{"id":30444,"date":"2025-07-23T05:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T05:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/30444\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T05:00:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T05:00:09","slug":"jonquel-jones-puts-up-18-to-lead-liberty-over-fever-in-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/30444\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonquel Jones puts up 18 to lead Liberty over Fever in return"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK — During theLiberty<\/a>‘s lineup announcement Tuesday night, one name brought the Barclays Center crowd to its feet: Jonquel Jones<\/a>. She held up a heart to the crowd.<\/p>\n

In the words of coach Sandy Brondello: “It’s a happy day. JJ’s back.”<\/p>\n

The Liberty star center returned to the court in New York’s 98-84 win<\/a> over theFever<\/a>on Tuesday night. Jones, last season’s WNBA Finals MVP, was playing for the first time since June 19 because of an ankle injury and scored a team-high 18 points.<\/p>\n

“It felt great to be back out there,” Jones said after the game. “Obviously, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the court, but my teammates have held it down while I was out, and everybody was excited for me to be back in. And I was just as excited.”<\/p>\n

Jones, the Liberty’s third-highest scorer, has averaged 12.1 points, 9.6 rebounds and 2.3 assists this season, while shooting 43.8% from behind the arc. New York struggled in her absence, going 5-4 after starting the season 9-0. The Liberty are undefeated with Jones on the court.<\/p>\n

It has been a touch-and-go season for Jones so far. She has been limited to just 10 games this season, initially injuring her ankle in early June and taking a brief absence before returning and aggravating the injury.br\/]<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2025 ESPN Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK — During theLiberty‘s lineup announcement Tuesday night, one name brought the Barclays Center crowd to its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[25689,352,25688,25687,436,3,99,434],"class_list":["post-30444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-25689","tag-espn","tag-espnw","tag-jones-jonquel","tag-new-york-liberty","tag-news","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30444","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=30444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}