For nearly three quarters of basketball at Crypto.com Arena on Tuesday night, the New York Liberty looked like a team still haunted by its own ghosts. Down nine in the second half, shorthanded by four rotation players, playing on the road against a Los Angeles Sparks squad desperate for relevance — the Liberty were teetering. Then Breanna Stewart decided enough was enough.
Stewart erupted for 19 of her game-high 29 points in the second half, fueling a dramatic comeback that lifted New York past Los Angeles 113–109. It was a win that felt bigger than the scoreline. It was a statement, a purge, and maybe the moment this Liberty team stops looking over its shoulder at what went wrong and starts sprinting toward what could go right.
The Ghost of June 21
To understand what Tuesday night meant, you have to go back to June 21, 2026 — Court Origins Night, a celebration of the WNBA’s 30th anniversary featuring three of the league’s original franchises: the New York Liberty, Los Angeles Sparks, and Phoenix Mercury. The Liberty led by 17 points. They had the game buried. And then they didn’t.
Nneka Ogwumike, somehow, someway, drilled a buzzer-beating three-pointer to give the Sparks a 98–97 win — one of the most stunning collapses in recent Liberty history. New York led for 87 percent of that game and still lost. What followed was catastrophic: the Liberty dropped seven of their next ten games, the worst stretch of their superteam era.
Tuesday’s rematch, then, was never just a regular-season road game. It was a referendum.
A Slow Burn Before the Fire
The Liberty came out flying. Sabrina Ionescu, back in form after battling foot and back injuries that limited her to just 15 games earlier in the season, looked like someone who had been waiting a long time to remind the basketball world who she is. She poured in 14 points in the first quarter alone, a blistering start that gave New York a 36–30 lead after one.
Then the Sparks settled in. Los Angeles clawed back through the second quarter and took a 56–53 halftime lead, flipping the script on the road team. In the third quarter, Rae Burrell — the Sparks’ most dangerous offensive weapon on a night when Kelsey Plum was sidelined with a lower-leg injury — buried a three-pointer that pushed the lead to 81–74, Los Angeles’s largest advantage of the second half. The arena got loud. The Liberty looked vulnerable.
Old habits, old ghosts. It must have felt familiar in the worst way.
The Takeover
This is when Breanna Stewart changed the game.
Stewart, who entered Tuesday averaging 12.1 points per game in second halves this season at a 49.8 percent clip across 27 games, did not blink. She attacked, she created, she distributed. The Liberty responded to that 81–74 hole with an 11–4 run to close the third quarter and take a one-point lead into the fourth. The momentum had shifted, and Stewart was the reason.
In the fourth quarter, it was bench depth that sealed it. Marine Fauthoux hit two consecutive three-pointers to push New York’s lead to 93–86, providing the breathing room the Liberty desperately needed. Los Angeles responded, challenged, and even won a coach’s challenge to overturn a foul call that would have sent Stewart to the line — a brief momentum swing that had the Sparks believing. It didn’t last. Stewart drew the defense, found Rebecca Allen in the corner, and Allen calmly buried the dagger three. New York maintained a two-possession cushion for nearly the entire final eight minutes and closed it out, 113–109.
Final line for Stewart: 29 points on 11-of-19 shooting, 7 assists, 4 rebounds, 4 steals. A complete, authoritative performance from the third-leading scorer in the WNBA this season at 21.1 points per game.
When Your Bench Beats Their Entire Team
Here is the detail that deserves to be shouted: the Liberty bench outscored the Sparks reserves 41–19. On a night when New York was without Satou Sabally (concussion protocol), Marine Johannes (ankle), Leonie Fiebich (foot), and Anneli Maley by coach’s decision, the second unit didn’t just hold the fort — they won the game.
Rebekah Gardner led the way with 15 points. Fauthoux added 13, including those two back-to-back fourth-quarter threes that broke the game open. Han Xu contributed 13 more in the interior, providing both scoring and rim deterrence. Allen delivered the dagger. This was collective toughness from a group that was supposed to be the team’s soft underbelly on a shorthanded night.
