Breanna Stewart said the New York Liberty never found the same rhythm in 2025 that carried them to the championship the year before, and the loss showed up in the first round when Phoenix sent them home. Stewart pointed to a team that kept changing, kept trying to force the same feel back into place, and never got there.
The Liberty won the title in 2024, then watched Courtney Vandersloot return to the Chicago Sky, Jonquel Jones miss significant time with a right knee injury, and Natasha Cloud arrive before the offseason to help fill the void at point guard. Stewart said the team could not reach the “Flow State” it had in the championship season, adding that the group had too many changes and tried to recreate that chemistry too quickly.
“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.” She added that the Liberty had “a lot of changes between our Championship to our 2025 season” and that “in trying to kind of course correct and create that flow state again very quickly, it just didn’t work.”
The numbers back up the slide. New York’s rebounds per game fell from north of 36 in 2024 to around 33 in 2025, a drop that mirrors the rest of the team’s uneven season. The Liberty later brought back their Big Three in free agency and signed Satou Sabally, moves that suggest the front office knew the roster needed another reset after Sandy Brondello’s final season on the bench.
Stewart left no room for spin when assessing where the team stood after the playoff exit. “This is not championship-level basketball at this point, and everybody needs to recognize that and understand that we need to get there,” she said. For a team that opened the year as the defending champion, the work ahead is less about chasing the memory of 2024 than proving 2025 was a detour, not the new standard.
