Breanna Stewart put up 25 and 11 in a Commissioner’s Cup final without A’ja Wilson on the floor, and the New York Liberty won it for the second time in four years, and still people are going to spend the next week debating whether the dynasty label fits.
It fits. It fit last year.
https://twitter.com/NBA/status/2072134870189355226
The Aces were down their best player (right ankle) and they still pushed New York to 93-85, which is the kind of thing that gets used as a “but.” Jackie Young dropped 31 and made it interesting in the fourth quarter. The Aces are a real team. That’s the counter, and it’s worth saying out loud: the Commissioner’s Cup is not a championship, and a game without Wilson is a game with an asterisk attached. Fine. Accept all of that. Now look at what the Liberty actually did.
They led 51-37 at halftime. They drew 29 free throw attempts to the Aces’ 14. Sabrina Ionescu, eight games back from a back injury, scored 26 points and hit the game-clinching three-pointer with 15.7 seconds left. When Stewart tried to hand the MVP award to Ionescu after the game, Ionescu shook her head and the whole bench was already chanting “Stewie.” Two years of this. Same building, same two names at the center of it, same result.
The dynasty conversation has been late for a while now. My mom texts me after every Liberty game asking whether they’re as good as people are saying, and honestly the answer keeps being: they’re better. The reason nobody wants to commit to the word is that the Liberty haven’t done anything disruptive. They didn’t blow it up and rebuild. They didn’t make a splashy trade that changed the identity of the roster. They kept Stewart, kept Ionescu, trusted the people in the building, added pieces without breaking what was already working. In a sports media moment that treats franchise-altering reconstruction as the only serious response to anything, the Liberty have just been quietly, boringly correct about everything for two years. That’s harder to write about than a blockbuster.
Stewart is now a three-time Commissioner’s Cup champion (2021 with Seattle, 2023 and 2026 with New York) and a two-time Cup MVP. Both of those are firsts in the WNBA. The league has been running this tournament since 2021, and no other franchise has won it twice. The Liberty have now won it twice — 2023 and 2026, with other teams splitting the intervening two years between them. These are the kinds of facts that, in any other sport, would already have the dynasty conversation locked in, backed up, and done.
The counter worth addressing is the one about stakes — a midseason tournament isn’t the championship, and if the Liberty come up short in the Finals again, none of this holds. That’s true. But two Commissioner’s Cup titles in four years, with the league’s best player putting up 25-and-11 while the other team’s best player sits out, and then offering the MVP trophy to her teammate because she felt it wasn’t entirely hers — that’s a culture and a team, not an accident. Organizations that win like this don’t usually stop.
The dynasty is not premature. It’s actually overdue.
Two Commissioner’s Cups. One quiet, devastating argument.
