{"id":166553,"date":"2025-09-19T00:45:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T00:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/166553\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T00:45:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T00:45:09","slug":"liberty-must-quickly-recover-from-poor-game-2-performance-vs-mercury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/166553\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberty must quickly recover from poor Game 2 performance vs. Mercury"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Liberty\u2019s mission to successfully defend their WNBA title was in good shape on Sunday night. Today it is in peril. <\/p>\n

They can only look in the mirror to assign blame for the change in circumstances. With the opportunity to win their best-of-three first-round playoff series against Phoenix, they turned in arguably their worst performance of the season Wednesday night at Barclays Center. <\/p>\n

The Mercury were better in virtually every aspect of the game and routed the Liberty, 86-60,\u00a0 to even the series 1-1<\/a>.\u00a0The teams will play the deciding Game 3 at PHX Arena on Friday at 9 p.m. <\/p>\n

Phoenix broke away from what had been a tie game at the end of the first quarter and opened a 19-point lead in the second. The Liberty never got back into the game, trailing by 31 with 6:09 left when coach Sandy Brondello pulled all of the regulars. <\/p>\n

After shooting 10-for-19 from the floor in the first quarter, the Liberty went 5:46 of the second quarter without making a field goal and 6:25 of the third quarter without one to finish at 30% shooting for the night. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey took it to another level and we didn\u2019t,\u201d Brondello said. <\/p>\n

The Liberty also committed 15 turnovers that Phoenix turned into 25 points. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey came in and they embarrassed us on our home court,\u201d Breanna Stewart said she told the team. \u201cNow we have to go back there for Game 3 \u2014 winner-take-all. If we\u2019re not ready for that, then we shouldn\u2019t be here.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIn the first quarter, they kind of let us play our game a little bit,\u201d said Emma Meesseman<\/a>,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0who was the Liberty\u2019s only double-figures scorer with 11 points. \u201cThen they just turned it up and they were way more aggressive [and] physical and we were just not there. We kind of collapsed starting from that [second] quarter. We were just not able to recover from that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Stewart suffered a left knee MCL sprain in the final minutes of the Liberty\u2019s Game 1 overtime win. \u00a0 \u00a0 She was back in the starting lineup Wednesday night<\/a>,\u00a0 \u00a0but was not the player she has been. The team\u2019s leading scorer this season with an 18.3-point average, she had six points and shot 2-for-6 in 20 minutes. <\/p>\n

She said, \u201cI just wasn\u2019t where I wanted to be today and I have 48 hours to figure it out.\u201d <\/p>\n

However, Stewart is not where the blame lies for the surprisingly poor performance. This was a global meltdown. <\/p>\n

Sabrina Ionescu had nine points and shot 3-for-13, including 1-for-8 on three-pointers. Natasha Cloud scored eight points (2-for-5) and Jonquel Jones had seven (3-for-9). Add in Leonie Fiebich going without a field goal and the starting five went 10-for-38 (26%). <\/p>\n

Asked about Stewart\u2019s performance, Jones replied, \u201cIt\u2019s not on her. All of us have to kind of step our game up, step our defense up, step our offense up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Roger<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Liberty\u2019s mission to successfully defend their WNBA title was in good shape on Sunday night. Today it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":166554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[436,99,434,1765],"class_list":["post-166553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-new-york-liberty","tag-sports","tag-wnba","tag-womens-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}