Coaching Carousel Starts to Spin in New York and Phoenix
What happened for the Liberty and the Mercury? What happens now?
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It isn’t every day that two coaches who led their teams to the WNBA playoffs are out of a job before the next season. It’s an especially puzzling event when it comes almost three months after the end of the season. Nonetheless, that’s precisely the position that former New York Liberty head coach Walt Hopkins and former Phoenix Mercury head coach Sandy Brondello found themselves in mere weeks before Christmas.
Walt Hopkins and the New York Liberty
What happened
The Liberty are living up to the impatient New Yorker stereotype. Hopkins had been in the Big Apple for two years and now he’s gone. The Liberty have developed a pattern of offering their head coach two years and no more. One of the founding members of the league, New York has had eight coaches. Only Richie Adubato (1998-2004), Pat Coyle (2004-2009), and Bill Laimbeer (2013-17) have lasted more than two years.
Hopkins was brought in when the team parted ways with Katie Smith. His first season was not the easiest. The young head coach and his team headed straight for the bubble expecting big things from rookie Sabrina Ionescu. Three games in, the 2020 overall No. 1 draft pick was out for the pandemic-shortened season with a Grade 3 ankle sprain. The team went 2-20, but it was difficult to pin that on the coaching.
Things started to pick up in Hopkins’ second season. The team signed the 2020 Most Improved Player Betnijah Laney, and she showed beyond a doubt that her improvement was not fleeting. For the second straight season, Laney played just over 33 minutes per game and shot about 50 percent from 2-point distance. The only real drop in her game came at the 3-point line where she shot just 31.2 percent after shooting 40.5 percent in 2020.
Rookie Michaela Onyenwere emerged as a star on her way to winning Rookie of the Year. The No. 6 pick in the 2021 draft got an opportunity to get on the floor and she seized it. With the trio of Onyenwere, Ionescu, and Laney, the future looked bright.
The talent was there and it was young. The group lost 20 games in 2021, but they made it to the postseason. Perhaps the 12-20 record was just not enough to please owner Joseph Tsai. It’s difficult to see how constant course corrections are going to help a group of young players develop. It’s also a legitimate question whether one year in the bubble and significant injuries during both seasons were enough for the team to develop a coherent identity. They certainly made progress, though. This year was the first time they had been in the playoffs since 2017.
What’s next?
Where do the Liberty look next for a head coach? Some are suggesting that Brondello will not be out of work for long because she’s on her way to New York City. It would certainly be a big change for Brondello. She has been coaching a team that is anything but young.
Phoenix has been in win-now mode for several years as they tried to get another title before Diana Taurasi retires. They have not had a rookie on the team since 2019.
That 2019 group does give some glimpses into Brondello’s ability to develop players, though. Brianna Turner has become a legitimate candidate for defensive player of the year and has some nice offensive games at times, as well. Sophie Cunningham is a solid reserve and spot starter.
Brondello is not the only option for New York, though. In the early days of the league, no one was more synonymous with the Liberty than Teresa Weatherspoon. The guard led the team to the WNBA Finals four times between 1997 and 2002. She hit one of the most famous shots in playoff history.
Since her playing days, Weatherspoon has coached at her alma mater, Louisiana Tech. She is currently an assistant coach for the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans. Her ties to the Liberty’s glory days may make her the best fit of any other coaching candidate. Keep an eye out for her among the other candidates you hear discussed.
Sandy Brondello and the Phoenix Mercury
What happened
Brondello had in essence been coaching for a contract. Her deal expired after the 2021 season. In hindsight, the fact that the coach and the organization had not addressed that prior to her final year suggested that this was on the horizon. That both sides eventually came to the same conclusion after their run to the WNBA Finals is perhaps a bit surprising, but the idea that both sides were already thinking about the end of the relationship shouldn’t be.
The organization has been in win-now mode for a while. They pay for high-priced free agents and either release their draftees or simply trade away the draft picks. That has left them with a short bench on several occasions. This year, they were without Diana Taurasi for 16 of 32 regular-season games. Bria Hartley was out for 26 of 32 games.
Despite that, the team got to the Finals for the first time since Brondello’s first season in 2014.
What’s next?
As soon as the news broke, there were outlandish suggestions. The ones that can be dismissed out-of-hand concern highly-paid, successful college head coaches. The two most often mentioned are Arizona head coach Adia Barnes and South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley.
The first reason to reject these suggestions is simple. Most college coaches–but especially these two women–make far more in the college game than they could in the pro game. The best WNBA players can make a bit over $225,000 per year. While the contracts of coaches are not quite as public, there’s no reason to believe that they are pulling in seven figures when the players are not. (We would love to report that information, just as we do player contracts.) College coaches like Staley and Barnes are making seven figures right now.
