Inside Sandy Brondello’s departure from the New York Liberty

The end of the 2025 season, a year when the Liberty underperformed in part because of a season decimated by injuries to their stars, and depth that struggled to fill holes for the these three stars, concluded with a press conference with Kolb on Thursday where he explained his reasoning for not picking up the option on Brondello’s contract. 

Kolb repeatedly returned to a central theme: evolution. He emphasized that the WNBA has evolved dramatically since he hired Brondello — even since he constructed a roster centered around Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu and Jonquel Jones back in 2023.

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“I think that you’re seeing our 3-point attempt rate, our free throw attempt rate dropping as respective to the league,” he said on Thursday. “You look at our our five person starting lineup, and you compare and contrast it to 2024, it’s actually eerily similar when you look at offensive rating, defensive rating and net rating. It was actually better net rating wise and offensive rating wise, but it dropped in ranking offensively, even though we scored more points per possession than just a year ago. And to me, that’s indicative of a changing league.”

Ironically, this point was echoed by Brondello herself back on the first day of training camp.

“Evolution,” she said when asked what the team motto was for 2025. “That’s the key thing. It’s not about repeating. It is about, it’s a hard thing, but we’ve got to evolve. So that’s what we’re focused on. How do we do that, individually, collectively, all of us.”

Ultimately, for Kolb, the evolution wasn’t evident. He two noted that his decision wasn’t “reactive” based on the results of the season but instead because he felt like the 2025 team regressed.

Evaluating that concept for the Liberty was virtually independent of results. Kolb said Thursday that if the Liberty hadn’t won Game 5 of the 2024 WNBA Finals, he was considering firing Brondello just a year ago after what would have been two straight WNBA Finals appearances.

All of which leads to this key question as New York hires a new coach: how much is being at the top of the WNBA — something that Kolb stated is a goal always for the Liberty — not about winning? There was a letter written to fans by the team’s leaders following the Liberty’s first-round exit that very much states that the front office is going to work as hard as they can daily “to get back to the top,” the place where the franchise believes it belongs. 

Was winning a 2025 title the only way that Brondello’s job would have been saved this season? Would it have even been enough?

While the Liberty won the 2024 championship fair and square, it happened via a lot of luck and chance. As Lucas Kaplan wrote, the Liberty “didn’t silence their ghosts” in 2024. 

There were moments in 2023, 2024 and most often in 2025 when the Liberty played below their talent level, and the target was on Brondello’s back to make sure that this didn’t happen in the year following the championship season. But it did. And it happened in a much more visible way, without being obscured by the results themselves.

But the Liberty’s 2025 season included moments when Brondello and her staff weren’t necessarily set up for success. Brondello, with the help of new assistant Sonia Raman, implemented a new NBA-style five-out offense and defense which was heavily reliant around the strengths of Breanna Stewart, the most versatile player in the WNBA. 

This system made sure that Stewart had enough space to drive, accelerate and decelerate—skills she worked on with Brondello’s husband Olaf Lange—while also making sure Sabrina Ionescu and Jonquel Jones had space to shoot off that dribble penetration. The updated defense included a lot of switching, which again is heavily reliant on Stewart’s ability to guard frontcourt and backcourt players.

So when Stewart missed a month in the middle of the 2025 season, it created an even greater disruption to the team’s scheme than losing the franchise player typically would.

The 2025 roster wasn’t identical to the 2024 roster. Gone were the physical switchable wings in Betnijah Laney-Hamilton and Kayla Thornton who served as excellent complements to the defensive prowess of Leonie Fiebich. Gone was Laney-Hamilton’s three-way offensive creativity — if reads and actions were blown up, she was able to drive, post up or just out-muscle her defenders. Gone was Courtney Vandersloot’s astute decision-making and ability to get Ionescu, Stewart and Jones easy looks.

All of these safety valves were missing when Stewart went down in July, and again when she got hurt late in Game 1 of the Liberty’s series against the Phoenix Mercury.

