{"id":611613,"date":"2026-04-18T03:53:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T03:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/611613\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T03:53:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T03:53:11","slug":"breanna-stewart-announces-new-max-liberty-contract-ahead-of-2026-wnba-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/611613\/","title":{"rendered":"Breanna Stewart Announces New Max Liberty Contract Ahead of 2026 WNBA Season"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two-time WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart is returning to the New York Liberty.<\/p>\n

According to ESPN’s Michael Voepel and Alexa Philippou<\/a>, Stewart announced on her podcast that she’s agreed to a three-year max contract to return to the Liberty. <\/p>\n

She’ll make $1.19 million in 2026. <\/p>\n

Leaving aside 2019, when she was recovering from an Achilles tear, Stewart had one of the more frustrating seasons in her pro career in 2025. A bone bruise in her right knee forced her to miss 13 games during the regular season, and she fought through a left knee injury<\/a> during New York’s first-round exit at the hands of the Phoenix Mercury.<\/p>\n

The 6’4″ forward wasn’t the offensive force fans have come to expect, either. Her scoring average (18.3 points) was her lowest since her rookie year in 2016, and she set a career low in three-point percentage (24.1).<\/p>\n

Still, Stewie’s reputation preceded her. She was one of the best players in a loaded free-agent class, and pretty much every team in the league would’ve jumped at the chance to sign her.<\/p>\n

Whether Stewart stuck around in the Big Apple was a little less certain.<\/p>\n

The Liberty didn’t have the same sharpness in 2025 that they possessed while winning their first-ever championship a season before.<\/p>\n

Injuries played a role in that. In addition to Stewart, Jonquel Jones was sidelined for 13 games. Two-way star Betnijah Laney-Hamilton missed the entire year due to knee surgery. By the time the playoffs rolled around, head coach Sandy Brondello was using a seven-player rotation.<\/p>\n

Laney-Hamilton’s absence exacerbated the effect of losing Kayla Thornton, who went on to earn her first All-Star nod, in the Golden State Valkyries’ expansion draft.<\/p>\n

Still, an opening-round defeat to Phoenix spoke for itself. The Big Three of Stewart, Jones and Sabrina Ionescu didn’t play as well as they needed, and general manager Jonathan Kolb assembled a supporting cast that wasn’t good enough to fill in the gaps.<\/p>\n

The situation wasn’t too dissimilar to Stewart’s 2022 season with the Seattle Storm.<\/p>\n

That team went 22-14 in the regular season before falling to the Las Vegas Aces in the semifinals. Legendary guard Sue Bird was in her farewell campaign, and Seattle’s all-in approach meant the roster had a lot of other aging vets (Tina Charles, Briann January, Epiphanny Prince and Jantel Lavender) who provided diminishing returns.<\/p>\n

The Storm needed a massive overhaul in order to seriously contend for a title again, and Stewart concluded the grass was greener on the East Coast. She was ultimately proven correct.<\/p>\n

In the end, Stewart concluded the Liberty still put her in the best position to chase a fourth championship.<\/p>\n

Not only is New York running it back with Jones and Ionescu, but it also signed three-time All-Star Satou Sabally. Kolb doesn’t have a lot of cap space left to distribute to the rest of the roster, so depth is going to be a big question here.<\/p>\n

But nobody in the league will have a quartet as good as Stewart, Ionescu, Jones and Sabally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two-time WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart is returning to the New York Liberty. According to ESPN’s Michael Voepel and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":{"0":"post-611613","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\/611613","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=611613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}