Jonquel Jones, a new member of the Liberty, was finishing her workout at the team’s practice facility at Barclays Center in late January when she saw assistant GM Ohemaa Nyanin’s eyes go wide. Courtney Vandersloot had announced over Twitter and Instagram that she’d be joining Jones and Breanna Stewart, the team’s other marquee offseason acquisition, in New York.
“I just started screaming and going crazy in the gym,” Jones says. “Just going super, super crazy and just being super excited about everything.”
The creation of a superteam in Brooklyn did not happen by chance. The Liberty had planned carefully for months, if not years, a vision scribbled on whiteboards in the back offices of Barclays Center by general manager Jonathan Kolb and coach Sandy Brondello. The players had been no less careful in their planning, conspiring for months in a group text to find a way to play together and hashing over the implications in intimate family conversations in Seattle, the Chicago suburbs and Connecticut. Even still, dozens of small moments had to tip the right way for them to all wind up together.
