Hello, hoopheads! The first weekend of WNBA preseason games is in the books, although I want to take this moment to advise against reading too much into what you see in them. Preseason sports often go a long way towards fans forming misguided opinions, featuring very little “best-on-best” action and often seeing players focus on hyper-specific work they need to get in as opposed to simulating an actual game (which can’t be simulated anyway). That said, I did watch some of my beloved New York Liberty’s first exhibition on Saturday, and the headline from that one was blissfully that there were no significant injuries. May that continue to be the case all the way into next offseason. With the seafoam squad still intact, it’s time to look at what’s ahead.
What happened last year?
Bestie and I watched some really, really shitty basketball and went home mad about it a bunch of times, the end.
Sorry, had to be a brat for a second. The Liberty went into 2025 as the favorites to win their second straight (and ever) WNBA title after outlasting the Minnesota Lynx in the 2024 Finals, and looked like they’d live up to that status during a hot start to the season. Things started to go off the rails when former regular-season and Finals MVP Jonquel Jones suffered an ankle sprain in June, from which she would initially return too soon and then miss several more weeks as a result. Fellow former multi-time and multi-type MVP Breanna Stewart would also miss several weeks due to a bone bruise suffered in July, although not before being a dumbass by further aligning herself with transphobic activist and one-time author J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise via a shoe collaboration after years of public fandom. I don’t think Stewie’s TERF shoes literally doomed the season, but I won’t argue with anyone who says they did. The Liberty’s cursed campaign eventually ended in a first-round playoff loss to the Finals-bound Phoenix Mercury, with championship-winning head coach Sandy Brondello (who also won a title in Phoenix) taking the fall soon after. I hated the decision to let Brondello go, but as I wrote in the Her Hoop Stats newsletter at the time, it was an understandable one given the way the season went. Sandy wasn’t out of work for long, landing with the expansion Toronto Tempo, while the Liberty hired former Golden State Warriors assistant Chris DeMarco from the MNBA ranks.
What’s the roster going to look like?
When Brondello took the fall, many people believed that her star players would line up to follow her out the door, with Sabrina Ionescu often projected to be headed to her native Bay Area to play for the Golden State Valkyries while Jones seemed to be fanfic’d to every team in the league. As it turned out, the Liberty’s “big three” each took less than the supermax salaries they were eligible for to stay with the post-Brondello Liberty, signing three-year contracts at the lower “maximum” (which is obviously an oxymoron, but I digress). Retaining their superstars at discount rates was at least part of the reason the Liberty were able to turn their “big three” into a “big four” with the addition of “the Unicorn” Satou Sabally from the Mercury in free agency. Sabally also took less money than she could’ve gotten elsewhere to join Ionescu, her former college teammate at Oregon, and the Liberty’s former MVPs, but those four players will still account for about five-eighths of the salary cap.
Two of the reasons the Liberty were able to make that sort of commitment to just a third of their roster are named Leonie Fiebich, who remains extremely cost-effective on her rookie contract, and Betnijah-Laney Hamilton, whose contract was suspended as a result of the injury that cost her the 2025 season, leaving the Liberty as the only team she could negotiate with in free agency. The phrase “six starters” will almost surely be thrown about on a regular basis this season, if only to protect the ego of whichever player comes off the bench (my guess is it’ll be Fiebich). It’ll be closer to the truth than lip service, however, as the Liberty won a championship with Laney-Hamilton and Fiebich in the starting five and would’ve most likely gone into this season that way if Sabally hadn’t come aboard.
Veteran Rebecca Allen, who spent the first eight years of her WNBA career with the Liberty, also returned as a free agent, while fellow vet Rebekah Gardner remained with the team. Promising 24-year old French point guard Pauline Astier seems like a lock to make the team off a training camp contract despite still being overseas, as does returning center Han Xu after not playing in the WNBA in 2024 or 2025. Han shined on Saturday, was a member of the 2023 Finals team, and most importantly the Liberty know there might be a mutiny among fans if they let her go. New York has exclusive negotiating rights with another fan favorite, Marine Johannes, who is also expected back, but hasn’t signed a contract yet. If all of those players make the team, that’ll only leave one spot on the 12-player roster for the rest of the players in camp.
BONUS QUESTION: Why isn’t Natasha Cloud back?
First of all, as for the speculation that Cloud has been blackballed due to her lengthy track record of social activism, I believe that both of the comments Tash has made on Threads (or perhaps it’s Instagram? I avoid the Zuckerverse) read like they were made by a player who believes she has not been offered a fair contract as opposed to one who believes she’s been blackballed. I also believe she is the last player who’d be quiet about it if she believed that was happening, and that is the biggest reason I am a huge Natasha Cloud fan.
Where the Liberty, specifically, are concerned, I think that answering the question of why Cloud wasn’t re-signed starts with remembering why the Liberty traded for her last spring. That happened because of the injury to Laney-Hamilton, the extent of which wasn’t known to the public — but surely was known to the Liberty — at the time of the trade. Laney-Hamilton’s injury left the Liberty with a gaping hole in the backcourt late in the offseason as they embarked on an attempt to win a second straight title. They filled that hole with the best available guard and Cloud became an instant fan favorite (much like Laney-Hamilton), but Betnijah’s return means the need that brought Tash to Brooklyn no longer exists.
Additionally, it’s impossible to overstate how important spacing is to a team like the Liberty, who attempted 3-pointers at the highest rate in the league every year from 2020 through 2024 and dipped to third last season. There were unfortunately real problems with how Cloud’s presence in the backcourt last season impacted the team’s spacing in general and Ionescu’s ability to get open 3s in particular. Tash is a 31.3% career 3-point shooter and hasn’t made better than 33.8% (her number last year) since 2018 while Laney-Hamilton is a 35.6% career shooter from deep and has made 37.7% in the 2020s. Opponents recognized that a good 3-point shooter next to Ionescu in the backcourt had been replaced by a below-average one, and as such, left Tash open on the perimeter while crowding Sab.
Given the Liberty’s roster crunch and the reality on the court, all they would’ve been able to offer for 2026 was a very limited role and most likely a veteran minimum salary, and that assumes Cloud would’ve made the team out of training camp. My guess is Tash had at least the opportunity to earn that roster spot extended and probably similar ones from other teams, but that she doesn’t deem them worthy of taking. It would be hard to blame her, given she hasn’t come off the bench in a WNBA game since 2018, but it might also be the kind of opportunity she has to accept if she wants to play in the WNBA at the age of 34. I’ll be in the stands at Barclays Center proudly wearing her shirt either way.
What’s the Marvel Snap deck?
A “ramp” deck in Marvel Snap is so named because it’s built around getting extra energy in order to play high-powered cards a turn earlier than they normally could be. Another way of looking at it is that ramp decks get creative with the salary cap and the lesser end of their roster in order to get more high-impact players on the court than should be possible. There might not be as much natural synergy as you find with some other groups, but they sure will be big. That sounds like the Liberty to me.
Just a whole bunch of large superheroes here, much like my Libs
What’s the expectation?
The Liberty are the oddsmakers’ favorites once again, and while I hesitate to get ahead of myself as a fan and season-ticket holder, I do think they have the WNBA’s best roster on paper. DeMarco will have to prove he’s up to the task as a first-time head coach, but he’s got an embarrassment of riches, particularly among his six starters, and four MNBA titles to his name as an assistant. There will be bumps in the road, but the expectation is a return to contending for the title.