NEW YORK -- The 30-year history of the New York Liberty has featured twists and turns, heartache and highs and, at times, even down-right irrelevance. But Liberty faithful have come to expect that with the arrival of autumn comes the arrival of playoff basketball in Brooklyn and, ideally, a championship.
Yet before the postseason opens Sunday, the Atlanta Dream are in town during the first week of fall for two games in three days to close the regular season, a playoff teaser as both teams vie for better seeding and momentum.
"You can feel it in the building. You can feel it on the streets outside of Barclays," first-year Liberty coach Chris DeMarco said Monday of the franchise's championship culture. "It's a passionate fanbase, and the standard has been winning, and it starts with our stars and our All-Stars, our top players, and what's expected out of them time and time again in a city that loves sports and a city that loves basketball.
"I couldn't be more excited to be here right now in this position where we're getting closer to the playoffs."
Four hours later, the Liberty walked off their home court with a 95-84 loss, the result officially knocking them out of contention for a top-four seed and home-court advantage for the first round.
To win a championship, they'll have to do it the hard way. Just as much of this season has been.
Between returning their big three and signing Satou Sabally in free agency, the Liberty were, as they have been since Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones arrived, considered championship contenders entering the season. Though DeMarco was new, the experience and talent on the roster in May made New York look well-positioned to ensure its 2025 first-round playoff exit following back-to-back Finals appearances was a mere blip.
Yet a roller-coaster season has put into question whether that will be the case. Between a rash of injuries, inconsistent play and a 13-12 start that Stewart described as a "what the f---" moment, the Liberty's performance has evoked questions about whether or why they haven't always played to their potential.
New York will enter the playoffs buoyed by a strong regular-season finish the team says more accurately reflects what it is capable of. Amid the ups and downs, the Liberty have maintained they have the players to win a second WNBA championship in three years.
When the playoffs tip off Sunday, the Liberty will be out to show who they really are. And the league will be watching to see what happens next if a franchise with perhaps the highest internal expectations once more falls short of a deep playoff run.
"We know this team has been through a lot," Stewart said in late August, "but we have a lot of fight left in us."
ONE YEAR AGO, the Liberty made shockwaves when they announced they were moving on from Sandy Brondello, the winningest coach in franchise history who'd guided New York to its first WNBA title 11 months earlier.
At the time -- days after New York had lost in the first round -- general manager Jonathan Kolb described the decision as an effort to pursue "evolution and innovation," to "keep pushing the New York Liberty to new heights" and "position ourselves to be at the top of the league in a real sustainable way."
"We need to nail this," Kolb told reporters regarding his next hire. "If we're going to make a bold decision like this, our players deserve to get the best."
The Liberty hired DeMarco in December, well after the league's other coaching vacancies had been filled. The latest NBA-assistant-turned-WNBA head coach, DeMarco was on the Golden State Warriors staff for their four recent titles; his head coaching experience came from leading the Bahamas men's national team over the previous six years.
In the preseason, players spoke of embracing a new era and expressed enthusiasm for DeMarco's new offense, which they touted for its simplicity and clarity. But things got off to a rocky start. After a 20-point road loss against the Indiana Fever on July 18, New York was 13-12.
"I'm surprised at how the first half of the season went from a record standpoint," said Stewart, who hasn't flirted with a .500 record since 2017, her second year in the league. "I was like, 'What the f---? Like, you gotta be f---ing kidding me.'"
Injuries piled up. Sabrina Ionescu played one game in the first five weeks of this season. Sabally made only 13 appearances before being ruled out for the season as she dealt with the effects of a second concussion in eight months. Leonie Fiebich, a critical cog to the Liberty's defense, was sidelined by a foot injury for seven weeks in July and August and has been available for only 20 games.
Then Betnijah Laney-Hamilton -- who sat out all of 2025 because of a knee injury -- fell out of the rotation entirely, picking up DNPs for three weeks before being waived four days after the trade deadline. It was an emotional departure internally for one of the Liberty's longest-tenured players and a 2024 champion who was viewed as the embodiment of New York grit. The prolonged nature of the ordeal and lack of clarity over why she'd been relegated also frustrated the fanbase, with DeMarco getting booed during introductions ahead of the first game following her release. "Welcome to New York," Stewart interjected when DeMarco was asked about it.
Consistency was also hard to come by, not only game to game but sometimes within a game. The Liberty went 16-6 this season against teams below .500, the worst such record among playoff teams. DeMarco and players acknowledged they needed to be better at playing a full 40 minutes and refocusing quicker when things didn't go their way, and that sometimes not making shots affected their defensive effort.
Things reached Jekyll-and-Hyde proportions when New York won eight straight games across late May and June but then lost eight of its next 10, not including clinching their second Commissioner's Cup championship.
