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Barclays Center in Brooklyn shook with the roar of 17,700 basketball fans, almost all of them rooting for the New York Liberty. They have been waiting years for a team like this one, and on Thursday, with only five minutes left and the Liberty up by 15 points over the Minnesota Lynx in Game 1 of the W.N.B.A. finals, there was a sense that the team’s run of failures was going to be over.
There have been some brutal lows over the decades and tons of thrills, but never a championship, even after five trips to the finals. Patricia Fraser-Morales, a season ticket holder since 1999, has been there for most of them. As she joined the crowd chanting and waving their white Liberty towels, she thought things might be different this year.
“We’ve been waiting a long, long time,” Fraser-Morales said from her seat before Thursday’s tipoff. “I think this is finally it.”
But it is still the Liberty, and somehow Minnesota swiped Game 1 with a shocking overtime win in the best-of-five series. Deafening noise turned to a somber murmur as stunned fans filed out into the Brooklyn night, some wondering if their team would ever win a title.
Yet hope remains. The 2024 Liberty are stacked with talent and earned the best regular-season record in the league, 32-8. They work hard, have a championship coach, finals experience and the support of a devoted and uniquely New York fan base. There’s even an elephant mascot. Will it all be enough?
Decades of frustrating history push against that notion. No New York-area basketball team has won a major professional championship since the New York Nets of the old American Basketball Association in 1976. It is a baffling drought, considering that the city has three teams (the Knicks, the Nets and, since 1997, the Liberty). Also, New York fancies itself the Mecca of basketball, and the fans supposedly demand success.
“I was told that on Day 1 when I arrived here, and you can feel it,” said Sandy Brondello, the Australian coach of the Liberty, who won the 2014 title as coach of the Phoenix Mercury. “It would be nice to be the first to do it, wouldn’t it? Go down in the history books.”
But now the Liberty must win three of the next four games, starting this afternoon against the Lynx, a one-time dynasty that won four W.N.B.A. championships from 2011 to 2017.
“We have the opportunity to do something that’s never been done before,” Breanna Stewart, the Liberty’s star forward, said. “We are playing for those who have been here before and haven’t gotten over that hurdle.”
All that talent over the years, with stars like Tina Charles, Teresa Weatherspoon and Becky Hammon, and no titles, just like the Knicks with Patrick Ewing or the Nets with Jason Kidd. It is almost enough to make you wonder if a curse lurks over New York basketball.
“There’s maybe been a tinge of that, but I try to be optimistic,” Fraser-Morales, a tutor from East Harlem, said Friday morning after the loss. “That’s why this is so important. New York needs this.”
No other fan base in W.N.B.A. history has suffered quite like the Liberty’s longtime supporters, because no other team still in existence has waited so long to win a first title — and no other team has had five empty trips to the finals. (Adding to the indignity is this statistic: In 28 years of W.N.B.A. playoffs, teams that led by 15 with five minutes to go had gone 183-0 — until Thursday.) The Liberty were an original W.N.B.A. team and went to the finals in four of their first six seasons, losing all of them. They also made it to last year’s finals, but lost again.
The club has also bounced around the region, hunting for a home. Originally owned by James Dolan, who owns the Knicks, the team started off at Madison Square Garden and even played games at Radio City Music Hall until Dolan’s support wavered and the team moved to Newark and then to the Westchester County Center, a modest 5,000-seat arena in White Plains.
“That was awful,” said Merlin Chowkwanyun, a professor of community health at Columbia University and a passionate Liberty fan who made several trips to White Plains for games. “It was so degrading and disrespectful to the talent. The Liberty were in the wilderness for too long. If they can win, it would complete the reversal of fortunes.”
That process began in 2019 when Joe Tsai and his wife, Clara Wu Tsai, bought the team from Dolan and moved it to Barclays Center, the home of their other team, the Brooklyn Nets of the N.B.A. The Liberty drafted the guard Sabrina Ionescu first overall in 2020. In 2023, they added Stewart (a two-time champion and Most Valuable Player, and Rookie of the Year Award winner with the Seattle Storm) and center Jonquel Jones, also a former M.V.P., who scored 24 points in Game 1.
With a home in Brooklyn, the Liberty have been transformed, and a new generation of fans adds to the vibe.
The team averaged 12,729 fans per game this season at Barclays, a 64 percent increase from last year, and season ticket memberships are up 152 percent year over year, according to the team. In-game sales of the Liberty’s sea-foam green merchandise have nearly doubled over last year’s, including items with a nod to Ellie, the team’s madly popular mascot with all the right dance moves.
“Our biggest advantage is our fan base,” Ionescu said. “Having 18,000 fans that are loud, cheering, rowdy all game is just electric.”
For many of these fans, the team has been an affordable and welcome alternative to the more aggressive atmosphere of some male professional sports events. The Liberty have become a beacon for women, people of color and L.G.B.T.Q. fans.
Jo Trigg, a social-work trainer and therapist from Brooklyn, went to one of the earliest games at Madison Square Garden as a child with their parents in 1997, lost interest over the intervening years and then rediscovered the team as a nonbinary parent of a 4-year-old.
“I didn’t understand sports fandom, and then I went to a game,” Trigg said, “and I was like: ‘Oh, I see why people love it so much. I totally get it. I can’t believe I’ve been ignoring this.’ The community is the most special part. The men that go are cool Brooklyn dads. It’s a breath of fresh air.
“It’s true — sports brings people together.”
Celebrities, including Spike Lee, Jason Sudeikis, Gayle King and Aubrey Plaza, were all at Thursday’s game. But with all that attention comes higher demand for tickets. Caitlin Shann, a marketing executive, said her season tickets cost $600 last year and will rise to nearly $1,200 next year, an almost 100 percent increase. A playoff strip of eight potential games cost her $775, more than the entire 20-game package for regular-season home games.
Shann, who is collating a spreadsheet of fellow season ticket holders’ price rises, worries that as the Liberty’s popularity grows, some of its core fans will be priced out. In the meantime, she calls the Liberty experience “addictive.”
“I feel physically and emotionally safe there, which I do not feel at men’s sports games at all, whatsoever, especially as a queer person,” Shann said. “That allowed me to release my inner fanatic.”
Keia Clarke, the Liberty’s chief executive, said the league, and all of women’s sports, is at a pivotal moment, when investment is starting to reflect interest. She said that although ticket prices have risen in some areas of the arena, others remain more affordable.
“Am I in the business of trying to price people out?” she said. “Absolutely not. Am I in the business of really honoring the value that these women bring every single night and having the price of the ticket reflect what the entertainment quality is? Absolutely.”
Clarke has been with the team for 14 years, from Madison Square Garden to Westchester, and seen the sine wave of fortunes and popularity. If the team can rally and finally win that title, she promised a ticker-tape parade to City Hall, same as the Mets and Yankees would get.
“Right down the Canyon of Heroes,” she said. “That’s the hope, and that’s the plan.”
Just as it has been for 28 years.
Remy Tumin contributed reporting.
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