- WNBA superstars have flocked to New York and Las Vegas during the 2023 off-season.
- With four MVPs and 11 All-Stars between them, the Liberty and Aces are the league's new superteams.
NEW YORK — The WNBA has entered its superteam era.
The 2023 off-season has seen league superstars flock to the coasts, particularly New York and Las Vegas, via blockbuster trades and free agency moves. Now, the Liberty and the Aces are brimming with talent — like, two WNBA MVPs and a full starting lineup of All-Stars each — and ushering in a cross-country rivalry for the ages.
"We want to have a superteam," New York governor Clara Wu Tsai said in a press conference at the Barclays Center. "We want to create an incredible rivalry with the West.
"We're ready for it," she added. "We're excited by it."
The Liberty have been working towards powerhouse status since new ownership took the reins
Wu Tsai and her husband, billionaire Alibaba executive Joe Tsai, have worked to build a behemoth in Brooklyn since they first acquired the Liberty in 2019. They promptly moved the franchise from the Westchester County Center — the suburban arena where former owner James Dolan exiled the team in 2018 — to a new home at the Barclays Center, fittingly located in New York City proper.
The couple invested in facilities fit for professional athletes, winning-caliber coaches and staffers, and young but promising talent. The success, they reasoned, would follow.
So when — just three years after the Tsais first embarked on their WNBA project — the Liberty suffered a season-ending loss to the then-reigning champions at a sold-out Barclays Center, the moment marked more than just the team's first home playoff game in half a decade: It represented New York's transition from a franchise overcoming extreme tumult to one ready to seriously pursue its first-ever WNBA title.
All the Liberty needed now, it seemed, was a superstar willing to give them a chance. Six months later, they got three.
"It marks the the end of one journey that began four years ago, and it starts another that we trust will continue for years to come," general manager Jonathan Kolb said during a recent press conference. "Four years ago we started a rebuild, and it was a build that took time and years to craft this into the end goal, which is a roster that is very capable of competing for a title and bringing the first [title] home to New York."
A new era in New York
Though, as Kolb suggested, the franchise's transformation from perennial WNBA bottom-dweller to superteam was four years in the making, the Liberty's 2022-2023 off-season was undoubtedly one for the record books. Before the league's free agency window even opened, New York had made a move that instantly upended the WNBA's power structure.
In mid-January, four-time league All-Star and 2021 WNBA MVP Jonquel Jones made her way to the Big Apple via a blockbuster three-team trade between the Liberty, Connecticut Sun, and Dallas Wings. With the ball-handling skills and shooting range of a guard, and the size, rebounding, and shot-blocking ability of a traditional big, the 6-foot-6 superstar is the epitome of a complete package on the basketball court.
Jones specifically requested the move to the Liberty mere months after her former franchise, the Sun, came up short in the WNBA Finals for the second time in the last four seasons. And with the trade for the Freeport, Bahamas, native — which saw New York part ways with role players Rebecca Allen and Crystal Dangerfield, as well as star Natasha Howard — the Liberty made themselves instant contenders for the 2023 title.
But New York was just getting started.
On Day 1 of the 2023 free agency period, Breanna Stewart — arguably the most dominant women's basketball player of her generation — announced her highly anticipated free agency decision to join the Liberty after six years with the Seattle Storm. The two-time WNBA champion and two-time Finals MVP made charter flights — and more broadly, investment in player experience — a major factor in her choice, sending a clear message to owners across the league: Invest in your franchise, and the WNBA at large, or prepare to lose.
"I want to be surrounded by greatness, and when you look at these people up here and the many people that are a part of the Liberty organization, everybody wants to be better," Stewart said during her introductory press conference. "Everybody wants to continue to raise the standard and move the needle, and we want to do that from on the court, off the court, whatever the case may be, to help this organization and the league be better."
"When talking to [Liberty owners] Clara and Joe [Tsai], they also feel the same way," she added later. "We're fighting to elevate the standard."
And as it turns out, Courtney Vandersloot is on board, too. The four-time All-Star and six-time WNBA assists leader — including five of the last six years — committed to joining the pair of MVPs in New York just one day after Stewart's announcement.
In the same press conference, a week after the news broke, Vandersloot said the Liberty's commitment to "really pushing the envelope in all areas" ultimately made their pitch impossible to refuse.
"The vision, right away, was so clear," the prolific point guard said. "It was like, 'This is what we see. This is what we're going to go do. We want to bring a championship. We want to bring the best players here. We're going to take care of you.'
"It was everything, I think I speak for both of us, that we're looking for," she added.
In adding Jones, Stewart, Vandersloot, and, later, WNBA veteran Epiphanny Prince to a roster that already boasted two young All-Stars in Betnijah Laney and Sabrina Ionescu, the Liberty put together a historically loaded roster for the 2023 season. With two former No. 1 draft picks, two of the last four WNBA MVPs, and six All-Stars in New York's arsenal, few teams have the firepower to keep up.
Few, but not zero.
Like the Liberty, Las Vegas parlayed owner investment into major roster gains this off-season
Let's head out West, shall we?
Aces owner Mark Davis — who also owns the NFL's Raiders — has been outspoken in his commitment to furthering both his franchise and the WNBA itself. And since purchasing the Aces in early 2021, he's put his money where his mouth is.
