Katie Barnes<\/a>, Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello said that Stewart will be a “game-time decision” for Game 2 after suffering a knee injury in Game 1 on Sunday.<\/p>\nStewart played 40 minutes in Sunday’s postseason opener and recorded 18 points, six rebounds, four assists and two steals to help lead the Liberty to a 76-69 win in overtime to take a 1-0 lead in the best-of-three series. Natasha Cloud led New York with 23 points, while Sabrina Ionescu added 16 points.<\/p>\n
Barnes noted that Stewart was in attendance at Tuesday’s practice but didn’t participate. She was seen wearing a gray compression sleeve on her left leg and she reportedly walked without a limp.<\/p>\n
“She’s tough,” Brondello said of Stewart. “I think one of her superpowers is her mental toughness, so if she’s able to go, she’ll go.”<\/p>\n
Stewart appeared in 31 games for the 27-17 Liberty this season and led the team with 18.3 points, 1.4 steals and 1.4 blocks while also adding 6.5 rebounds and 3.5 assists. Still, Ionescu said the team knows how to handle the absence of key players and will be prepared for Wednesday’s matchup regardless of whether the two-time WNBA MVP is available.<\/p>\n
“The same, like we’ve approached every game this year,” Ionescu said. “It’s nothing new to us, to be completely honest. We’re well-equipped. I think the regular season really prepared us for this moment, and we’ve got to control the things that we can and go out there and win on our home court.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The defending champion New York Liberty are facing the possibility of being without one of their best players…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":{"0":"post-149893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}