After dominating the WNBA’s regular season, the New York Liberty know it’s time to go win it all

So far in the WNBA playoffs, there’s been no doubt about the big storylines.

The top headliner? Yes, Caitlin Clark has drawn the most attention. Though her postseason run lasted just two games, they drew big TV audiences after Clark helped the Indiana Fever earn their first playoff berth in eight years.

The best individual player? A’ja Wilson continues her amazing year with the Las Vegas Aces. After the first 1,000-point season in league history (1,021, to be precise), a record 451 rebounds, a league-high 98 blocks, the first unanimous MVP win since 1997, and her second Olympic gold medal, she led a sweep of the Seattle Storm.

You want Philly angles? There have been plenty. South Jersey-born, La Salle-bred Cheryl Reeve is the favorite to win Coach of the Year (she was named AP’s Coach of the Year) for steering the Minnesota Lynx to the No. 2 seed. In the first round, they swept a Phoenix Mercury squad that included North Philly’s Kahleah Copper and Broomall’s Natasha Cloud.

From a few miles up the road, Harrisburg-area native Alyssa Thomas delivered commanding performances to help the Connecticut Sun sweep Clark’s Fever, after a sixth straight top-two finish in the Eastern Conference.

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But none of these items should be the biggest of all. The No. 1 honor should go to a team, and a place, that shouldn’t be surprising: the No. 1 seed.

The team is the New York Liberty, and the place is … well, you know that part. Breanna Stewart, Jonquel Jones, and company — including another Philly-bred star, Betnijah Laney-Hamilton — stormed their way to a 32-8 record. (It would have been 33-7 had the stars not rested for much of the regular-season finale.)

There were already big expectations in Brooklyn after last year’s run to the team’s first Finals since 2002, and so far the Liberty have lived up to them. But New York still hasn’t won a championship in its 28-year history, so its only title remains being the WNBA’s most star-crossed team.

Will this finally be the year? The climb started with a two-game sweep of the No. 8 seed Atlanta Dream, 83-69 and 91-82. Stewart scored 33 points in the series, Jones had 29 and 20 rebounds, and Sabrina Ionescu poured in 53 points and 14 assists. Both games had big crowds, too, with swaggering mascot Ellie the Elephant joining a slew of courtside celebrities.

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“Spike Lee gave me a high-five as I was going to take the ball out of bounds,” Ionescu said after her 36-point eruption in Game 2. “I thought that New York was just injected into my veins. At that moment, I was like, ‘We’re winning this.’”

Yes, New York’s most famous hoophead is on the ride, even if it means crossing the East River from his beloved Madison Square Garden. Whoopi Goldberg also was there on Tuesday, adding a former Knicks coach (OK, a fictitious one) to the sizzle.

A few seats over, Liberty coach Sandy Brondello is at work not just as a tactician, but as a psychologist. Some teams would try to stay away from their pasts when embarking on postseasons with high expectations. Brondello is embracing her team’s head-on.

After the Game 1 win, she made a point of getting out tape of last year’s first-round Game 2 vs. Washington. The Liberty were the No. 2 seed at the time and won Game 1 at home by 15. But the Mystics took Game 2, also in Brooklyn, to overtime before New York narrowly prevailed. (In the WNBA’s best-of-three first-round format, the high seed hosts the first two games, and the low seed hosts the third if it’s necessary.)

“All the lessons that we learned last year carry over for this year, and it was just a reminder,” Brondello said before the year’s first Game 2 tipped off. “After a really big victory, your biggest thing is, if you don’t come ready to play in the next one because you just think it’s going to happen, that’s the biggest danger that we have.”

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This wasn’t prompted by someone in the media tossing a lit match onto nearby logs. Brondello did it herself.

“It’s just a refocus,” Brondello said. “Making sure this is a mindset: We’ve got [the] big picture now. Don’t relax.”

There’s also virtue in keeping emotions balanced, and Brondello is doing her part. When a moment came to say so, she did.

“Another thing you’ve heard for many years now [is] ‘Don’t get too high or too low, control the controllables,’ and that’s all we’ve got to work on,” Brondello said. “It’s one game at a time and come out and be the best version of ourselves, individually and collectively. If we can do that, I think nobody can beat us, and we have to have that confidence.”

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Those first two sentences would fill up a sports cliche bingo card, but Brondello doesn’t mind. She knew the third would have the biggest impact, and it did. It should, too, given how dominant the Liberty have been this year. But now they have to make it stand up on the big stage.

The Liberty did in the first round, and that film session proved prescient. Atlanta gave everything it had in Game 2, pulling within a point with 6 minutes, 3 seconds left. Only then did New York finally pull away.

So that’s one step done and two left to climb. The next one won’t be the biggest, but it will be as big as a semifinal could ever be.

The Liberty-Aces showdown will be a rematch of last year’s Finals and the most star-filled series the league can offer.

Yes, that counts Clark in the rankings. As big a deal as she is, she’s one player. New York and Las Vegas have a pile of big names. They sent a combined 10 players to this year’s Olympics, including six to the U.S. squad: the Aces’ Wilson, Chelsea Gray, Kelsey Plum, and Jackie Young, and the Liberty’s Ionescu and Stewart.

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Las Vegas fell to No. 4 this year because of injuries and too much subpar play around Wilson. But the Aces won nine of their last 10 regular season games, then took down No. 5 Seattle.

The best-of-five series starts Sunday in Brooklyn with a network TV matinee (3 p.m., 6abc), and there could be another for Game 4 in Vegas on Oct. 6. ESPN or ESPN2 will have the other games and the other semifinal between Minnesota and Connecticut. The headline matchup there is Thomas against the Lynx’s Napheesa Collier, two more of this year’s U.S. Olympians and multi-time All-Stars.

ESPN’s WNBA broadcasts have set four records so far this year: the network’s most-watched draft, regular season, All-Star Game, and playoff game. Clark obviously had a lot to do with that, having been in all three one-show events. But before you fire up your emails, know that Indiana was in just eight of ESPN’s 25 regular-season games. So it wasn’t just her.

It certainly wasn’t Clark when last season’s Finals drew the largest per-game audience in 20 years, since she still was in college. So there’s no reason why this year’s Finals shouldn’t do just as well, especially if New York gets there. A Liberty-Lynx series would be best for TV, with Stewart dueling Collier and Reeve going for a record fifth title — and her first since 2017.

That’s for later, though. For now, the semifinals will bring plenty of their own drama.

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