Tulin's Treasures: I Hate that the Liberty Let Sandy Brondello Go, But I Get It
The Liberty made an unpleasant decision on Tuesday, then the postseason parity party continued
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Liberty opt not to renew contract of two-time WNBA champion Sandy Brondello
The New York Liberty sent a shockwave through the sports world on Tuesday morning with the announcement that it won’t renew the contract of head coach Sandy Brondello, who spent four seasons with the team including back-to-back WNBA Finals appearances in 2023 and 2024 and the franchise’s first WNBA title last year. I doubt that I have to tell you that I’m a longtime Liberty fan or a huge Sandy Brondello fan at this point in the season, so it should come as no surprise that I absolutely hate this. I truly hope that Brondello and all of her excellent jackets, be they jean, leather or otherwise, have nothing but success in the future.
I would be stunned if Brondello’s next tenure doesn’t begin as soon as the 2026 season does, unless she chooses to take time away from the bench. There’s zero doubt that Brondello will be a candidate for jobs currently open in Portland, Seattle and Toronto, and if any other jobs open up, they’ll vie for her services as well. The Liberty’s all-time wins leader, Brondello has the fifth-best regular-season record (271-181, .599) among the 33 WNBA coaches with at least 100 games under their belts, trailing only Becky Hammon (117-43, .731), Cheryl Reeve (364-190, .657), former Houston Comets coach Van Chancellor (211-111, .655) and Stephanie White (116-76, .604). Brondello is also one of seven WNBA coaches to win multiple championships along with Chancellor, Reeve (four each), Bill Laimbeer (three), Brian Agler, Michael Cooper and Hammon (two each).
With her first title coming in Phoenix, where she’s also the winningest coach in franchise history, Brondello is one of two coaches to win titles with multiple franchises (alongside Agler). Brondello’s time with the Mercury ended in a “mutual parting of ways” following a 2021 season that saw her team finish fifth in the standings before a surprise run to the Finals, with players on both that Mercury and this Liberty team publicly supporting Brondello in the aftermath of their postseason eliminations. Among those players this time around was Breanna Stewart, whose f-bomb laden reaction to a question about Brondello’s job status went viral on Friday night. After blurting out my favorite word, Stewie went on to say, “to anybody who kind of questions Sandy being here, this is a resilient group and she has our back and we have hers.”
With respect, it wasn’t a particularly resilient group on the court. On top of that, the sense that Brondello’s Liberty were less than the sum of their “superteam” parts was a pervasive one even at the highest of highs. Having cared, watched and written about every game the team played this season, I know as well as anyone that it got hit pretty hard by injuries after coasting to a 9-0 start. The Liberty went 19-19 from then through the end of the playoffs (18-17 over the rest of the regular season). Only Washington (12-22), Dallas (9-23), Connecticut (9-26) and Chicago (8-27) had more losses than the Liberty after their 9-0 start.
Again, the injuries were significant, although none were season-ending. Jonquel Jones missed about a month with a sprained ankle, Breanna Stewart missed about a month with a bone bruise in her knee and Sabrina Ionescu missed a handful of games because of a toe injury. There were other injuries, too, such as the broken nose that forced Natasha Cloud to miss a game and finish the season in the role of masked vigilante out to avenge unjust foul calls (which, in her mind, is all of them, and I love that about her as a ref hater). I just don’t think you can ignore the fact that pretty much every other team in the WNBA had significant injuries this season, didn’t have the luxury of still having multiple All-Stars at all times and yet also didn’t spend the bulk of the season playing offense like they didn’t know the shot clock existed.
The Fever got 13 games out of Caitlin Clark and lost seemingly an entire league’s worth of other contributors to season-ending injuries but were resilient enough to still be in the hunt for the title. The Lynx played so well without Napheesa Collier that it might have cost her MVPhee. The Valkyries lost their only All-Star — taken from the Liberty in the expansion draft — to a season-ending injury during the All-Star break while their marquee free-agent signing Tiffany Hayes missed 18 games. Meanwhile, the Liberty got sloppier and sloppier as the season went on, and the only answer Brondello seemed to have was that the team hadn’t had a chance to build chemistry. That didn’t seem to bother Golden State en route to the best expansion season ever, even while half of its brand-new roster left for EuroBasket in June. Lack of chemistry also didn’t slow down Phoenix, which had an almost brand-new roster and arguably played better when it was ravaged by injuries early in the season than when it was healthy after the break.
That Brondello’s contract was up for renewal via a team option, part of a one-year extension signed after last year’s championship, is itself an indication that the Liberty weren’t all-in on her as their coach entering 2025 — if they were, she’d have gotten a multi-year extension. That’s understandable if for no reason other than the fact that this was in many ways a stopgap season around the league thanks to the expiring CBA and veteran players’ refusal to sign contracts beyond this season. That 2025 went disastrously clearly didn’t assuage whatever doubts the team had in the first place. I wouldn’t have made the decision to move on knowing what I know from the outside, but I also feel very comfortable with the assumption that what I know is a minuscule fraction of what Liberty general manager Jonathan Kolb and owners Clara Wu and Joseph Tsai know about their future plans and the inner workings of their team.
Which brings me to my final thought on the matter: Kolb and the Tsais have unquestionably earned the benefit of the doubt from Liberty fans over the course of their stewardship of the franchise. That stewardship began in early 2019 when the Alibaba Group co-founder/Nets minority owners bought the flailing franchise out from under the inept hands of Knicks owner James Dolan. Dolan, lest anyone forget, had banished one of the WNBA’s founding and most recognizable franchises to Westchester, where it had become a complete afterthought in New York sports by the end of the 2010s. The Associated Press story about the January 2019 sale of the franchise was all of 101 words. Kolb was hired as GM two months after the Liberty sent that tiny ripple through the sports world, and he immediately made Valkyries GM Ohemaa Nyanin his first hire, which I bring up mostly to say Nyanin should’ve been the 2025 WNBA Executive of the Year. After that, the braintrust brought the Libs back to NYC proper where they belong, delivered their first championship and established them as a team that doesn’t feel like it can accept a fifth-place finish and playoff crashout. I don’t have to like it to understand it.
