New York Liberty Tops Off 5-Year Glow Up With 1st WNBA Championship Title
Clara Wu Tsai and her husband, Joe Tsai, bought the Liberty in 2019 and spent the next five years transforming the team into a No.1 seed who won their first championship on Sunday night.
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In 2018, the New York Liberty got kicked out of Madison Square Garden, the arena where the team had played since forming in 1997. Despite being ranked 4th in the WNBA for attendance and regularly attracting around 10,000 fans per game, they were moved from a 19,000-seat arena to the barely 5,000-seat Westchester County Center in White Plains, New York. A MSG spokeswoman said at the time the franchise had lost millions over the years, even though attendance for the Liberty and teams across the league had been on the rise. Basically, the team’s then-owner, the Madison Square Garden Company led by James Dolan, was very much over owning this women’s sports team and wanted to sell. (Huge boooo to Dolan, who donated to Trump’s campaign in 2016 and 2020.)
“They need to find an owner who is committed to the team and women’s basketball,” Newsday sports columnist Barbara Barker told WYNC at the time. “I don’t think it’s ever been James Dolan’s thing. His thing is the Knicks.”
Enter Clara Wu Tsai—and her husband, Joe Tsai, the billionaire chairperson of the Alibaba Group who owns the Brooklyn Nets. The couple bought the Liberty in 2019 for an undisclosed amount and spent the next five years transforming the team into a No.1 seed who won their first WNBA championship on Sunday night. When people say, “invest in women’s sports,” this is one of the stories they’re talking about.
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“From the earliest days, what I remember is that no one wanted to buy the team,” Wu Tsai recently told CNN. “The first feeling out there was we thought that the fundamentals were actually very good. Not only are the best female basketball players in the world playing this league, but of course New York and the tri-state area is this country’s largest media market.” Top-tier athletes + New York City as a home base = success? What a crazy thought!
“The first thing we did was bring the team back to New York City to play at the Barclays Center, much closer to the fans,” she continued. “And then we started to invest in the team. We built a state-of-the-art locker room, and we invested in our performance team, and over four years, through drafts, through trades, and free agency, we assembled a team of stars.” The new ownership also allowed the marketing team a chance to rebrand, with Liberty CEO Keia Clarke and Chief Brand Officer Shana Stephenson eventually introducing the world to Ellie the Elephant in 2021. Ellie has since become the WNBA’s most viral and most recognizable character, and possibly the second most beloved elephant in the world, behind only Disney’s Dumbo.
Wu Tsai said that landing star center Breanna Stewart in 2023 was a major moment and ultimately got other star players to take a chance on this once-struggling franchise. “Signing her gave other players the confidence to sign with us, and after she came and brought along some other stars, it allowed us to start to win,” Wu Tsai told the outlet.
And win they did! The Liberty made the finals in 2023 but lost the title to the Las Vegas Aces by one point in Game 4. This year, they faced off with the Aces again in the semi-finals, this time winning Game 4 handily, by a score of 76-62. They entered the 2024 playoffs as the No.1 seed and finished it with their first WNBA championship title Sunday night in Game 5 against the Minnesota Lynx. It was the second game of the finals that went into overtime.
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Beyond the literal victory, the WNBA Finals TV ratings have been record-breaking. Viewership for Sunday night’s game will be released over the next few days, but Game 3 was the most-watched WNBA Final game on cable, according to ESPN PR, with 1.4 million viewers and a peak of 2 million—a 112% increase from Game 3 of the 2023 Finals on ABC.
“Congratulations to all of you, this incredible team, the culture that you have built here, the investment that they’ve made in women,” ESPN’s Holly Rowe said during the post-game press conference. “This is what women’s sports can be when you invest.”
Further, according to Nielsen ratings, the 2024 WNBA playoffs were the most-viewed WNBA playoffs across ESPN since the league’s first season in 1997. And if you’re like me, you might have already forgotten over the past couple of weeks that this was Caitlin Clark’s rookie year. While Clark undoubtedly boosts ratings, and will likely continue to do so for her hopefully very-long career, it’s worth underlining that these viewership records happened despite the Indiana Fever getting knocked out by the Connecticut Sun early on. People aren’t just watching women’s basketball for Clark, people are watching women’s basketball because women’s basketball is a blast to watch.