Morgan Taylor oversees event operations, merchandise and ticketing initiatives for the Liberty and now she has a new challenge, the Long Island Nets
It was another big night at Barclays Center Tuesday night as the New York Liberty beat the Atlanta Dream … and 16,145 fans had a grand old time. The win and the attendance are what’s expected now from the Libs on a nightly basis.
The team on the court is 10-1 and the crowd that supports Sabrina, Breanna, Jonquel etc. is averaging better than 16,000 per game six games into the 22-game home circuit. Both numbers — the win-loss record and the attendance — could wind up historic.
The latter number is more of a surprise than the former. The Liberty averaged 7,776 customers two years ago and 12,730 last year, both considered very good numbers for the W. Getting there has been helped by a number of factors, a winning team first and foremost, but the Tsais’ ownership has been big as well. Back in 2018, before Joe and Clara Wu Tsai bought the Liberty from James Dolan and moved them from the 90-year-old Westchester Center in White Plains to Barclays Center, the Libs drew only 2,823 fans per game (while winning only seven of 34 games.)
You can also attribute it to the “fixer,” Morgan Taylor who is head of business operations for both the Liberty and Long Island Nets. She oversees event operations, merchandise and ticketing initiatives for both teams. as Barbara Barker of Newsday wrote recently. Bottom line: the Freeport, Long Island native has been crucial to the Libs’ success.
[S]he has gained a reputation as a bit of a “fixer,” someone adept at increasing a team’s fan base and generating sales…
It’s a reputation earned in a variety of stops along the way. She started as an intern with the Washington Mystics while at The George Washington University where she also was manager of the women’s basketball team. She had her first stint with the Liberty in 2025 and 2026 when they still played at Madison Square Garden. Then, she took on a bigger challenge when she was hired by Las Vegas Aces as a sales manager before their inaugural season.
“We had to get people to buy into a whole new team in a city that then was not a sports city,” Taylor told Barker. “It was a transient city and a female sport that was an unfamiliar experience . . . It gave me the experience to come back to New York and help build a brand in a new city.”
The Tsais hired her in 2021 as the Liberty’s director of ticket sales in their first season in Brooklyn after surviving both Westchester and the WNBA “wubble” during the COVID pandemic. It was not going to be an easy job, as Barker wrote.
The challenges confronting the Liberty were immense, given that they were asking fans to come to a new arena that, because of COVID-19 restrictions, couldn’t be at full capacity, and fans were required to be vaccinated and tested. Taylor had to communicate with the WNBA and the city to coordinate the implementation of the restrictions, and she had to help communicate with the fans and make them comfortable with them.
Her colleague in the Liberty build was Shana Stephenson, the Liberty’s chief branding officer.
“We had to reconnect with some lapsed fans and re-energize fans who, quite frankly, felt frustrated about the uncertainty,” said Stephenson. “Morgan had pre-existing relationships with our fans. She wasn’t above picking up the phone and talking to fans to answer their questions.”
“Our biggest advantage is our fan base,” Sabrina Ionescu said last season. “Having 18,000 fans that are loud, cheering, rowdy all game is just electric.”
Marine Johannes, who played in Westchester, was asked about the change from Westchester to Brooklyn after Tuesday’s game. She laughed and said, “when we had 10 people? then began counting “… 1, 2, 3,” mimicking the players as they surveyed the crowds back then.
Now, with the Liberty flourishing, Taylor has a new challenge, a new “fix,” the Long Island Nets, the Brooklyn Nets G League affiliate. She was given control of business operations in 2023. It’s not so crucial that Long Island makes money. G League clubs are often loss leaders for the NBA teams they’re affiliated. Some lose seven figures a year. It’s about development, not profit but finding a way to get fans into Nassau Coliseum can’t hurt.
Last season, the team averaged 2.074 fans with a high of 7,325 on Education Night near the end of the season in March, but a low of 625 (not a typo) back in January. They also had six games in Montreal that averaged nearly 7,000, the result of work she did with Ron Goldenberg, who runs international marketing for BSE Global. Nassau Coliseum may not be Westchester Center but it’s still a big challenge for Taylor, as she told our Scott Mitchell in an exclusive interview at season’s end.
Education Night which filled the ample parking lot around the coliseum with school buses is part of one strategy Taylor has pushed: local theme nights. G League rosters are fluid and stars are few. So make it about the community.
“It’s important for us to be a pillar in the community. We can show up authentically and make sure we’re resonating with the fans in certain communities,” Taylor told Mitchell. Those communities can be town-centric like “Hempstead Night,” based on ethnic holidays like Chinese New Year or just fun, like Dale the mascot’s birthday.
“[T]hey’re an opportunity for us to immerse ourselves in the community that we’re honoring and serving for the night. They’re a part of our overall brand experience. We want to make sure that we’re resonating with fans,” she added. The goal is to up the average attendance to 3,000 a game, a 50% increase.
Will it work? Taylor by now has a record, a reputation and she also has a personal history that speaks to her ambitions. Back in high school in Glen Cove, she was a rising young hooper. But after leading her team to a championship as a junior, she blew out her patella tendon early in her senior year. That ended her competitive basketball career, but she wanted to stay in sports and so she did.
“I gave up my hoop dreams on the court, but I knew that I wanted to be involved in sports,” she told Barker. “I knew I wanted to be involved in a women’s basketball program, and a strong women’s basketball program.”
And so she has.