Welcome to Basketball Insider, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. Expectations are a funny thing in professional sports, something best exhibited by the New York Liberty and the Washington Mystics.
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The Mystics are 19-12. The Liberty are 20-13. Both teams are on extended winning streaks. And yet: the fans and observers around the league are enthusiastic about the D.C. season so far, while Liberty head coach Chris DeMarco is facing postgame questions about getting booed by the Barclays Center faithful.
It’s all a reminder of what I pointed out back in the spring:
The Tsai-era Liberty do not accept mediocrity as an outcome in any element of what they do, with an attitude that does cause some enmity from others around the sport. Depending on who you’re asking, it is either jealousy or a real-time accounting of their trophy case, which still has, for all the star power and the best efforts of Ellie, a single championship parade to show for it.
Essentially all of the team’s actions serve as simultaneously a public acknowledgement that previous heights were not good enough and an elimination of any public safety net. Firing Sandy Brondello, a coach who led the team to a championship in 2024 and a fifth seed in 2025, suggests that anything like a 2025 season revisited isn’t acceptable.
Similarly, moving on from Betnijah Laney-Hamilton after giving her just 285 minutes and five starts in 2026 is an implicit argument that the team feels it can do better by playing Marine Fauthoux more and riding her production into the future, as they signed her to a multi-year deal.
Both decisions carry significant public baggage.
Replacing Brondello with a first-time WNBA head coach in Chris DeMarco isn’t, in a vacuum, an indefensible decision. Far from it. But it means, if Jonathan Kolb is to make that call, he better be right. The growing pains that come with a learning curve in the WNBA cannot be sufficiently problematic to keep the New York Liberty from reaching its championship aspirations.
That might still happen. But right now, the team is checking in beneath the 2025 performance that led to a change. And New York is not in the long-term development mode that the Mystics are. Beyond the record, New York’s net rating is 4.7 so far this season. It was 5.2 in 2025, and that came with significant injuries to all three of Breanna Stewart, Jonquel Jones and Sabrina Ionescu. The trio has logged 449 minutes together already in 2026. In all of 2025? Just 234 minutes.
And perhaps most concerning is that in those 449 minutes in 2026, New York’s net rating is just 0.2. In 2025, Brondello’s staff leveraged those three to a net rating of 21.2. Put simply: if DeMarco and company can’t turn that trio into an elite powerhouse by playoff time, it’ll be difficult for New York to win another championship.
There’s time, just as there is time now to see whether the team’s slow-motion decision to excise Laney-Hamilton will pay off in 2026 or not. She was claimed this past weekend by the Mystics. Considering the way in which Laney-Hamilton’s exile from New York happened — with a lack of public communication, weeks and weeks of fan frustration over seeing a favorite marginalized in the rotation and ultimately a release for no compensation — this is another example of a decision that could turn out to be the right one, but with vastly higher stakes than a typical end-of-roster move.
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Laney-Hamilton concluded her New York career with 3,658 minutes played in a Liberty uniform, 17th in franchise history. That’s more than Sue Wicks, Sophia Witherspoon or Kym Hampton. It also understates how long she’s been a critical part of the franchise’s identity, since she missed all of 2025 due to injury and has played sparingly here in 2026, much to the chagrin of a crowd which has repeatedly called for DeMarco to bring her into the game.
This is how DeMarco explained the chronology to our Jackie Powell:
“We started her at the beginning of the season, she played well. She took some time away from personal reasons. Got back, coming off the bench a little bit, and then she had the injection in the knee. So some games off, and then there’s a third time, we played her in the rotation for a few games, and then she’s out of rotation. So it’s just a tough, tough year all around for her.”
The last part is the one where DeMarco uses the passive voice. And that’s silly. She wasn’t taken out of the rotation by an act of God. The Liberty made the decision that they’d be better without her playing regularly.
And perhaps the Liberty will be right. But Laney-Hamilton ending up in Washington means that not only is there a chance she will prove that decision wrong regularly down the stretch, or even power the Mystics further into the playoffs than the Liberty, there’s every possibility the two teams will meet in the first round. Just two losses separate the No. 3-No. 7 seeds entering Tuesday night’s games, so there are a significant number of outcomes that lead to D.C.-N.Y. in Round 1.
And if that happens, well, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in recent sports history featuring one team with all of the pressure on it. But that’s life for the New York Liberty. Their decisions have exacerbated it. And as I said back in April: they better be right about those calls.
Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Washington Mystics, holds a minority stake in The IX Sports. The IX Sports’ editorial operations are entirely independent of Monumental and all other business partners.
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