New York Liberty’s championship defense was meant to be a victory lap; instead, it ended in a disastrous first-round collapse. The Liberty suffered a disastrous first-round playoff setback in what turned out to be Sandy Brondello’s final season with the team, losing to the Phoenix Mercury, a team CBS Sports didn’t even consider a title contender before the season. Now, veteran team member Breanna Stewart has shared her two cents on the team’s struggle-laden season.

In her interview, Stewart offered an interesting perspective, stating that the team couldn’t reach the ‘Flow State’ that they had reached in the championship-winning season.

“I don’t this it’s a huge issue for me. You call it like a flow state,” Stewart said. “So, when you’re in that flow state where you’re reading and going off with your teammtes now, you have to have a chemistry, and you have to like keept that. So, we had a lot of changes between our Championship to our 2025 season. In trying to kind of course correct and create that flow state again very quickly, it just didn’t work.”

Now, flow state in the sports domain refers to the phase of a team when all its actions are perfectly in sync and rhythm. That’s precisely the term you can associate the NY Liberty with in 2024, where every sequence of play had a stamp of dominance. The Big Three of Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, and Jonquel Jones, along with veteran Courtney Vandersloot, just dominated any team that they faced.

After all, sweeping Atlanta led by Rhyne Howard in the first round of the playoffs or dominating the Las Vegas Aces led by A’ja Wilson, 3-1 in the second round, is no easy feat. The Liberty did it pretty convincingly with their experienced coach, Brondello, at the helm, calling it a “special time.” But immediately next season, the tide changed, and the team got a bit decoupled.

First, they lost one of their key players in Vandersloot, who returned to the Chicago Sky. Additionally, Jones, who gives an edge to the team on the glass, also sustained a right knee injury and missed quite a few games. The team did bring in Natasha Cloud before the offseason to address Vandersloot’s absence, but the chemistry the team had in 2024 never materialized under Sandy Brondello last year, with inconsistency regarding injuries and stagnation on the court at times.

On top of that, the Liberty weren’t clean on the court, especially on the boards, where the team saw a major drop-off from north of 36 rebounds per game in 2024 to around 33 last season. Stewart had also hinted that the team doesn’t have a Championship-level mentality in the locker room midway through the season.

After a loss to the Phoenix Mercury in the regular season, Stewart said, “This is not championship-level basketball at this point, and everybody needs to recognize that and understand that we need to get there.”

While the 2025 season was marked by all these external factors and a degree of desynchronization, the NY Liberty has assembled a group of Avengers heading into the next season. And veteran Stewart is quite optimistic for the immediate future of the team in that regard.

Breanna Stewart Sounds Positive About Her Team’s Depth and Chemistry Going Into the Upcoming Season

For the NY Liberty, most of their worries got eased right away in the free agency. Liberty’s front office played a masterclass, bringing back its Big Three. On top of that, the team also signed star forward Satou Sabally to add more firepower to their frontcourt. Speaking in an interview after a few days in the training camp, Breanna Stewart has emphasized that the depth and physicality of players like herself and Jones can be their ace heading into the season.

“It seems like we just have a lot of length,” Stewart said. “Anywhere you look. We’re long and we’re tall, and we’re gonna kind of use that to our advantage. I’m sure some people are gonna think that, ‘Oh, we’ll be too big.’ But [it] seems hard to stop.”

The three-time WNBA champ also doubled down on team bonding during camp, especially with an array of new players on the roster. “So far, it looks like the team has really gelled and gotten the hang of it quickly,” she said. “I was able to be in for most of practice today, which I was happy about, and then ramp up for Saturday.”

All in all, it will be interesting to see how this physicality and team bonding play out for them this season. After all, they also had the same core and quite a substantial firepower, but the results didn’t turn out for them. With a new coach, Chris DeMarco, Breanna Stewart, and the Liberty hope to see their on-paper strength materialize into another championship-winning season, starting in a few weeks.