Releasing the Dobermans

In which the Liberty grind it out

Liberty 83 - Fever 75

Anyone can win when they play well. But to play terribly, to fall behind by double digits, to shoot as if both distance from the basket and proximity to the basket created unconquerable difficulties — and still somehow to win, that is impressive. And that (to the great disappointment of countless Fever-jerseyed twelve-year-olds and one excitable CBS announcing crew) is what the Liberty managed last night. Not since Game 5 against the Lynx in 2024 has Barclays seen such hideous magnificence. Look on my free throws, ye rivals, and despair.

Some notes from an ugly, improbable, unreasonably satisfying win:

We wouldn’t have won without Stewie and her 30-points, but God did she make it look hard. Watching Stewie, on nights like this — missed bunnies, a parade of free throws — feels like watching a kid who is stuck in a sleeping bag hop down a flight of stairs. You wince, he stumbles and bashes and staggers. But he gets there. (Incidentally, the TV cameras caught part of a Stewie tirade (directed at Andrew Wade? It was hard to tell) that looked intense. I’ve got no problem with it, but to be (briefly) fair to the Fever, if that had been Caitlin Clark, we would all have gotten blaring alerts on our phones from the government, like when there’s going to be a flash flood.)

JJ was much less productive than against Toronto, but she did not, to her and the coaching staff’s credit, get lost in a funk. She grabbed twelve emphatic rebounds, and managed a comeback-securing no-look assist to Stewie on a fast break in the fourth quarter.

Johannes hit the only two 3’s we made all night (we were 2 of 18!), but she does not, rightly, have a place on the court when defense is the theme, so she mostly watched the second half.

Leo couldn’t shoot her way out of a paper bag — she missed open 3’s and open layups both — but she is perhaps the key to our defense. In a late stretch when it appeared that this might become the Kelsey Mitchell game, Leo switched onto her and shut that down. (The game effectively ended, fittingly, with Leo holding a plank pose over Mitchell’s prone body.)

Astier was mostly quiet… until, with Clark in foul trouble, she managed two critical, acrobatic layups (and a gorgeous assist to JJ) that put the game away. We still need Sabrina (side note: Sabrina and Caitlin Clark have in common reputations as 3-point savants that belies their actual value as attention-drawing facilitators. Compare and contrast, with particular attention to their off-court fashion choices.) But anyway, with every game Sabrina misses, a certain All About Eve-esque subplot — with Astier as the ingenue and Sabrina as Bette Davis — becomes harder to ignore.

Satou missed her share of open 3’s (4), but her value as a rebound-grabbing, 3-point-play converting beast is becoming ever clearer. Also with her newly bleached hair and transparent fitted ear-plugs, she looks like a visitor from basketball’s Mad Max future.

Plucked from Satou’s vision board

Before the season started, every Liberty-watcher wanted to know: what was going to be our identity in the DeMarco era? And every day DeMarco would gruffly explain that we don’t get to choose, that it would be a matter of what other teams felt when they played us. For the first few games of the season it seemed that our identity might be: the team that rains 3’s and manages to score a hundred points no matter what. Now a quite different answer is emerging: the team that, when things are going poorly, turns games around with smothering, ferocious defense. Back in the 90’s Bulls era, announcers would talk about “releasing the Dobermans,” when Pippen et al would suddenly implement a full-court press and the other team would be reduced to a panicky mess. That’s the phrase that kept coming to mind for me late in last night’s third quarter. We, and the rest of the league, thought we were an expensively acquired team of show dogs . Maybe we’re actually Dobermans?

See you for what should (knock on a dusty Mohegan Sun roulette wheel) be a considerably easier time in Connecticut.