The team held multiple meetings after the initial loss to Indiana, including one postgame in the locker room with players only and another the following day with the entire group. They discussed the importance of each person remembering what got them there and, from the coaching staff down to the players riding the bench, that they were all in it together and it would take everyone to be successful.
"You can sit in the locker room and feel sorry for yourself and complain and be upset about the way things are going, or you can do something about it," Ionescu said. "And I think we all kind of took it upon ourselves to try and do something about it."
The Liberty focused on stacking wins even if they weren't pretty. They learned to embrace that it was OK if things were more difficult for the time being, as long as they could play their best basketball by the playoffs.
"We had this expectation of being one of the better teams in the league and being maybe top two, top three, whatever it is, and that wasn't really materializing for us at the beginning of the season," Jones said in August. "We put a lot of pressure on ourselves, and I think that pressure turned into anxiety, and then it turned into the way that we were playing on the court, where we just weren't really moving the ball, everybody was just trying to figure it out, but we were all trying to figure it out separately."
New York is 13-5 since that July 18 loss, and in that span boasts the second-best offensive rating in the league at 114.3 points per 100 possessions. The other end of the court has been a work in progress all season. The Liberty rank seventh in defensive rating and have struggled to guard the 3-point line.
"We're an offensive powerhouse ... and everyone knows that," forward Rebecca Allen said. "The question mark people have is, 'Defensively, can they rise to that challenge?' I think that we've really put that question on ourselves as well, and we're taking it quite personally."
DeMarco acknowledged the changes in personnel availability from game to game forced the coaching staff to continuously pivot and sometimes reinvent the lineup -- all as he was navigating the learning curve that comes with being a first-time coach in the WNBA.
"You've been able to see it through our record over the last month," Ionescu said Monday of DeMarco's progression. "Obviously, he's learning the league a lot more and understanding what it takes to be a head coach in this league, and he's had to adapt and adjust really quickly. And I think he's done a great job."
Having more continuity in the lineup has helped, Ionescu added, as has Fiebich's return over the past six games. The Liberty are 12-11 without Fiebich and 14-6 with her.
"I don't know if we proved anything to ourselves," Stewart said after Fiebich's first game back on Aug. 22, a 109-102 win at home over the Fever. "Now I'm really excited for us to continue to build. Like, better late than never, I guess.
"Now it's just really important how we finish this season."
THE DREAM'S THREE-POINT halftime lead Monday suddenly ballooned to 10 not even 2 minutes, 30 seconds into the third quarter, prompting a Liberty timeout. New York hung around, even cutting the deficit to two, but Atlanta's third-quarter punch in which the Dream scored 32 points and capitalized on a slew of Liberty turnovers proved the difference.
New York will enter the postseason with recent quality wins over the Fever and Minnesota Lynx, and gets another shot at Atlanta on Wednesday. But the team is not yet a finished product. Keeping composure amid an opposing team's run -- what players have acknowledged has been an issue throughout the season -- will be even more critical in the playoffs.
"We have shown what we can do, but we have to do it consistently," guard Rebekah Gardner said Monday. "That's going to be the difference in how far we go in the postseason."
New York has championship experience, but bookmakers and historical precedent are not in its favor. DraftKings gives them the sixth-longest odds at 14-1 to win the 2026 title, better than only the Washington Mystics and Dallas Wings. The lowest-seeded team to win a WNBA title was the No. 6 Chicago Sky in 2021, also the only team to win a championship without finishing top four in the standings.
The Liberty's 10-11 record against playoff teams this season is tied with the Dream and Mystics for fourth best, slotted behind the Lynx, Golden State Valkyries and Las Vegas Aces. Even in its 13-5 run since dropping to 13-12, the team's 6.3 net rating ranks sixth in the league, ahead of only the Lynx and Wings in that stretch.
Even still, few teams probably would line up to face the Liberty in the first round. Their core four of Ionescu, Stewart, Jones and Fiebich has chemistry, shared bond and a collective will to win, Ionescu said, forged from their 2024 championship and the adversity that has come along the way.
"I think everyone knows we're not a traditional [low] seed," Ionescu said in early August. "At least for me personally, it's less worrying about the seed that we are because I know when we're playing our best, we can beat anyone, even if we are an 8-seed."
They also have Stewart, who in 2026 has further solidified herself as the sport's greatest winner with Unrivaled, EuroLeague, Commissioner's Cup and World Cup championships. She nearly willed the Liberty to the semifinals on a sprained MCL last year and is playing with the same determination and heightened leadership down the stretch of this season.
"I'm really locked in," Stewart said Monday. "I know that the moment is almost here as far as what we want to do in playoffs, and knowing that Wednesday is our last get-right game before we figure out where we go and who we play and vice versa.
"I just want to leave it all on the court and do that on a nightly basis. And I think that making sure to set the tone for my team and really let them know what type of basketball we're going to be playing for the next hopefully month and beyond."
ESPN Research contributed to this report.