Courtney Vandersloot admitted there was a period of trouble this offseason.
She knows how free agency and its meetings work.
Just last year, the Liberty point guard overcame that situation and ended up leaving the only WNBA team he ever played for.
Vandersloot never thought she’d end up living in Brooklyn.
“I think very few people did that,” she says. The same could have happened to Jonquel Jones, the former Connecticut Sun MVP and a key figure in the Liberty’s 2023 WNBA Finals run, when his contract expires.
However, after Jones signed a two-year contract to remain with the Liberty and Brianna Stewart was designated as a core and secured an additional one-year contract, the Liberty, which had become a core from their postseason performance, fell to an ace and super It was a blow to the team. In 2024, the obstacles that still stand in the way remained.
General manager Jonathan Kolb revamped the bench with Kennedy Burke, Leoni Fievich and Ivana Dozic, which Vandersloot said usually “makes a good team a great team.”
But the first step was to keep everything, or as much as possible, the same as the Liberty lost Liberty forward Stephanie Dolson to the Mystics.
“I believed that [Jones] “I wanted to be a part of what we were building, but we obviously fell short of our ultimate goal,” Vandersloot said Wednesday during a visit to the Lerner Children’s Pavilion at the Hospital for Special Surgery. said after. But once she told me she was coming back, she could sleep at night and everything was fine. ”
So once Jones and Stewart signed the contract, the rest of the Liberty’s presents began to fall into place.
Vandersloot did not play overseas, instead training since turning pro, though he has had a separate career in Turkey, Russia and Hungry.
And in instances like Wednesday, Vandersloot represented Liberty in a community whose footprint and profile have blossomed since returning to Barclays Center in 2021.
Vandersloot, 35, went between the inpatient and outpatient rooms at Lerner Children’s Pavilion, taking pictures and signing autographs with children and staff.
She gave an 8-year-old patient a shirt, learned about an upcoming trip, and learned that their birthdays were in the same month.
Vandersloot said she understood what the patient and family were going through because her mother had battled cancer and the hospital visit was “something that was close to my heart.”
This time, and in other appearances since arriving in Brooklyn, Vandersloot has been spotted at Liberty Society.
And based on her past experience, that wasn’t always the case.
“I come from a time when the WNBA wasn’t necessarily like that,” Vandersloot said. “A lot of times, you walk in the room and no one knows what the WNBA is.”
Last year, the Liberty achieved record attendance with franchise-best regular season and postseason wins of 32-8 over the Mystics and Sun.
At point guard they had Vandersloot.
Stewart won his second MVP award.
Sabrina Ionescu set the WNBA’s single-season record for 3-pointers.
Jones rediscovered his vintage talent as a forward and became perhaps the Liberty’s most effective player in the postseason.
It took some time for the group to come together, especially since Vandersloot and Jones were injured during training camp.
It would have been difficult to integrate three rookie starters if every possible practice was possible, but that wasn’t the case.
They figured things out “on the fly,” Vandersloot said, and in the playoffs they also learned how to get through initial runs together.
So if anything, the offseason has been defined by most lineups, especially the starters, avoiding change and being stable.
This year, Vandersloot said, they’re in a “completely different place.” they know what works. They know what is not. They know that the Aces are still the team to beat.
And that last one in particular will shape everything that follows.
“We came into the game without a lot of experience as a group,” Vandersloot said of last year’s WNBA Finals. “So we had our personal experience, but in the final stages we found out that the aces had been there before. That wasn’t the case. That’s how it turned out. .”
