Betnijah Laney-Hamilton dancing on a ’90s-themed set with both Ellie the Elephant and Maddie the Dog is symbolic of what the 2026 New York Liberty season could be: a successful partnership of the familiar and the new.
The scene happened in a promotional video with one of the team’s older but still appreciated theme songs, “Gotta Get Up,” playing as Laney-Hamilton, both mascots and a quintet of dancers grooved and posed in a different outfits honoring the Liberty’s original colors. The Elephant and Laney-Hamilton were wearing the new Liberty court origins jersey.
The jersey itself isn’t really new. Rather, it’s a refreshed take that combines the familiar with the new. It’s an updated version of the jersey that Rebecca Lobo and Teresa Weatherspoon wore in the franchise’s first seasons.
The difference is that the seafoam on the new jersey’s edges is brighter and bolder than the softer teal of the original jersey. Those distinctions could also be said about the Liberty’s public perception as a franchise. Since the mid-2020s, the franchise has emerged as a cultural institution that stands out rather than just exists.
Laney-Hamilton has always wanted these original colors and designs baked into the Liberty’s aesthetic, but it simply wasn’t time. This version of New York Liberty needed an identity of their own, and seafoam, black and white have been their staple colors (along with a larger-than-life personality from their mascot, too). The WNBA’s 30th season is more the time for a collaboration like this to happen. So far, the aesthetics have all fit together seamlessly — and even made filming easy.
“Honestly we were like a one-take wonder,” Laney-Hamilton told reporters about how the video and the dancing that accompanied it. “I’m not even going to lie to you. We just got out there and did it.”
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This scene is symbolic for what could happen on the court. Can the Liberty take a lot of familiar and mix it with some new to find their franchise’s second championship in three seasons? This is definitely both the formula and the goal after a 2025 season where underperformance happened across the board. It wasn’t just the players on the roster, the coaching staff and the front office that felt the repercussions of everything they gave to the 2024 championship season. Even Ellie the Elephant felt the championship hangover at times, appearing noticeably gassed.
Once it all cascaded down into the Liberty not playing October basketball for the third season in a row, the front office wrote a letter to fans that it was going to spend each day following its 2025 first-round exit to the Phoenix Mercury “working to get back to the top.” That’s the place the franchise believes it belongs.
Here’s how some of that work has manifested itself since the letter was written and title-winning coach Sandy Brondello and her staff were fired.
The new: Chris DeMarco’s approach
What headlines the new for the Liberty in 2026 is head coach Chris DeMarco, an NBA veteran who helped build the Golden State Warriors dynasty of the mid-2010s into the early 2020s.
DeMarco, who has never coached in the WNBA, is bringing an offensive and defensive system to the Liberty that returners have called “completely different” from what was installed by Brondello and her staff in the years prior.
While DeMarco hasn’t provided the most forthcoming answers on how exactly this is “completely different” from what Brondello and her staff taught, some of the players in training camp have pulled back the curtain a bit more. Rebecca Allen, a returner to the franchise who has been a part of now three different iterations of the Liberty, alluded to a “family style” offense where there is a lot of off ball cutting and ball movement, which isn’t all that different than what Brondello and her staff tried to establish over the years.
“I saw at the start there you go back to those habits where you start playing just that one on one, and it gets stagnant, but then eventually we played our way out of it,” Allen said reflecting upon the Liberty’s 109-91 preseason loss to the Indiana Fever. “I think that’s what’s really cool about that, is then you started seeing those back door cuts along the baseline. You saw the 45 cuts. You saw those, we’re calling it a wheel action.”
The “wheel action” in particular is something that does come right from the NBA, which astutely was picked up by Lucas Kaplan. Some of the terminology and methodology might be different in DeMarco’s new style, but cutting, spacing and positional versatility were all part of what Brondello implemented in New York.
The pro basketball cliché “positionless basketball” isn’t just overused, it’s also not exactly accurate in the Liberty’s case — both under Brondello and now under DeMarco. Positions exist, but it’s not always going to be the typical player archetypes playing those positions. Players will be playing positions, but maybe not the positions commonly in accordance with their size.