In the beginning of the season, the Liberty were mostly executing the new vision, with key acquisition Natasha Cloud playing within the system. The team also played against some of the bottom teams in the league and had more time to work and rest between games. “It gave us a little bit of, I think, a false sense of security,” Lange told The IX Basketball. 

But in June, the injuries began to pile up. Jones was out for a month. Stewart was out for a month. Ionescu was out for almost two weeks toward the end of the season. Kennedy Burke, a reliable role player who made a jump in 2025, was out for almost a month. Emma Meesseman—who also wasn’t used to a very different 2025 WNBA — was added and only practiced with the team a handful of times. 

But while the adversity didn’t stop for the Liberty in 2025 amid the revolving door of injuries and 18 different regular season starting lineups, what bubbled up to the surface were what turned out to be irreconcilable differences between the front office and the coaching staff. When a team is winning at a high level, these differences aren’t magnified. But when a team isn’t winning and struggling heavily to retain any sort of consistency, these differences become much more prominent. 

Rotation decisions became friction points. Most notably, an initial overreliance on Stephanie Talbot, relative to Rebekah Garnder, but also a lack of trust in the pieces from the roster that Kolb assembled. Mistakes that came from substitution patterns during games, as pointed out by our Emily Adler, became a much bigger deal. 

The Liberty’s players often looked exhausted and overworked — in part a consequence of playing with eight available players on the roster. That was one of the root causes of the Liberty’s effort issues which plagued them all season long. There wasn’t a lot of relief for players coming off the bench. Nyara Sabally’s limited 2025 took a toll on Jones. 

“I just think we haven’t had a lot of bodies,” Jones said at a shootaround on August 18. “And I think a lot of times, sometimes you go out there and you’re thinking like that, like, I have a whole game to play. We’ve got eight people and sometimes you… keep it in the tank for later on in the games.”

There were questions all season long about why the Liberty struggled to fill in the gaps for their injuries, and an unwillingness to sign players to hardship contracts in the end might have taken a toll on the roster. 

Accountability was something that Brondello routinely would admit to, and as a result so did her players. Stewart, Jones and Ionescu all took accountability within the final days of the Liberty’s 2025 season. 

When Kolb was asked about what he learned from the 2025 season and if the different decisions he made to set up his team for success, he expressed that getting players that they wanted on hardship contracts was a much more complicated mechanism for his roster this year. 

“We didn’t feel comfortable that collectively, if we brought somebody in, that they would 1) play and 2) be worth potentially pushing back the return dates of those players,” he said.  “Then later in the year, we did give serious consideration to applying for a hardship with league. At that point in time, players we were interested in bringing that we felt could contribute were not interested in that. And other players sought out other opportunities with teams that would have had a longer stay and be able to prove themselves in ways that maybe means something more for their future in the WNBA. And then, quite honestly, at another stage, when we looked at it, players that we were interested in were already overseas. And I just think that speaks more to the rules of our league currently that are in place than whether a hardship player would or wouldn’t have impacted our season.”

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The Liberty’s constant struggle with different players in and out and lack of season ending injuries bit them and in turn made it harder for the coaching staff and the players to be able to really move forward and adapt.

While Kolb didn’t explain specifically how he planned to evolve as a result the 2025 season, his players did. Leonie Fiebich, moments after losing to the Mercury to end the team’s season, elaborated on this point even as she dealt with a fractured rib sustained early in Game 3.

“It’s hard right now because there’s so much emotion, but I don’t know just to play when your biggest contributors are down, how you can step up, how you can help the team,” she said. “What it takes to really like work on the weaknesses without any practice, we barely practiced a season. To learn on the fly, to learn with film, to talk through it, because we don’t get the reps.”

Those are the new realities of the evolving WNBA, where there are so many games jammed into a really tight footprint. NBA teams are known to barely practice and WNBA teams must be built to sustain a similar cadence.

Collectively, that meant so many changes from 2024 into 2025. It cost the Liberty a chance to repeat. And ultimately, it cost Brondello her job.