Just a year into his involvement in the league, Davis shelled out more than $1 million to lure Becky Hammon away from the NBA and coach his Las Vegas squad instead. He's also, like the Tsais, staunchly in favor of charters: He believes WNBA players "don't need to be flying on commercial flights" and is more than willing to take on the added expense once the league gives him and other owners the green light to do so.
After boasting a starting lineup featuring three 2022 All-Stars — A'ja Wilson, Kelsey Plum, and Jackie Young — during their run to the last year's WNBA title, the already-stacked Aces weren't expected to be a huge player during this year's free agency. Instead, Davis and his front office doubled down to make the biggest splash outside of New York City.
Much like what took place in New York, Las Vegas made news days before free agents were even eligible to sign on the dotted line. Two-time WNBA MVP and two-time league champion Candace Parker took to Instagram on January 28 to announce her intentions of signing with the Aces, parting ways with her hometown Chicago Sky and turning down her previous franchise — the Los Angeles Sparks — in the process.
In and of itself, Parker's surprise move to Las Vegas took the Aces from merely stacked to a full-blown juggernaut. But then, days after its newest star's announcement, Vegas welcomed two-time champion and All-WNBA defender Alysha Clark to bolster what was already an incredibly fearsome roster.
But as Parker herself acknowledged: "There's a lot teams I've been on that have looked great on paper, but you gotta do the work."
Two multi-time MVPs, five All-Stars, and four No. 1 overall draft picks later, the Aces amassed enough pieces to contend with the new superteam in the East — and to pick up a league investigation "for circumventing the salary cap" via alleged under-the-table payments to players, according to The Next's Howard Megdal.
The WNBA's inquiry threatens to leave Vegas with "voided contracts, loss of roster spots and cap room," per Megdal's sources. But should their roster remain intact come May, the Aces have hopes beyond outcompeting their foes on the opposite coast.
"I want to be one of the best offensive teams that women's basketball has ever seen," Hammon said during Parker's introductory press conference. "I think we have a great opportunity to put a really exciting basketball team out on the court."
WNBA superteams are nothing new. But superteam rivalries formed through player-initiated movement are unprecedented.
For as long as the WNBA has existed, superteams have formed across the league.
Take the now-defunct Houston Comets, who won the WNBA's first four titles behind the star-studded trio of Cynthia Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes, and Tina Thompson. A little more than a decade later, a Minnesota Lynx roster stacked with league legends Seimone Augustus, Lindsay Whalen, Maya Moore, Rebekkah Brunson, and, later, Sylvia Fowles won four championships of its own over a seven-year span.
Even last year, the Phoenix Mercury formed a superteam of their own, as former league MVP Tina Charles and young All-Star Diamond DeShields joined a core that featured superstars Diana Taurasi, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Brianna Turner, and Brittney Griner. Of course, Griner's wrongful detainment in Russia thwarted the Mercury's big plans for the season, but their stacked roster serves as proof that the WNBA superteam concept wasn't invented in New York or Las Vegas.
Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello — who played in the league through the Comets' reign and coached Phoenix from 2014 to 2021 — knows this as well as anyone.
"If you think back a few years, I think the Minnesota Lynx had a bit of a super team didn't they? I think there's been super teams all throughout the WNBA," Brondello said in a press conference. "The 'superteam' everybody's putting emphasis on, yeah it's a superteam, but there's been superteams before. I had one in Phoenix."
What is new is the role of player movement in the creation of said superteams. The players who formed Houston's juggernaut around the turn of the century or the Lynx team that terrorized the league through the early 2010s almost exclusively landed with those franchises through the WNBA draft or trades initiated by front offices.
The Mercury represent a hybrid; some players came via the draft, others through trades, and one in free agency. The Aces are a similar story, though more of their key players — Parker, Clark, and Chelsea "Point Gawd" Gray — picked Las Vegas as free agents.
But New York leans even further in the opposite direction; the Liberty built their superteam almost entirely through player-initiated moves. Laney joined the team in free agency in 2021 and then, this off-season, Jones forced a trade to New York just weeks before free agents Stewart and Vandersloot picked the Liberty over a number of other potential suitors.
"As far as player movement, it's something that the league needs, and with the old CBA and the ability to core players multiple times, it didn't really happen much," Stewart said. "And you're going to see it happening a lot more. And that means just with player movement, fan engagement is gonna go from one team to another team — it's just gonna make it more exciting, make things more spicy.
"I mean it's gonna be weird to see us in a Liberty uniform — I think it's going to be weird for us to see ourselves in a Liberty uniform," she added. "But it's what the league needs to continue to grow the way that we want it to and the way that it should."
For Stewart and many of her counterparts, that's putting the best product on the floor, increasing viewership, and, ultimately, scoring a more lucrative media rights deal. It's bettering players' travel accommodations, increasing health and wellness resources, and ensuring "that the next generation... [is] set up to have success and not have to worry about tedious things."
"We're trying to elevate the level," Brondello said. "We're trying to to promote our game and create those rivalries. I think that's great for the WNBA. Hopefully more fans can come and watch us, and we're selling it... We think we got some pretty special players, but you know Vegas got some special players.
"I think that's what it was going to make us work really hard and get up in the morning," Wu Tsai added, "is to be able to beat that team in the West."