Breanna Stewart is still one of the WNBA’s greats. Why don’t we appreciate her enough?
· Yahoo Sports
NEW YORK — I sometimes like to imagine that Breanna Stewart puts herself to sleep by reciting her professional achievements, the way that I put myself to sleep by reciting childhood friends’ phone numbers.
I’ll abridge the list, to spare you: McDonald’s All-American, four straight NCAA championships at UConn, first pick in the WNBA Draft, Rookie of the Year, multi-time Olympic gold medalist (one of them a mere 48 hours before the birth of Stewart and her wife’s first child), winner of multiple MVP awards, three-time WNBA championships, champion of Unrivaled (the three-on-three professional league she co-founded).
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And yet, I’m shoving aside this heap of hardware to tell you that Stewart is underappreciated. And that the fact of her underappreciation is not easily correctable — this is not like when the New York Review of Books finds some neglected classic on a dusty shelf and suddenly “Stoner” is a bestseller. No, her underappreciation is actually integral to her greatness, the essence of it. Because Stewart is not a novel at all; she is a section of the tax code.
While Caitlin Clark, Olivia Miles and Paige Bueckers flood you with basketball narrative, logo 3s and no-look dimes — plays that are endlessly replayed during TV timeouts, digitally transformed into NBA 2K simulacra — Stewart smothers you with the basketball equivalent of paperwork. She tips the pass that would have led to the open 3. She falls, with all 7-foot-1 wingspan of her collapsible-tent-pole limbs, on top of a loose ball. She convinces her rookie coach to use his challenge on an out-of-bounds call. She crushes opponents with the relentless unsexy rightness of her decision-making. And then — clink — she adds another medal to her vault.
This year’s playoffs, in which the Liberty upset the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx in the first round and begin the semifinals against the favored Atlanta Dream on Sunday, have showcased Stewart’s muted brand of dominance.
But first, a bit about how Stewart and the Liberty became underdogs in the first place.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Liberty added Satou Sabally in the off-season — a move of Kevin-Durant-to-the-Golden-State-Warriors-esque unfairness. Stewart was already part of a big three, along with Sabrina Ionescu (a spectacularly clutch, maddeningly inconsistent guard) and Jonquel Jones (an MVP-quality center who occasionally seems equipped with the motor of a lawnmower). The three of them won the championship in 2024 — not quite dominatingly, not even (according to Lynx fans) fairly.
And then, rather than repeat in 2025, they staggered through the regular season before being eliminated in the first round. They expected 2026 would, with Sabally’s help, be their redemption.
But Sabally turned out not to have recovered from a devastating concussion and featured far more prominently on the injury report than on the court. Ionescu spent the season mired in back pain and shooting woes. The Liberty’s new coach, Chris DeMarco, an NBA disciple of Steve Kerr, stepped immediately into quicksand made of his unfamiliarity with the W and his almost freakish lack of charisma.
And so Stewart, in her 10th WNBA season, found herself hauling her poor, benighted team across the desert of the season and into the playoffs. She played 33 minutes per game, tied for third in the league. She averaged 20.8 points, 8.3 rebounds and 3.3 assists. She kept herself in the MVP conversation — but always in that part of the conversation when the conversationalists defensively remind each other that you really can’t forget about Breanna Stewart.
The Liberty hobbled in as the eighth seed, and were expected, even by many of their supporters, to quickly hobble out.
But they won Game 1 in Minneapolis behind the rare Stewart performance that generates highlights. She (whose 3-point shot fell off years ago) hit multiple triples; she sliced through the lane like an octopus extruding itself between rocks.
The harder work, though — and the more quintessentially Stewart work — came in Game 2.
Consider this three-minute sequence:
With eight minutes left in the second quarter Tuesday, the Minnesota Lynx were hanging around, down 6. Barclays, the Liberty’s Brooklyn, N.Y., arena, was desperate to combust in ecstatic celebration — but the Lynx kept steering trickles of water onto the powder keg. Pauline Astier, the Liberty’s just-this-side-of-reckless French rookie, drove to the basket and got blocked by Olivia Miles, the Lynx’s star and the newly minted Rookie of the Year. Then Miles, who’d been struggling, hit a 3, bringing the Lynx within a possession.