DeMarco admitted this to reporters during training camp. “We need ball movement and player movement, and anybody can bring the ball up, anybody can play pick and roll. And I don’t like calling it positionless, because it’s really not, like we still have specifics to it.”
While there are some different wrinkles thrown into basketball that aims to accomplish similar goals from the team’s past, the most striking difference in DeMarco’s approach is how he has taught his system.
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Sabrina Ionescu emphasized that there’s a clarity and simplicity during training camp, while also explaining during the team’s first preseason game that the Liberty only really have put in one play.
“There’s not really any grey area,” Ionescu said on April 21. “It’s very like black and white. You understand where you have to be on the offensive side of the ball at all times, and you know where your teammates supposed to be. You know where the posts are supposed to be, even if it’s not your position. And he’s able to really, like paint that picture very clear for us to just understand. Like, this is what you need to be doing offensively, and this is where you need to be. And there’s not really this, second guessing.”
This is all a reference to some of the confusion from the 2025 season, especially the large playbooks that Brondello would operate with — something that she has since admitted to as something she needs to get better at. But isn’t confusion a rational result of when there is disconnect between the coaching staff and front office? Irreconcilable differences can impact a team in similar ways that they sometimes do a household.
Breanna Stewart read into some of these comments and addressed reflections from 2025 season herself. She phrased what she had to say very carefully, as she too believes that misfortunes of 2025 weren’t the fault of one individual, regardless of the narrative. She wanted to make sure her comments had “no shade.”
“I think that reading and reacting is hard,” Stewart said. “So if a player needs to read and react, and all five need to do that, there’s going to be confusion, because if one person hesitates, then everyone else will hesitate behind. So that’s why there would be confusion, because in our offense previously, it’s more like, if this person’s is going to read their defender and make this cut, which is the right cut, but if they do it a second late, then the person behind waiting to fill is going to be a second late. It’s it’s kind of more calculated now as like, this is what we’re going to do, until we build that foundation, and then from there it will read and react.”
Stewart said these issues weren’t prevalent during the team’s 2024 season because the team was often in a flow state. Of course, it also helps that the team’s big three in Ionescu, Stewart and Jonquel Jones played together far more than the 234 minutes they were on the floor together in 2025.
“So we had a lot of changes between our championship to our 2025 season, and trying to kind of course correct and create that flow state again very quickly, just doesn’t work,” she said.
To Liberty general manager Jonathan Kolb, the takeaway has been trying to make sure the Liberty players aren’t as overwhelmed as they were in previous seasons, especially when new additions came into the fold mid-training camp or sometimes mid-season (like Emma Meesseman last year).
While Leonie Fiebich and and new front court addition Raquel Carrera might not join the team until after the Spanish league finals end on May 17, Marine Johannès and new french guard Pauline Astier joined training camp practices officially during the second week of camp.
“I think what happens is the deck can get really cluttered, and you can become like a master of none,” Kolb said. “And so for us, it was just being really intentional. And I think you’ve seen the word simplicity, you’ve seen the words clarity. That is what we talked about.”
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The familiar: Precise roster construction
A common refrain on the internet during the sleepless couple of days that were WNBA free agency was this question of: how are the Liberty managing their salary cap with so much talent? How is Kolb doing this?
This was the narrative back in 2023 when the team was able to trade for Jones, sign Stewart and sign Courtney Vandersloot and didn’t have to give up a ton of assets to do so.
While Kolb had confidence that the Liberty’s big three in Jones, Stewart and Ionescu were all committed to the franchise long term, a new CBA with more money available could have changed those calculations. But the trio signed on through 2028 for $1.19 million each — the regular maximum salary, not the $1.4 million supermax. Jones explained the big three’s commitment to the organization, and might have unintentionally referenced a Jack Johnson song while doing so.
“I think all of us have had to sacrifice and, you know, just put the team before ourselves,” she said. “Obviously, I don’t think we get to where we were, win a championship without that in 2024. Unfortunately, last year, I feel like we had so many injuries, we couldn’t really, kind of like hit the ground running and really get our rhythm, but I don’t know. I just feel like it’s always been about that with us three, we understand that we’re better when we’re together.”
