As Jonquel Jones returns, will the New York Liberty get their groove back?

Moments later she was asked about team morale and expressed she and her teammates weren’t pointing fingers after the team had lost its sixth game of the season. She explained that the Liberty needed to find ways to get wins. Then she was asked, point blank, why winning games had become so difficult after the team had lost three of their last five games. That question lit a fire in Ionescu.

“Because we’ve been down three starters in the last Seattle game, and then two starters for these, all these entire games like these are huge pieces of offenses and there’s no way around it,” she answered. “You know, you can say that it doesn’t affect the team, or just the next man up, but at the end of the day, we’re missing our and Finals MVP [Jonquel Jones], we’re missing Leo[nie] Fiebich for all these games. It’s hard.

“People have to step up in positions and play, and there’s great teams in this league. It’s not just going to be easy when you’re down that many starters to just show up and we win because we’re the New York Liberty. You’re going to have to find a way to win and dig really deep.”

To quiet the noise on that Sunday afternoon, Ionescu uttered that she and her team were “going to be just fine,” especially since all of this adversity was thrown the team’s way in the first half of the season rather than the second.

New York is getting significantly closer to “just fine” after Jonquel Jones told reporters on Tuesday that she will return for the first Liberty game following the All-Star break on July 22 against the Indiana Fever.

This is a team that started 2025 9-0, looking almost unstoppable and even better than they were during their 2024 championship season. New acquisition Natasha Cloud had won an Eastern Conference player of the week, and her fit into her role on the Liberty looked almost seamless.

But then the Liberty were hit with the injury and absence bug in ways they previously hadn’t been since MVPs Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones came to New York. Jones sprained her right ankle for the first time on June 5 against the Washington Mystics and then re-tweaked it just two weeks later against the Phoenix Mercury.

At around the same time, New York had to go a week and a half without defensive stalwart, connector and 50% three-point shooter Fiebich, who was away at EuroBasket.

Then Ionescu dealt with a neck injury that kept her out of one game, and as a result she was not herself for the majority of the Liberty’s weeklong trip at the end of June. And while all of this was going on, Nyara Sabally continued to deal with right knee issues. She was sidelined from practicing with the team after they returned from their late June roadtrip and only has begun to look like herself in the team’s two most recent games against the Las Vegas Aces and the Atlanta Dream.

Then Fiebich collided into Isabelle Harrison‘s knee while trying to go for a rebound against the Storm on July 6, and then moments later Cloud left the game with a left hip injury. Both were out against the Las Vegas Aces, which left the Liberty with only nine players able to suit up on July 8.

New York has played this out cautiously. They’ve held players out of games to prevent recurring injuries. This includes Jones, who began individual workouts less than two weeks after the Liberty announced that she’d miss 4-to-6 weeks. Jones participated in her first bit of 5-on-5 work prior to the Liberty’s July 13 matchup against the Dream, and she told reporters ten days ago that she didn’t want to cut corners when it came to her return to the court. This is a strategy New York has implemented with most players that have appeared on their injury report this season.

The last time Jones wasn’t at full strength, in 2023, the team was still able to win games. But that was a different time. Breanna Stewart put on a herculean regular season performance that yielded her a second MVP, but also resulted in her not having enough in the tank during the WNBA Finals, a time when the Liberty needed her the most.

This was before Stewart changed her shot profile and used the space that Jones creates to hunt the most high percentage shots she can. For context, Stewart’s effective field goal percentage has been 12% worse with Jones off the floor this season. Stewart’s two-point field goal percentage has been 20% worse without Jones on the floor playing. Those numbers aren’t coincidental, but rather illustrate why everything the Liberty does on both ends is so reliant upon Jones’ one-of-one skillset.

The Liberty have six losses as of July 15. They lost eight times in all of 2024. Besides having a fully healthy team, which has been tough to come by in 2025, what have all of these absences revealed about where this team is heading into the midpoint of the season?

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When the Liberty have won games this season, they’ve averaged 22.2 assists, and when they’ve lost, that number shrivels to 18.8. That’s an over 15% decrease. Against the Seattle Storm on July 6 and during the team’s week long road trip, the offense would stagnate. Players would either stay spaced out on the perimeter or would cluster and linger inside the paint in the half court sets.

Liberty assistant coach and offensive coordinator Sonia Raman noticed a hesitancy among the team of knowing when to cut. The Liberty’s motion offense is often at its best when players are creating space for one another on and off the ball. This hesitancy too is linked to Jones’ absence.

“When [Jones] has the ball, I think people just instinctively know, ‘if I cut, she’s gonna find me,'” Raman told The Next. “She’s got that tall target where she can pass over the top of defenses and just sort of operate as a hub.”

Uncertainty cutting and moving off the ball also led to Ionescu and Stewart’s shot diet’s increasing and their efficiency decreasing. As a result the ball moved less, and the team struggled to trust one another. Brondello noticed this lack of trust and at times questionable energy levels and called one of the Liberty’s culture meetings. The team met the Tuesday morning before they took on the Aces.

Brondello doesn’t use a talking stick to facilitate meetings, but rather opens the floor once she delivers her message. She also makes sure to call upon those who are less comfortable as well.