Liberty fans, who have become unwilling connoisseurs of collapse, developed pits in their stomachs. The Liberty committed a shot-clock violation, and those pits sprouted tendrils.
It was at this point that Ionescu (the disappearance of whose shot has been a sub-theme of the season) hit a 3. But before Barclays could properly explode, Napheesa Collier — the Lynx’s marquee forward and Stewart’s business partner — answered with a basket of her own. Four-point lead for the Liberty. A sense that the Lynx, for the first time all night, were developing momentum. Which is when Stewart took the game into her enormous, weathered hands.
What this looked like was Stewart receiving the ball in the paint from Astier, turning to find herself defended by the much shorter Courtney Williams, and nonetheless missing the shot. But Stewart knows, to the everlasting fury of Lynx fans, how to angle her body. She knows how to unfold her tent poles precisely so that they get tangled in her neighbors’ tree limbs. There was a whistle. Personal foul on Williams. TV timeout.
Fouls drawn don’t show up in ordinary box scores (though Stewart is second in the league at 6.3 per game). But imagine you were an alien who had never seen a basketball game: think how demoralizing, how diabolical, the act of drawing a foul would seem. For one thing, it infuriates your opponent. For another, it inches that opponent one little pie-wedge closer to actually being removed from the game. And in the meantime, it transforms that opponent, as if via an energy-sapping laser beam, into a less effective defender.
But the even more vital thing it does — this was Stewart’s true genius on Tuesday — is use up time.
From the moment the whistle blew until the Lynx got the ball back after Stewart’s free throws, the game clock hadn’t moved — but two minutes and seven seconds of actual clock time had elapsed. That’s a timeout’s worth of rest, no small thing if you happen to be in your 10th season and on your way to playing 40 minutes. But that’s also two minutes and seven seconds of Ellie the Elephant dancing, of hip-hop music blasting, of Liberty fans staring daggers at what few visiting Lynx fans had dared to stir with their MILES R.O.T.Y. signs.
Interrupting a comeback with a foul, in basketball, is like interrupting an evening of seduction with a knock on the door from a neighbor with an overflowing toilet. The Lynx’s moment had passed.
And on the very next play, Miles — whom coach Lynx Cheryl Reeve had clearly spent the timeout telling to be aggressive — drove into the paint, the sort of play she’s been finishing with preternatural elegance all year. And Jones blocked her so hard that something in Miles, and in the Lynx, seemed to break. They never threatened the Liberty again.
So, look at the sequence again: an Ionescu 3 and a Jones block, bookending a bunch of Lynx-deflating downtime brought to you by Stewart. But look closer at those bookends: who assisted Ionescu on that 3? Stewart. And who was guarding Miles, steering her directly into Jones’ waiting arms? Stewart.
Stewart was all over this sequence, as she was all over the game, as she will be all over every game that the Liberty play until she retires.
And that brings me to the final reason I would urge you to spend these playoffs cherishing Stewart — appreciating that which we are conditioned, in every fiber of our highlight-loving beings, not to appreciate. Because Stewart, at 32, may not be doing this for much longer.
You know when your parents get to that age when they are still healthy and capable and themselves, but you can see — in their peers, in the apprehensive flutter you feel when you notice you’ve missed their call — that this condition is finite? That’s the moment we’re in with Stewart. Basketball players don’t get better after 32. At some point, all the college, Euroleague, Unrivaled playoffs and All-Star Games begin to wear on a body.
What I’m saying is the basketball equivalent of call your parents.
Watch Stewart — who has just improbably extended her team’s season; who every game does a thousand things that no one bothers to thank her for, or even record — while she’s still here.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
New York Liberty, WNBA, women's sports
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