Culture
How New York Liberty’s length could be WNBA semifinals key: ‘It looks like an NBA roster’
NEW YORK — The final basket of Breanna Stewart’s 34-point clinic on Sunday to open the WNBA semifinals was never going to be blocked. Las Vegas Aces forward A’ja Wilson tried — elevating as high as she could as the seconds ticked down on both the shot and game clock — but the New York Liberty star skied over Wilson’s outstretched arms.
With just over a minute remaining in New York’s eventual 87-77 victory, Stewart elevated for a runner. A step in front of the free-throw line, she leaped, flicked the basketball with her right hand and watched it carom off the backboard and drop into the hoop.
Stewart ran back down the floor emphatically nodding her head after her basket served as a delightful dagger enjoyed by the sellout Barclays Center crowd of more than 14,000 fans.
New York puts the dagger in Game 1 😤
Stewie floater.
Jonquel MONSTER block.#WNBAPlayoffs presented by @Google pic.twitter.com/TuFCI6x75T— WNBA (@WNBA) September 29, 2024
What happened next wasn’t surprising either. Stewart deflected a layup by Aces guard Kelsey Plum.
Stewart’s arms were everywhere on Sunday — during that late-game sequence, on numerous New York offensive possessions in which she knocked down nearly unguardable mid-range jumpers, on defensive switches and when her arms got into passing lanes. “Sometimes the ball might be out of reach, but (I’m) still able to make a play,” Stewart said.
Plum might have scored 24 points to lead Las Vegas, but she was only focused on the loss. “That’s the only thing that I really see,” she said.
Sunday’s result was largely because of another L-word: Length.
That New York’s length was impactful wasn’t exactly a surprise. Heading into the series, both teams recognized the other as familiar foes. New York swept its three regular-season meetings against Las Vegas, and, of course, there was history between them last year. The Liberty won the 2023 Commissioner’s Cup over the Aces, and later, more importantly, the Aces defeated the Liberty for the 2023 WNBA championship.
Las Vegas knows what to expect against New York. Nevertheless, before Saturday’s practice, Aces coach Becky Hammon reminded players who they were going up against.
“It looks like an NBA roster,” she said of New York’s length. “It really puts into perspective how big they are and how mobile they are.”
She put the wingspan of each of New York’s starters on a board. Liberty wing Betnijah Laney-Hamilton’s wingspan of 6-foot-3 and 3/4 inches is nearly four inches longer than her 6-foot height. Rookie wing Leonie Fiebich stands 6-4 with a wingspan to match. Center Jonquel Jones, who is 6-6, has a nearly 6-10 wingspan.
Then there is Stewart, the two-time WNBA MVP.
She issued a correction to the Liberty’s media guide, which lists her at 6-10 3/4. “I thought my wingspan was 7-1,” she said, extending her arms in a postgame interview. “We’re going to have to confirm with the New York Liberty to re-measure that.”
The size and mobility played immediate dividends for the Liberty. They constantly switched on defense and scrambled when necessary to close out on open Aces. New York disrupted Las Vegas’ pick-and-roll actions. And when the Aces tried to drive baseline? “It was not good things happening,” Hammon said, adding that New York cut off corner opportunities, too.
Stewart’s wingspan made a difference on offense as well. She scored 20 points in the first half and passed Lisa Leslie for the longest streak of double-digit performances (35) in WNBA postseason history. “She had too many mismatches,” Hammon said. “We were switching guards onto her and (Jones) in the first half, and we’re not supposed to do that. They destroyed us in there. Both the bigs.”
Jones finished with 13 points and 12 rebounds. And though Fiebich added only 6 points, she was plus-19 in 35 minutes, leading New York in plus/minus for the third consecutive playoff game. Fiebich is still new to the Liberty’s starting lineup. Before New York’s first-round series last week against the Atlanta Dream, Liberty coach Sandy Brondello started her and moved Courtney Vandersloot to the bench. Brondello said she wanted two playmakers on the floor at all times. But the move had other benefits: Because of Fiebich’s size, strength and length, New York can switch almost any screen defensively. (Sunday’s starters had a plus-85.2 defensive rating in the regular season.)
Fiebich opened the series against the Aces guarding Plum. Afterward, the 24-year-old German rookie wasn’t pleased with her performance. “I’m such a perfectionist on defense that I didn’t really feel like it was great defense,” Fiebich said.
Still, Fiebich repeatedly disrupted other Aces when scrambling around the floor. Most notably, Aces guard Chelsea Gray was hounded by Fiebich at the end of the third quarter and was unable to get a shot off.
Afterward, Vandersloot thought back to one of her earliest memories of Fiebich, seeing her switch onto a center in an early-season contest. “It’s not really a mismatch,” Vandersloot said she thought to herself. “What a luxury that is to have her be able to guard the smallest girl on the floor and then switch out onto somebody without having to get into rotations.”
Of course, the greatest luxury of all for New York is Stewart, who laughed afterward about how hard it is to find long sleeves that fit.
There is an old adage in basketball: You can’t teach height. At this point in the playoffs, you can’t teach length either. Instead, Hammon and her staff will be tasked with trying to counteract New York defenders’ arms. A possible solution?
“You gotta spread them out,” Hammon said. “You gotta get to space. You have to space, and the ball has to move. If the ball doesn’t move, and we grab it and we analyze, their length becomes an issue again because everybody recovers back to their own.”
In theory, Las Vegas knew what was coming on Sunday as well. Aces guard Jackie Young said she knew that New York’s length would affect shots and passing lanes. Gray said it forces players into higher release points on their shots. “That poses a challenge at both ends,” Gray said.
And it did. Gray scored only 4 points on 2-of-7 shooting.
Game 2 is Tuesday evening in New York. Hammon called it “do-or-die.” But at least for one afternoon, the two-time defending champion Aces couldn’t stop what they knew was coming.
New York fans inside Barclays Center waved their arms (and white towels) in delight as the final seconds ticked off the clock. Liberty arms were all over the imprint of Game 1. “They punched us in the nose,” Hammon said. “No doubt about it.”
(Photo of Breanna Stewart: Evan Yu / NBAE via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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