Liberty finally give New York City a basketball championship

NEW YORK — As the final second ticked off the clock, Breanna Stewart turned to her teammate Jonquel Jones for a long-awaited championship hug, as streamers floated down on the court and thousands of fans screamed, danced and recorded the moment on their phones.

The long wait was over. The New York Liberty, one of the original WNBA teams, won their first championship on Sunday at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, beating the Minnesota Lynx, 67-62 in overtime, to capture the best-of-five series, 3 games to 2.

New York City finally had a 21st-century basketball championship to savor.

After more than a quarter century of trying in more than four home arenas, the Liberty finally will have a banner to hang at Barclays, their current home. City buildings will be lit up in the team color, Liberty “sea foam,” and Mayor Eric Adams promised a parade. History has been made.

“To be able to bring a championship to New York, the first ever in franchise history, it’s an incredible feeling,” said Stewart, who is from North Syracuse, New York. “I literally can’t wait to continue to celebrate with the city, because it’s going to be bonkers.”

Not only is the title a first for the franchise, but the Liberty also broke a long drought for New York area professional basketball. Theirs is the first championship for a New York major pro basketball team since the New York Nets of the old American Basketball Association won the last title of that defunct league in 1976, before it merged with the NBA the next season.

The New York Knicks have not won an NBA championship since 1973, more than a half-century ago. While they (and, to a lesser degree, the Brooklyn Nets, who also play at Barclays Center) continue to strive toward their own elusive trophy, the Liberty secured theirs thanks to a core of talented and gritty players, who withstood a fierce challenge by Minnesota.

But the game included some controversy. With the Liberty trailing by two points and with only 5.2 seconds left in regulation, Minnesota’s Alanna Smith was called for a questionable foul on Stewart, the Liberty’s superstar forward.

The Lynx asked for a video review, but the call was upheld, much to the dismay of Cheryl Reeve, Minnesota’s head coach, who said after the game that a bad call had decided the outcome.

“All the headlines will be, ‘Reeve cries foul,’” the coach declared. “Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on because this was stolen from us.”

But Stewart still had to hit the shots, and she had missed two free throws a few minutes earlier. She said that she thought about how pythons seem to know the right moment to strike.

“At that moment I was thinking about being a python,” Stewart said.

She calmly swished both throws, and the Liberty controlled the overtime, as nervous fans counted down the seconds.

In the moments after the final buzzer, fans roared and hugged one another, and some danced through the main concourse of the arena, singing Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” Outside on the street, fans were shouting, “Basketball is back in New York, baby.”

Up in the stands, Myrna Morales-Fraser hugged her wife, Patricia Fraser-Morales, and yelled through the din, “We did it. We did it.”

“We’ve been waiting so long, and it feels so good,” said Fraser-Morales, a season-ticket holder since 1999. “I can’t believe we won.”

Since the formation of the league in 1997, the Liberty have been graced with sensational players like Vickie Johnson, Tina Charles and the Hall of Fame guards Becky Hammon and Teresa Weatherspoon, who was at the game and received a loud ovation. But none of the teams featuring those players could grab the ultimate prize, even if they came close several times.

The Liberty reached the finals on five previous occasions, including last year, but lost them all. Until Sunday, the team had the most trips to the finals in league history without having won a title.

With an itinerant past that took them from Madison Square Garden to Newark to White Plains, New York, the club even played some games at Radio City Music Hall. The Liberty finally settled in Brooklyn in 2020 and rapidly built a future champion team, led by Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu and Jones, who was named the most valuable player of the finals.

When the Liberty drafted Ionescu out of the University of Oregon in the 2020 WNBA draft, a transformation of the team began. It won only two of 22 games that year. Then before the 2022 season, the Liberty hired Sandy Brondello, a personable former WNBA player who won the 2014 WNBA championship as head coach of the Phoenix Mercury.

Bringing in former champions proved a winning formula. In 2023, the Liberty signed Stewart, a two-time Most Valuable Player Award winner and a two-time champion with the Seattle Storm.

“This is more personal,” Stewart said. “Because I’m from New York. I’m from upstate, and I came here for a reason.”

Before the finals began, Stewart said that last year’s loss to Las Vegas in the finals had fueled the Liberty’s unrelenting pursuit of this year’s title.

“We have that scar, and that hurt from last year,” she said. “This moment feels different, and we’ll be ready.”

Stewart and her teammates backed it up, and they did for New York area basketball what Weatherspoon and Charles, Patrick Ewing and Bernard King, Jason Kidd and Kevin Durant never could.

They made a New York basketball team into champions.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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