NEW YORK— With 11.6 left in the fourth quarter, the raucous Barclays Center crowd was chanting the famous guitar riff from “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes in unison. New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu had just drained a free throw, her ninth point of 11 in the fourth quarter alone.
Moments later, Las Vegas Aces point guard Chelsea Gray attempted to inbound the ball. Ionescu was jumping up and down trying to deflect her pass while Betnijah Laney-Hamilton and Leonie Fiebich aimed to keep Las Vegas guards Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young and Tiffany Hayes in check. Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones were sandwiching A’ja Wilson.
Fiebich leaned toward Plum when Gray passed the ball toward her teammate, and Fiebich’s pressure on Plum forced the ball out of bounds. Aces ball the officials indicated, but the crowd egged head coach Sandy Brondello to challenge the call on the floor. Following Brondello’s second successful challenge, the score stayed at 84-82 New York and the Liberty got the ball back with 10.5 seconds left.
New York wouldn’t have been in this position to begin, and wouldn’t have won the game 88-84 to jump out to a 2-0 series lead if it wasn’t for a trio of separate player performances throughout critical moments across all four quarters.
Brondello was put in a conundrum during a Saturday practice prior to the beginning of the semifinals. She was asked to definitively nail down a player who would serve as the team’s X factor. An X factor’s job is to alter a game’s momentum and make winning plays down the stretch. An X factor has qualities that will have a notable influence on the outcome of the series.
She couldn’t definitively give an answer. While the Liberty have a trio of franchise players in Ionescu, Stewart and Jones, the Liberty also have a trio of semifinal X factors from the swing woman Thornton, point guard Vandersloot and combo-wing Laney-Hamilton. While Ionescu was the one who scored around 58% of the Liberty’s 19 fourth-quarter points, the trio of Thornton, Vandersloot and Laney-Hamilton produced an aggregate of 24 total points for the Liberty in the first half. That’s over 50% of New York’s 46 first-half points.
“I would say that we’re really proud of every single individual that came in and stepped up and made big, big plays for us,” Ionescu said during the Liberty’s postgame presser.
But it wasn’t just points for this trio, but instead, there were crucial blocks, momentum-changing rebounds and sharp decision-making from the Liberty’s trio of X factors.
Thornton played with an edge and aggressiveness
While Brondello was indecisive when speaking to reporters during that Saturday practice, the first name that came to her mind was Thornton’s as the Liberty’s 3-and-D specialist has built a career on using her athleticism and high energy style of play to help her team win.
Thornton told The Next at shootaround on Tuesday morning that Brondello specifically challenged her to emerge as an X factor in this series. Thornton believed her Game 1 performance didn’t include enough of the energy that she knew she could give. She fixed that in a meaningful way in Game 2, and owned the second quarter.
She scored eight points in the second, mostly on plays where she outran the Las Vegas Aces defense in transition and took advantage of her size and strength when Plum was matched up on her. Thornton’s aggressiveness and willingness to attack the Aces’ closeouts paid dividends and drove Las Vegas coach Becky Hammon nuts. The Aces head coach wailed at her team for giving up the looks they did to Thornton.
The Liberty even ran a play for her to take advantage of that Plum matchup and eventually give New York the lead with 6:59 left in the second quarter. Stewart found Thornton in the restricted area and muscled the ball up into the basket.
But aside from the scoring, Thornton was in the right place at the right time defensively. She applied meaningful pressure on Gray to force her to turn the ball over in the final minute of the first half, and then in the second half of the fourth quarter blocked Gray in the fourth which resulted in a questionable foul call for a play made on the ball.
“I said that to [Thornton] because that’s what she is,” Brondello said postgame. “I thought she could be this X factor in this series, just her physicality, the toughness defensively, we know what she does, but her ability. I said, don’t worry about offense. Offense is going to come, but you impact it with the defense. And everyone has an important role to play and [Thornton] came out tonight and gave us nine big points just by doing all the little effort things.”
Vandersloot understands now that her role doesn’t change off the bench
Vandersloot’s 20 minutes off the bench on Tuesday night included timely scoring, anticipatory rebounds, a steal and a block at moments when the Liberty needed a stop.
