An original franchise when the WNBA launched in 1997, the star-crossed Liberty are still chasing their first title.
Michael Voepel is a senior writer who covers the WNBA, women's college basketball and other college sports. Voepel began covering women's basketball in 1984, and has been with ESPN since 1996.
After losing in the 2002 Finals, New York didn't return to the championship series until last year, after a two-decade gap. ESPN spoke to Weatherspoon, other current and former Liberty players, executives and owners, plus players and coaches around the league about New York's history, and why this season might be different.; a championship coach in Sandy Brondello; and the WNBA's most glamorous mascot, Ellie the Elephant, the Liberty are again chasing their long-awaited happy ending.
Then-Liberty GM Carol Blazejowski said the Liberty's original logo was selected after it"fell out of the jacket pocket of one of those big portfolios. ... It had the color green in it. It was perfect." The Liberty played at Madison Square Garden, and the atmosphere for their home games was a hallmark of the WNBA's early days."It was just an aura, something about that arena and its history and just the way it looked when you walked in.
Teresa Weatherspoon's half-court heave at the buzzer won Game 2 of the 1999 WNBA Finals. But what other team's most iconic moment comes from a series it lost? Houston clinched the title the following day. "If you looked at pure talent, we maybe didn't have as much as some other teams. We did have terrific chemistry. But the league was good, it was really just so hard to win."
The Connecticut Sun selected New York native Tina Charles with the No. 1 pick in 2010. She played four seasons there, then was trade to New York, where she played for six seasons. In 2015, Isiah Thomas controversially was appointed Liberty president despite his involvement in a sexual harassment lawsuit the Knicks had lost while he was the team's president. Still, the Liberty had the league's best record and advanced for the eighth time to the East finals.
During the 2011, 2012 and 2013 seasons, the Liberty were displaced from the Garden while it was being renovated, and played at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. Then, while waiting for new ownership, the Liberty were exiled in 2018 and 2019 to the Westchester County Center, which was 90 years old and held fewer than 3,000 fans. The Liberty went from averaging nearly 10,000 fans per home game in 2017 to 2,239 in 2019.
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