That 41-point bench performance wasn’t just impressive — it was the difference between a redemption story and another gut-punch loss. Ionescu finished with 27 points, 5 three-pointers, 6 assists, and 6 rebounds. The Liberty had two players score 20 or more and three players reach double figures off the bench. In a game that tight, that kind of distributed production is almost impossible to defend.
Ogwumike’s Magnificent, Lonely Effort
There is a sadder story to tell on the other side of this game, and it belongs to Nneka Ogwumike.
Ogwumike, who was listed as game-time doubtful with an illness, played anyway and delivered her fourth consecutive near-triple-double: 21 points, 9 rebounds, 9 assists. She is averaging 20.6 points, 8.4 rebounds, and 2.8 assists this season while shooting 47.4 percent from the field and 24.3 percent from three. She is one of the finest players in the league right now, posting numbers that would make her a franchise cornerstone on any contender.
Instead, she plays for a Sparks team that is now 10–17, mired in a six-game losing streak, sitting 12 games back in the Western Conference with their playoff hopes effectively extinguished. The team’s season plus-minus sits at a dismal minus-131. Kelsey Plum, who was averaging over 15 points per game before going down with her injury, is unavailable. Burrell led the team with 24 points on Tuesday night but cannot carry this roster on his own. Ogwumike nearly wills herself through walls and it still is not enough.
She remains the one undeniable bright spot on a franchise going through a painful rebuild, and watching her nearly record a triple-double in a loss encapsulates everything about what this Sparks season has been.
What This Means for New York’s Stretch Run
The Liberty improved to 16–12 with the win, sitting third in the Eastern Conference — two games behind the Indiana Fever (18–10) for the top seed, with 13 games remaining. The playoff picture is tight, the margins are thin, and there is zero room for another seven-game slide of the variety New York just endured.
The Eastern Conference standings are a reminder of how compressed the race is: Indiana leads, the Atlanta Dream sit at 16–10 just a game back in second, and the Washington Mystics at 15–12 are breathing down New York’s neck in fourth. A slip here costs a seeding. Two slips could cost a home series. The Liberty cannot afford to be the team that gives games away anymore.
Which is precisely why Thursday’s game against the Las Vegas Aces (19–8) matters so much. The Aces are the second-best team in the Western Conference, led by A’ja Wilson, who is averaging a staggering 26.1 points per game — the best scorer in the league by a wide margin. If this Liberty team has genuinely turned a corner, as Yahoo Sports put it when they described New York as having “flipped the page” coming out of the All-Star break, then a competitive showing against Las Vegas will validate it. A blowout loss will raise questions all over again.
The Pattern Behind the Explosion
What makes Stewart’s second-half takeover particularly meaningful is that it was not a fluke. It is a pattern.
Across 27 games this season, Stewart has averaged 12.1 points in second halves alone, shooting 49.8 percent from the field in those situations. That is 326 second-half points accumulated over the course of a WNBA season — a volume and efficiency that speaks to a player who does not just survive late-game pressure, but actively hunts it. Her season plus-minus of plus-61 is a reflection of what the numbers already suggest: when Stewart is on the floor and engaged, the Liberty are a different team.
She was drafted first overall in 2016 out of UConn, spent seven seasons building a legacy in Seattle, and has now spent four seasons in New York adding to it. At 31 years old, she carries 318 career games of experience into every fourth quarter, and it shows. The 19 second-half points against the Sparks were not the exception. They were the rule, finally made visible on the biggest stage of a road comeback.
Turning the Page
The Liberty are not a finished product. They are still missing key contributors to injury, still two games out of the top seed, still chasing a postseason positioning that felt more comfortable before June’s collapse. But Tuesday night in Los Angeles was something they needed badly: proof that when the game gets hard and the deficit mounts, they can respond.
Stewart can take over. Ionescu can carry a first quarter on her back. The bench can outscore a starting unit. Allen can hit the corner three when the game is on the line. This team has the pieces. For one night at Crypto.com Arena, against the franchise that broke their hearts five weeks ago, they showed they also have the resolve.
The ghosts of June 21 are not fully exorcised. They won’t be until New York wins something that truly matters in October. But for the first time in a while, this Liberty team looked like one that had stopped being haunted and started doing the haunting.
Thursday against Las Vegas is next. The real test begins now.