to take us out, and they did,” she said.

But the Aces also made the Liberty a better team when they spoke about the Liberty’s chemistry in 2023 — or rather the lack thereof. Plum spoke to a group of reporters during last year’s finals about how the Liberty were this talented group that didn’t really like each other in the way that her team did. The Liberty have been intentionally trying to prove this wrong throughout the entirety of the 2024 regular and postseason.

“I don’t think we try to prove anything that anybody else says wrong,” Ionescu told The Next. “I think we’ve just proven ourselves right. That’s really what it’s been. This group of players decided to stick together, didn’t achieve our goal last year, but we’re all back this year to do just that, and we’ve all believed in each other from the beginning. That’s never wavered, and we’ve never let the outside noise get in on what it is we’re trying to accomplish. I’d say that’s something that I’ve been the most proud of is just we continue to prove ourselves right every single time, and I wouldn’t want to be here with any other group.”