What should New York Liberty fans be watching for during preseason?

Will the offense look much different than last year, when it was the WNBA’s best in the regular season? According to the Liberty, it should.

A seven-month WNBA offseason leaves us with an extra sharp hunger for hoops, especially for the defending champion, star-studded New York Liberty.

Their preseason contest on Friday night against the Connecticut Sun will be their first action since Game 5 of the WNBA Finals, 204 days earlier. The team’s path to repeating will be quite different than the one to the first championship in franchise history, given Betnijah Laney-Hamilton’s season-long absence, Kayla Thornton’s departure, and June’s EuroBasket competition, which will temporarily pluck three key pieces from the rotation.

Alas, none of our questions will be answered over two preseason games, the second of which will take place at University of Oregon, the alma mater of Sabrina Ionescu and Nyara Sabally. But we’ll learn something, right?

“I think it’s just understanding the purpose that we’re going to be playing with, and kind of our offensive and defensive principles,” said Sabrina Ionescu. “We’ve changed a few things offensively, and I think being able to see that pace of play that we’re going to play with is going to be a lot different than last year.”

In 2024, the New York Liberty were the league’s best offense, posting a 107 offensive rating. And yet, like Ionescu’s comments, much of the chatter out of training camp has referenced a shift in offensive approach.

There is a stated desire to play faster, and lean even further into 5-out concepts than the team did last season.

“I mean, it’s preseason,” Head Coach Sandy Brondello cautioned, before adding, “We always want to go out and play to the style that we’ve implemented. So, it’s getting some experience in playing the little position-less, five-out action that we want, understanding how to play at two speeds a little bit better. Sometimes we don’t downshift very well to our secondary actions, and getting a feel how to play, and play with each other a little bit.”

If there is one area to keep an eye on in New York’s two preseason contests, it’s the offense. Will alignments be different? Will their pace, with the downhill-minded Natasha Cloud now in the backcourt, be much faster?

The Liberty seem to hope so. This (slight) shift in philosophy can, in part, be attributed to Sonia Raman, Brondello’s newest assistant coach…

Per the players, Raman seems like the de facto offensive coordinator, as she introduced much of New York’s basic offensive principles at training camp this year. And it should be no surprise as to what her initial focus was.

“We’re starting with our running habits,” Raman told me. “Trying to get out and win those first three steps and see if we can beat teams up the floor. You know, try to be as organized as we can in that flow stage of the offense, you know, as we downshift a little bit and slow down. And then obviously, we progress to that half-court offense and trying to really be able to execute with teams.”

Over two seasons of the Breanna Stewart, Jonquel Jones, and Ionescu-led Liberty, their offense has gotten them into trouble more often than their defense. They scored just 69 points in Game 4 of the 2023 WNBA Finals, securing their defeat to the Las Vegas Aces. Even in their 2024 Finals victory, the nail-biting Game 5 was tied at just 60 entering overtime.

It goes beyond the numbers, of course. A well-oiled machine that seems poised to decimate all opponents occasionally falters in clutch time. The ball sticks, there’s uncertainty in actions, Jones doesn’t get post touches; for such a dominant team, it’s odd.

But 2025 is a new year, and there is a new ball-handler in Natasha Cloud, taking the place of Courtney Vandersloot. At this stage of their careers, this is probably an upgrade, all due respect to the departed Hall of Fame.

Cloud has described her main goal, for now, as learning the offense and “being able to run it with fluidity.”

The long-time Mystic comes off one season with the Phoenix Mercury, where she played with Diana Taurasi in the backcourt. Though it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, Taurasi and Ionescu do share similarities in their long-range shooting and ability to function on or off the ball.

Cloud sees that too: “What I loved about playing with DT and Sab was that I get to take a little bit of weight off of their shoulders by being able to get into the paint, engaging two [defenders], and then finding them as they’re moving and creating easy shots for them.”

The hope is that defenders don’t sag as far off Cloud as they did off Vandersloot, who shot 28.5% from deep as a Lib and ended her time here as, essentially, a non-spacer. Cloud enters just under 31% for her career, but has occasionally felt more dangerous than that. Liberty fans will remember round one, game two of the 2023 playoffs, when Cloud posted a career-high 33 points including five threes, nearly staving off elimination…

Expect to see plenty of guard-to-guard action with Cloud and Ionescu, who has openly discussed becoming more of a screener in training camp, in addition to her excitement to play with her new point guard: “It’s gonna be great. Just the ability to play off one another, her ability to get downhill and create. She’s through and through a pass-first point guard. So our ability to be able to use that to our advantage, every time she drives, she’s gonna collapse the defense.”

Indeed that is the hope for Natasha Cloud and the New York Liberty as they enter 2025 with not a new look, but an altered one. Presumptive fifth starter Leonie Fiebich is still overseas with her Spanish League team, Valencia, playing in the final round of their playoffs. Valencia is currently up 1-0 in the best-of-3 series, meaning a win on Sunday will end their season, and Fiebich will join the Liberty soon after. A loss means Valencia will play again on May 18.

In any case, Fiebich will not be around to join the Liberty during their two preseason games, and Breanna Stewart, coming off a meniscus cleanup surgery, will miss the first one on Friday…

Still, eagle-eyed viewers will get a look at the Cloud-Ionescu backcourt on Friday, the general pace and spacing of the team, and their first look at Rebekah Gardner, the 34-year-old guard coming off an achilles rehab, but with a real opportunity to crack the rotation.

These are some keys for the New York Liberty as they play their first organized basketball in seven months on Friday night. Tip-off against the Connecticut Sun is scheduled for 7:00 p.m. ET.