When she entered the game for Laney-Hamilton with under five minutes left in the first quarter, Vandersloot changed the pace. She pushed the ball in transition and snaked through the open driving lanes she could find between different Aces players while using a screen or two to propel her to the rim. She scored eight of the Liberty’s 22 first-quarter points and allowed New York to hang within two possessions of the Aces after the first 10 minutes of regulation.
Vandersloot told reporters that she felt confident in being more aggressive and seeking out places to leave her mark on the game. After playing four games off the bench, the 5-time All-Star has realized that her role isn’t really that different after all. All that changes is when she enters the game.
“I think it was just a little bit of like experience of doing that a couple of times,” Vandersloot told reporters postgame. “Talking to you guys, it’s like, we make this big deal out of it. I’m not like blaming you guys. We do it, and then at the end of the day, it’s just, it’s the same thing. I get in there and so I think just doing it honestly.”
While most of Vandersloot’s scoring came in the first half, she had a momentum-shifting two-way sequence in the final minute of the third quarter. New York was struggling to score in the quartercourt court and off another Liberty turnover, Vandersloot ran back on the other end to be there right on time to block Young and create a turnover for her team.
On the other end of the floor moments later, Vandersloot had the confidence to take and make a wide-open three on a pass from Jones. Plum came to double Jones and that gave Vandersloot just enough time to get her shot off. Vandersloot’s effort, activity and aggression put the Liberty up by nine with 59 seconds left in the third quarter.
Toward the end of the fourth quarter, Brondello used both Vandersloot and Laney-Hamilton interchangeably for specific possessions. If the Liberty were inbounding the ball, Vandersloot was in and would take care of it and employ her point guard poise to do so. If the Liberty were about to have to be on defense following New York free throws, Laney-Hamilton then checked back in to apply as much pressure as she could.
Laney-Hamilton’s pride and two-way presence mattered
Speaking of Laney-Hamilton, while there continue to be questions about how healthy she is due to the five-minute spurts she’s been playing for the Liberty, she found a way to provide more of a two-way punch on Tuesday evening.
She scored the first Liberty bucket of the game on an open three. In Game 1, she hesitated even when closeouts weren’t near. In the first quarter, she hit two threes, including another one with Gray’s hand in her face. In the second, she maneuvered Young in the post and scored two feet away from the basket. While Laney-Hamilton began seeing the ball go in the basket as Brondello predicted she would pregame, she still wasn’t as efficient finishing with just 3-for-9 shooting.
While the box score didn’t tell Laney-Hamilton’s complete story on Tuesday night, the eye test did. There were multiple individual Las Vegas offensive possessions when she was tasked with flying around between a trio of Aces guards in Young, Plum and Gray. Each player Laney-Hamilton had to guard within seconds of each other had a different modus operandi and moved differently on the floor.
“She pressures full court, and is our point of attack defense, and that is so important for us,” Liberty assistant coach Zach O’Brien told The Next Tuesday morning. “Then her ability to switch on to other players defensively and in the moment, understand what it takes to go from guarding Chelsea Gray to guarding Kelsey Plum, and how everything just kind of shifts in an instant, and to be able to process all of that within a moment, is always very impressive when it comes to [Laney-Hamilton].”
How does she just shift in an instant and adapt so quickly? I asked her, and before I could even finish my question, she had her answer. “Pride,” she said. “Being able to defend anything.”
This pride that Laney-Hamilton emphasized is how she has been approaching this series while not at her most fresh and healthy was appreciated by those sitting courtside in Barclays Center on Tuesday evening.
After the final buzzer went off, Laney-Hamilton found Clara Wu Tsai and the Liberty’s owner gave her a squeeze that lasted close to five seconds. Robin Roberts and Gayle King made sure to say something to the Liberty’s wing stopper before she walked back to the locker room. Then Alicia Keys crept back into the Liberty’s locker room with a message for the team.
“Thank you for all of that great energy out there,” she told the team. “For giving New York your all.” That’s also the role of an X factor, and a defining trait of the Liberty’s trio of impact players.