As the Atlanta Dream learned just before the 2021 season started, it makes more sense for a coach to go from the WNBA to college than the other way around. Former Dream coach Nicki Collen certainly felt that way when she went from Atlanta to Baylor.
While college coaches have to worry about recruiting, that essentially makes a coach the equivalent of a head coach-general manager. At this point in time, the attention and money are far greater in the college game than in the pro game. With NIL, that may soon be true for players as well as coaches.
Staley and Barnes are also rockstars in their respective cities. The two metropolitan areas have between 730,000 and a million people. Cities that size with universities tend to have their focus on the college. It is something that Barnes has noted on several occasions. She tells recruits how they’re the only game in town, so the people love them.
Both women are national figures, but they also live in areas that love and support them in unique ways. In turn, they are able to influence the lives of young women–both on their teams and in the cities at large–from within the college system. The WNBA does not offer anything in that regard that they can’t do while making more money in college.
In contrast, Phoenix is a major city. The city is the fifth-largest in the nation with 1.63 million people. The sprawling metropolitan area is the 11th largest metro with almost five million. It has numerous professional sports teams and two universities that field sports teams. The head coach of the Phoenix Mercury does not have the kind of cultural influence that Staley or Barnes has on her local community.
When it comes to Barnes, she does not have a special tie to Phoenix simply because she lives in Arizona. Tucson and Phoenix are geographically nearby, but they are culturally and politically distinct. Barnes is not from the state; she grew up in the San Diego, Calif., area. Her ties to the state are ties to Tucson. That the Mercury opening is in the state of Arizona is rather irrelevant.
Staley? She’s from Philadelphia. She has even less reason to give up her contract, move across the country, and take up residence in the desert. She might make more sense in New York, but the salary problem would persist no matter which WNBA city was in question.
So, who does make sense?
If college coaches like Staley and Barnes don’t make sense for the Mercury, then who does? There’s a former Arizona Wildcat already on the Phoenix staff who fits the bill. Mercury assistant coach Julie Hairgrove has been with the organization since 2005.
Hairgrove also attended college at the University of Arizona. Her grandfather, Lute Olson, was the man who made Arizona Basketball a national powerhouse in the 1980s and 1990s. She was not a teammate of Barnes, but she donned the Wildcat uniform shortly after Barnes left when the program was still strong.
Hairgrove is the longest-tenured assistant coach in the WNBA. She has coached under four different head coaches. In the past, she did not pursue a head coaching position because she wanted to be actively involved in her children’s lives as they grew up. Now, the kids are older and things are changing.
“I definitely think if a head coaching job were to open that makes sense for my family, I think that’s something I would definitely consider,” Hairgrove said in April. “But it’s got to be right for the family. It’s something that I would like to try at some point in my career because being the assistant it’s great, but I think I’m ready to make that next step in the next couple of years.”
The Mercury also have former player Chasity Melvin on the staff. Is Melvin ready to take that next step? The big question is whether she can handle the challenges of big egos and occasional conflict that Phoenix has had to deal with the past few years. Talent management is about more than deciding lineups.
Melvin started her coaching career at the high school and AAU level but landed a job with the G-League’s Greensboro Swarm in 2018. Two years later, she had taken a job with the Loyola (MD) women’s team. When the pandemic shut that down, Brondello brought her on board. Is it time to climb to the top rung of the ladder?
If things weren’t working the way the front office wanted, staying within the family may not be on the Mercury’s agenda. Suggestions like Pokey Chatman and Brian Agler are floating around, but both come with questions.
Chatman is 134-172 as a WNBA head coach. Those numbers suggest that she has been given plenty of opportunities to succeed. She also had general manager duties in both Chicago and Indiana, so the lack of the players she needed to succeed can’t be blamed on someone in the front office. Her teams missed the playoffs in five of her nine years at the helm.
Agler has had a great deal of success including two WNBA titles, but he was fired by Dallas after missing the playoffs in 2020. He also had to deal with accusations about an inappropriate relationship with a player that Penny Toler made in her lawsuit against the Los Angeles Sparks earlier that year. He was the head coach of Dallas during Mercury point guard Skylar Diggins-Smith’s final year with the organization, although she never played a game for him.
If the team wants to go outside the organization, the best options might be a current WNBA or NBA assistant. Is it best to take the road of experience or to go with an assistant who doesn’t have anything in her past to overcome?
For two teams, someone will be answering that question very soon. Then, we get back to the question of whether they can help the team win.
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
Interesting evaluation of the situations, especially Phoenix.