“I want them to be vulnerable and honest in all of our meetings,” Brondello said. “It allows them to have a bit of a voice. They always have a voice in the locker room, and sometimes I have to encourage them to talk. I have a vibe on this team, so I kind of know what they need when they need it.”

Brondello had been speaking to reporters prior to the Tuesday meeting about how each player needed to give a little bit more than what they are used to. Roles had to change and effort and energy had to be greater.

According to Ionescu, the team realized on Tuesday morning that players couldn’t just expect winning outcomes by playing as if the team was whole. “I think what we really talked about was, at least on my end, was you can’t come out and play the same exact way as you would if we had everyone healthy, right?”

The Liberty couldn’t rest on their laurels, but also, stars like Ionescu and Stewart had to be bought in and trust players like Fiebich, Kennedy Burke, and Marine Johannès to be able to make plays.

Burke she knew she had to play with more intensity, especially on the defensive end. She reminded herself before Tuesday night’s game against the Aces to just look to make a play even if she makes mistakes. Stewart explained that a takeaway from the meeting was the team wants Johannès to just play her game and move how she’s most comfortable moving. Johannès explained that it was important for her to hear this type of feedback from her teammates and coaches. “[Brondello] is always talking to me, to stay like myself and stay aggressive on court,” she said.

Fiebich kept getting nudged by Brondello, and in particular Stewart, to just shoot the ball and look to score more, especially since defenses had been sagging off of her.

“Instead of us all internally focusing on ourselves, how can we focus on someone else?” Stewart said about the results of the meeting. “When things are struggling, we’re losing games, we’re down bodies, people are tired, like, let me focus on uplifting one of my other teammates. And that kind of becomes contagious, and nobody’s immune to needing some confidence and needing some up-lifting.”

The results of this discussion led to Burke’s six steals against the Aces, Fiebich’s regular-season career scoring high against the Dream and clutch shotmaking and effort plays from Johannés when New York needed it the most in both games.

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Against the Dream in particular on Sunday, New York began the game energy-deficient. New York’s post defense allowed Brionna Jones and Brittney Griner to get there looks without much resistance. Without New York’s Jones it looked like another afternoon where the Liberty would give up over 60 paint points once again to the team with a size advantage.

But during halftime, the coaches showed the team film. They implored the players to press up into the Dream guards and take advantage of the fact that the Atlanta post-entry passes often come from when players put the ball above their heads.

New York responded. Harrison stepped up by three-quarter fronting Griner, and Sabally used her length to register four blocks, approximating her injured teammate while Jones watched from the sidelines. Meanwhile, Stewart was all over Allisha Gray, making it impossible for her to move the ball.

“Even though we did struggle in the first half but the second half, it really like turned that switch around,” Burke said to reporters postgame. “Just digging down deep and making sure that we were making it tough for the post players.”

What waiving Marquesha Davis means in the long term

Before the Liberty tipped off against the Dream on Sunday, the team announced that they had waived 2024 11th overall draft pick Marquesha Davis. While Davis had been touted for her athleticism and shot creation, she struggled to make it into the Liberty’s rotation during her second season. Undrafted second year player Jaylyn Sherrod had jumped her in the rotation when the Liberty needed a burst of defensive energy.

Liberty General Manager Jonathan Kolb didn’t just decide to waive Davis at any random time, but rather did so before the midpoint deadline. The midpoint deadline marks when contracts become guaranteed.

Waiving Davis before the midpoint deadline gives New York an extra roster spot as of now, in addition to even more salary cap flexibility than their previous $119,394 of space. An opportunity now opens up for New York to bring a player into the fold that could earn more of Brondello’s trust and fill needs. Does this mean New York could be in play for the Emma Meesseman sweepstakes? That all remains to be seen, but expect New York to be aggressive leading up to the August 7 trade deadline.

Without Davis on the roster at least for now, New York can continue to evaluate what type of player they could bring on to complement their depth. Another option for Davis is rejoining the Liberty, but she would return on a bunch of cheaper seven-day contracts rather than her initial rookie-scale deal for a first round pick if New York decides to bring her back.

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Will the Liberty “be fine”?

The Liberty haven’t been at their best yet, but a team with repeat champion aspirations doesn’t need to peak until the fall. And New York has learned plenty amid its recent struggles, from exactly who they have on their 2025 roster to how those complementary pieces will be able to contribute in the most pivotal moments that lie ahead.

But another detail to pay attention to for the team moving forward is being able to — when their team is whole — earn home court advantage in the playoffs, a major factor in their 2024 title run. As of July 15, the Liberty are a half-game behind Phoenix, and third overall. The Lynx hold the top seed, 3.5 games clear of New York. The top two seeds are guaranteed home-court advantage through at least the first two rounds of the playoffs. The top seed guarantees that if the WNBA Finals goes the distance — five games last year, seven this year — that game will be played on the home court of the top seed (the Liberty experienced this last season.)

If the Liberty reach that moment again, it will mean plenty of wins in the months ahead. But New York will likely look back at the struggles of the past few weeks, too, for lessons that helped get them there.