Besides re-signing the big three, the Liberty also found creative ways to sign players they either had exclusive rights to or could bring over under cost efficient contracts due to their years of service. This included signing Han Xu and Johannès for $277,500 each and even Laney-Hamilton, whose $400,000 deal is a bargain especially if she has a bounce back year following multiple injuries since 2024. And not to mention other potential bench contributors in Carrerra and Astier, overseas veterans who will be WNBA rookies and make $270,000 each.
Kolb’s roster construction in 2026 was done with much more intention and injury-proofing than the 2025 roster, which was constructed based on a lot of assumptions.
Allowing for Kayla Thornton to be picked up in the expansion draft assumed that the smaller Rebekah Gardner would be able to fill her position on the roster. Just because two players play similar positions doesn’t mean they can play the same role. That was something the Liberty learned the hard way last season.
And trading for Natasha Cloud as theoretical replacement for Laney-Hamilton only reinforced how much of a unique player Laney-Hamilton is.
The idea in 2026 is Jones won’t have to worry about not having a center who can come in and spare her some minutes with Han and potentially Carrera. When Fiebich arrives, both she and Laney-Hamilton won’t have to overburden themselves.
“We were super intentional about that,” Kolb said. [Laney-Hammilton] put in so much work over the last year to get back. I mean, she’s been in the gym every single day. But we also don’t want to put too much pressure on her. We want her to get to the state that she’s used to being at on her own timeline, and don’t want to pressure her, but she’s been amazing, and so I think now that [Laney-Hamilton] doesn’t have to do everything, I think that’s the biggest thing. But also she’s capable of that, and she’s gonna have the opportunity to go to the other questions earlier about her offense, she’s gonna have opportunities in this offense to punish mismatches, do what she does best in that area, but it’s not going to be the default. It doesn’t need to be, and I think for her, that’s gonna help her go through a season healthy, finish the season healthy which is what we all want.”
Oh, and don’t forget: Satou Sabally is now on this roster. So, too, is Allen. Both are long whings who can make sure Laney-Hamilton and Fiebich won’t have to put the weight of guarding tough matchups and creating offense on their shoulders alone.
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Can the Liberty get back to the top?
There’s a lot of new and familiar. It’s not just about DeMarco and Kolb’s roster building skills, but also about the roster itself. Allen and Han returning to New York could be viewed as nostalgic.
But also, can a new approach take hold in New York — one where the Liberty don’t feel pressured to go 9-0 in May or win the Commissioner’s Cup in June? How is pressure for this team properly scaled where players don’t get too frustrated early, but also don’t get complacent during the process?
“There is a learning curve with with our team, because of new offensive and defensive schemes and things like that, and just like a kind of a reset,” Stewart said about this balance. “There’s still pressure because this is New York, because we are the Liberty, and people still want to beat us because of what we have and who we have here. And embracing that and really knowing that every single time, like we’re not just gonna not care about May, just just because we have new concepts.”
Still, the margin for error for this team is wider than it will be in September and October, so a few bumps in the road shouldn’t be cause for panic. But in order to get to the playoffs and thrive, this team will have to embrace the familiar and the new and take the time to experiment and determine what can work and what is more theoretical.
An example of this is the Liberty’s potential for an even larger lineup than they’ve had. The lineup of Jones, Stewart, Fiebich, Ionescu and Nyara Sabally helped them win Game 5 of the 2024 WNBA Finals. Imagine that group but with 6’11” Han instead of Nyara?
Jones looks forward to figuring that out and refining it. She thought about those possibilities when waiting to come into the Liberty’s preseason game against the Fever. Caitlin Clark was too intrigued, asking Jones all about it.
“Man, that big lineup for you guys is massive,” she told Jones.
“Once we get more comfortable with it, I think it can be really good for us,” Jones replied with a smile.
Getting comfortable will be paramount in the Liberty’s journey to getting back on top. A championship win during the league’s 30th season would represent a successful partnership of not only the new but the familiar, too.
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