Olaf Lange has spent enough time with Sabrina Ionescu to know when she is clicking. The New York Liberty assistant coach warms up the guard before each game, and he’s been instrumental in how she has expanded her skill set this year, coaching her in driving more to the rim and developing a more delicate touch from midrange. And on Sunday, before Game 4 of the WNBA semifinals against the Las Vegas Aces, Lange was confident.
She has it today.
“You just know,” Lange says. “She doesn’t speak more or less. It’s just the way she goes about it. More of a sense, I can’t put words to it, but I knew.”
Ionescu was stymied by the Aces in an uncharacteristically quiet Game 3. She did not score at all through the first three quarters and finished the loss with just four points. (She averaged 22.5 in the first two games as New York took a 2–0 series lead.) Ionescu used the day after the defeat to watch film and take a few specific points about screening and how she had been moving off the ball. But what heartened Lange was how she carried herself on Sunday. This season has seen the 26-year-old grow into a more vocal, confident leader, and it felt clear to him that would manifest in Game 4.
Ionescu simply was not going to allow Vegas to beat her like that again.
“She was aggressive right from the get-go,” Lange says. “There were a few things we talked about, and she put them into action, but mostly it was that mindset.”
Ionescu led all scorers with 22 points to help the Liberty knock off the Aces, 76–62, in order to earn a trip back to the WNBA Finals. She was joined by a dominant Breanna Stewart, who finished with 19 points, 14 rebounds, five assists and four blocks. The pair helped weather early foul trouble for New York and kept the game close before finishing out with a smothering fourth quarter. The Liberty have never experienced a losing streak this season: Each one of their losses has been followed by a win. They kept that statistic intact on Sunday.
That meant vanquishing an old foe. It was the Aces, of course, who defeated the Liberty in the 2023 Finals, and that loss shaped much of the last year for the team. But while revenge in the semifinals may have been nice, it felt incidental here, the players said. They have bigger goals.
“We haven’t done anything yet,” Stewart said. “This was a tough series, an emotional series for a number of different reasons, but we’re going to the Finals… I’m not satisfied.”
The Finals will begin in New York on Thursday with the Liberty facing either the Minnesota Lynx or the Connecticut Sun. That semifinal will be decided with a Game 5 on Tuesday.
New York’s emphatic performance in Game 4 felt like a return to form after the listless showing in Game 3. A crucial part of that was a revived Ionescu. In order to open her up, New York split up ballhandling duties more in Game 4, giving some to Stewart. (“We’ve been continuing to develop Stewie as a handler,” said Liberty coach Sandy Brondello. “She’s just high-energy, highly skilled, so why not use all those skills?”) That let Ionescu get more aggressive with screening and establishing herself early on. And that individual offensive performance was supported by a strong collective defense.
This is where the roster has developed the most this year—the way in which the Liberty are most different from who they were last season—yet the defense in Game 3 felt reminiscent of how it had unsuccessfully played the Aces in 2023.
“In the past, it was just a lot of one-on-one, just them driving the ball down our throats and really picking on certain matchups,” says New York center Jonquel Jones. “We had to be a little bit better in terms of not playing into their hands… We’ve grown too much for us to play that type of way.”
They did not repeat those mistakes for Game 4. The Liberty held the Aces to their lowest scoring output of the year, with a tough, gritty defense that shone especially in the fourth quarter. New York entered the period up by just two. Jones had sat much of the third quarter with four fouls, and so had 6' 4" rookie Leonie Fiebich, putting two of its most effective defenders on the bench for a crucial stretch. But with both on the floor again for the fourth, they made their presence known, and they helped initiate an overwhelming shutdown.
That was clearest on three-time MVP forward A’ja Wilson. The engine of the Aces had managed to keep producing as some of the guards around her faltered. “She’s a team responsibility, right?” Jones says. “Guarding her is a team job.” Wilson scored 16 points in the first three quarters. But that stopped there. She did not shoot even once for the first seven and a half minutes of the fourth.
“They’re going to A’ja, that’s what they did, and we were just collapsing a lot so that she had to give it up,” Fiebich says. “Then we were just scrambling, and no one wanted to take a tough shot.”
The Liberty ultimately outscored the Aces 23–11 in the fourth quarter.
“Our scramble defense was as good as it’s been,” says Liberty guard Courtney Vandersloot. “I think we were on a string. A lot of it is just kind of knowing. It can’t always be communication… We just have to understand and know who’s next.”
That has been one of the biggest changes this season for the Liberty. They have spoken all year of their improved chemistry and their increased trust. It’s partially a product of bonding after their painful loss to the Aces last year in the Finals, partially a product of specific team meetings, and mostly a product of time. The core that was assembled last year in free agency has now had two seasons to jell and coalesce. The players know each other now. They can trust each other enough to work through foul trouble. They can believe their young guard will not let herself get beat twice in a row. They can read each other well enough to shut down the best player in the league in the fourth quarter. They can do exactly what they were built to do: They can leave no doubt they are the best team in the WNBA. And they now have one more series to prove their point.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Sabrina Ionescu Finds Scoring Touch As Liberty Return to WNBA Finals .