By Amy Tennery
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The New York Liberty’s long comeback story got a thrilling new chapter with a second straight trip to the WNBA Finals this week, as the team once relegated to a 2,100 capacity stadium in the suburbs has Brooklyn’s Barclays Center rocking.
The top seed Liberty eliminated Las Vegas in the semi-finals on Sunday, a year after the Aces denied them the championship, and will vie for their first title against the winner of a semi-final series between the Connecticut Sun and the Minnesota Lynx.
Their on-court success has been matched by huge gains in the ledger book, with average regular-season attendance of 12,729 – up 64% over last year – and season ticket membership up 152% at the venue they share with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets.
“This was a brick-by-brick rebuild,” said Keia Clarke, the Liberty CEO.
It marks an astonishing turnaround from 2017, when the Madison Square Garden Company announced it would sell the franchise and booted the team from its eponymous venue.
The Liberty were sent off to play at the Westchester County Center, a tiny venue an hour from midtown Manhattan and light years away in prestige.
“We found ourselves in that moment,” said Clarke, who has been with the team for 14 years. “I would describe it as resiliency.”
The Liberty got a lifeline as Joe Tsai, founder of the Alibaba Group, and his wife Clara Wu Tsai, purchased the team two years later and subsequently made plans to move them to Brooklyn.
“We hit reset,” said General Manager Jonathan Kolb, who was hired in 2019.
The team adopted a “player first” philosophy, as they went after the league’s top talent with tremendous investments in player performance.
“We consider our performance team to be the best in the WNBA. And our goal is really to be the best performance team in sports,” said Kolb.
The approach paid off, as the team picked up the 2021 MVP Jonquel Jones, the five-time All-Star Courtney Vandersloot and the twice Finals MVP Breanna Stewart in a series of blockbuster moves ahead of the 2023 season.
Kolb said winning the title after coming up empty handed in five priors Finals appearances would be a well-deserved reward for fans, who stuck around through their “nomadic” years.
“It would have been easy for them to drop us at any point when we were moving around so much,” he said.
“It would just mean everything.”
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in New York)
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