There’s a phrase that gets used in job interviews — the dreaded “What’s your greatest weakness?” — where the expected move is to repackage a strength as a flaw. I’m a perfectionist. I care too much. I work too hard. Nobody believes it, but everybody plays along because the alternative is admitting you don’t have a good answer. I kept thinking about that dynamic while reading Breanna Stewart’s postgame comments after the Liberty fell to the Portland Fire, 81-74, on May 25. Stewart, who scored 25 points on 15-of-17 from the line and still lost, told ESPN: “I’m happy it’s happening early and not late.”
I covered the WNBA for two years before the layoff, and I heard some version of that quote from a lot of players on a lot of teams. It almost never came from champions. It came from teams trying to convince themselves, and the room full of reporters, that the losing was educational. That it was building something. Champions don’t usually need to narrate their own adversity in real time. They just win.
The full quote is worse, or better, depending on how much you trust the Liberty’s self-assessment. “Nobody expected this,” Stewart said. “Not to say we thought it was going to be easy, because we definitely didn’t. But it’s going to take time. There’s going to be highs and lows. While it seems we’re in the lows right now, eventually we’ll get to a place where everybody’s really confident and comfortable with what’s going on.” That word — “eventually” — is doing enormous heavy lifting for a team that won a championship two years ago and was the consensus preseason favorite entering 2026. You don’t say “eventually” when you believe the destination is close. You say it when you’re not sure where the road goes.
The Liberty dropped to 3-4 after losing three consecutive home games at Barclays Center — their worst home skid since 2022. Golden State beat them 87-70. Dallas got them 91-76. And then Portland, an expansion team that literally did not exist fourteen months ago, closed with a 12-0 fourth-quarter run and took it 81-74. The Fire are 4-3 and ranked seventh in NBC Sports’ Week 2 power rankings. The Liberty are tenth. Portland has beaten New York twice — including their first-ever WNBA win, a 98-96 buzzer-beater on May 12 courtesy of Sarah Ashlee Barker’s putback. An expansion franchise is using the defending champions as a developmental milestone.
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I want to be careful here, because the injury context is real and it matters. Sabrina Ionescu missed the first five games with a rolled ankle, made her season debut against Dallas on May 25 — going 4-for-15 with 7 assists in 31 minutes — and then sat out the Portland game entirely for injury management of her left foot on the back-to-back. Satou Sabally has been in and out since opening night, first with a cyst, then illness; she exited the Portland loss after four minutes with two early fouls and flu-like symptoms. Leonie Fiebich hasn’t suited up at all. Betnijah Laney-Hamilton missed time for personal reasons. The Liberty built a roster to win now — Stewart, Ionescu, and Jonquel Jones all took the regular max over the supermax to create flexibility, and Sabally signed at a discount — and they can’t put that roster on the floor.
But here’s what I keep circling back to: injuries aren’t new information for this franchise. The 2025 Liberty started 9-0 and then cratered to 27-17 when Stewart missed 13 games, Jones missed 13, and Ionescu missed 6. They lost in the first round of the playoffs to Phoenix. So the Liberty have now experienced the same failure mode — build a superteam, watch it disintegrate through unavailability — in back-to-back seasons. At what point does the pattern stop being bad luck and start being a structural vulnerability? Roster construction that only works when everyone is healthy isn’t really roster construction. It’s wishful thinking with max contracts.
And the coaching dimension complicates everything further. Sandy Brondello won a title in 2024, oversaw the 2025 collapse, and got fired. She’s now coaching the expansion Toronto Tempo (3-4, ranked eleventh — basically the same record as the team that fired her). Her replacement is Chris DeMarco, a four-time NBA champion as a Warriors assistant under Steve Kerr, and a man who has never been a head coach at any level. After the Portland loss, DeMarco said: “This is how it goes sometimes. We had a lead, we let it get away, turnovers hurt us.” That’s a sentence you could generate by feeding every losing postgame press conference into a language model and hitting shuffle. It’s the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
During the three-game skid, per Yahoo Sports, the Liberty averaged 73.3 points per game — fourteenth in the league — committed 45 turnovers, and got outscored 139-109 in second halves. Those aren’t early-season chemistry numbers. Those are structural collapse numbers. Teams that are “figuring it out” don’t surrender 37 three-point attempts across a three-game stretch. Teams that quit competing for quarters at a time do.
The counter-argument writes itself, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t have merit. The WNBA season is 40 games. The 2025 Aces started slow and won the title. It’s May. Ionescu is barely back. Sabally has played fragments. The Liberty snapped the streak on May 27, beating Phoenix 84-74 behind Marine Johannès’s 21 points and a 23-0 third-quarter run. Maybe that’s the real Liberty showing up, and the losing streak was the aberration.
But “I’m happy it’s happening early” isn’t what you say when you believe the aberration is over. It’s what you say when you’re building infrastructure for the next time it happens. It’s the championship version of the job-interview weakness flip — repackaging a losing streak as a learning experience because the alternative is admitting you might not have answers. Stewart is too smart and too accomplished to not know what her team looks like right now. And what her team looks like right now is a defending champion that’s managing expectations in Week 3 of a title defense. I’m not sure what to make of that, exactly. But I know that last year’s Liberty felt inevitable, and this year’s Liberty feel like they’re trying to convince you — and themselves — that inevitability is still coming. Eventually.
