The New York Liberty announced on Tuesday that the team would not be renewing head coach Sandy Brondello’s contract, days after the defending champions lost a competitive first-round playoff series to the Phoenix Mercury. Brondello is the winningest coach in Liberty history, having recorded an impressive 107-53 record in her four seasons and winning the 2024 WNBA championship. She also oversaw a rickety, uncreative Liberty team this year that was often overmatched and outcoached in critical moments. Unsurprisingly, the tension between those two realities has produced an interesting split in how the firing has been received.
On the one hand, there is shock that the Liberty would get rid of a coach who has won two titles (in addition to the 2024 title in New York, Brondello coached the Mercury to the 2014 championship), and would do so less than a year after winning one. Brondello is extremely experienced, with seven years in Phoenix and eight with the Australian national team, which she led to a bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Brondello has stuck around that long and won so much because she is a player’s coach. After the Mercury beat the Liberty, a reporter asked Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu, sitting alongside Brondello, “What would you say to those who question whether Sandy should be here next year to coach you guys again?” Stewart said, “What the fuck?” before responding with a vociferous defense of Brondello, pointing out correctly that the Liberty roster was full of holes all season.
Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon, the second-longest tenured coach in the league, also came to Brondello’s defense, and more generally to the defense of letting a coach survive a rough season. “I didn’t love [the firing] for Sandy, I’m gonna have to be honest. She’s just won a championship,” she said. “When you have a good coach, you keep the good coach. And that doesn’t mean you win every year. It’s really hard to rip up a foundation and start over.” Hammon cited Minnesota’s Cheryl Reeve, in her job with the Lynx since 2010, as the model. Reeve in turn also offered her support for Brondello. “I think Sandy is a heck of a coach and I think Sandy will land on her feet like she always does,” she said. “I am absolutely thrilled if I am Seattle, Toronto, and Portland, that I was just gifted a championship-level coach.”
On the other hand, there is a pretty coherent case against Brondello as a basketball coach, one that the Liberty’s owners, Joe and Clara Wu Tsai, were evidently convinced of. In the 2023 Finals, Brondello’s squad was comprehensively beaten by an Aces team down two starters; one year later, the Liberty had to fight through the mud to squeak by Reeve’s Lynx. Of the epic first game of that series, our Maitreyi Anantharaman wrote:
Sometimes I have trouble squaring Liberty fandom as depicted—the stylish elephant; the affirming, pleasant vibes!—with Liberty basketball, the actual and frequently vexing product. It can feel a bit like going to a birthday party at the dentist’s office. It’s an ungenerous thing to say about a talent-rich one-seed that just dispatched their last Finals opponent and has four more chances at a championship this year, but no team has a worse ratio of stressful watching to relief in victory.
That sums up the feeling that Brondello’s Liberty teams never really played to its full potential. The Libs’ offense featured a lot of standing, and did not appear to have a coherent philosophy for getting good shots beyond relying on the team’s ultra-talented players to beat their defenders unaided. The 2025 Liberty were all banged up, with Stewart, and Ionescu, and Jonquel Jones starting and finishing the same game just 12 times this season, but that doesn’t fully explain the busted after-timeout plays and Brondello’s unwillingness or inability to make adjustments at halftime. Close watchers of the Liberty could see that, championships or not, Brondello got outcoached on a fairly routine basis.
To the Tsais, that clearly mattered more than Brondello’s personability or rapport with players. “Liberty brass considered nothing short of a championship to be a success this season,” reported ESPN’s Alexa Philippou, which is a high standard, but also the one that matters most. Maybe 10 years ago, Brondello would have been given a longer runway, but the competitive landscape of the WNBA is different in 2025. There is more money in the sport, for one thing, and more ownership groups are willing to spend it in pursuit of winning, which will naturally lead to higher standards and more coaching and front-office turnover.
As Reeve hinted, the new owners in Toronto and Portland likely will be more like the Tsais than like the clown ownership groups in, say, Dallas and Chicago. In coaching and every other way, the gaps between variably competent and competitive organizations will only become more obvious in the next few years.
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