The Liberty roll into Minneapolis tonight, tied 1-1 in the WNBA Finals, a far cry from five years ago when they were 7-27, playing in 90-year-old antique in front of disinterested owner.

Back in 2019, the New York Liberty was a basket case. James Dolan, unable to unload the money-losing WNBA franchise for more than a year, had moved the team, under the management of Isiah Thomas, from Madison Square Garden where it had hosted four WNBA Finals to Westchester County Center, a 90-year-old barrel-vaulted antique of venue in White Plains. Its attendance, once the lynchpin of WNBA attendance, had dropped to 2,200 per game, last in the league, adding to the league’s overall financial distress. Its record a miserable 7-27.

Enter Joe and Clara Wu Tsai, then 49% owner of the Brooklyn Nets but on the road to control. Clara Wu Tsai, who’s previously said, in slap at Dolan, that she didn’t understand why the owners stopped investing, told the Athletic last week, “Nobody wanted to touch it.” If the W couldn’t make it in the hoops capital of the world, were its days numbered?

It became a distress sale, but Wu Tsai told Mike Vorkunov and Ben Pickman, she and her husband saw an opportunity, believing in New York’s media market, and put some, but not a lot of money down. As The Athletic also reported in June 2022:

League sources said the Liberty were sold with little new money changing hands and new owner Joe Tsai financing the transaction mostly by taking on debt, as well as stipulating fresh capital for MSG Sports if the Liberty hit certain revenue thresholds. The deal occurred only after the NBA asked several league owners to step in to take over the franchise because it had languished on the market for more than 14 months, sources said.

CNBC reported that same year that the Tsais put down only $10 to $14 million.

They then moved the team back into the city, setting up shop at their other big asset besides the Nets: Barclays Center. After the purchase but before the move, Tsai came to New York to promise his skeptical players things would get better.

Then COVID intervened and the league faced another crisis. It was cash-short and in danger of “going dark” for 20 months if they didn’t finish the 2020 season. It was a close call, as Vorkunov and Pickman write.

The league went ahead with the “Wubble” which greatly helped the league and in a way, made people think more seriously about a number of issues affecting the league’s future, from finances to the need for better player amenities, starting with charter flights.

In early 2021, the Tsais showed leadership in the financial aspect of league growth, as the Athletic writers report.

In early 2021, the WNBA put out a pitch deck to investors. The process was driven, in part, by the Liberty’s ownership group, which also owns the Brooklyn Nets and Blue Pool Capital, a private equity firm. “At the time, we really needed that infusion of capital,” Wu Tsai said.

The league needed the money for the most basic elements of growth: manpower, marketing, brand building, digital innovation.

They got more than they had hoped for with Michael Dell and Nike putting up most of the $75 million capital raise. The Tsais also participated. The new investors wound up with 16% of league ownership, the WNBA’s governors and NBA dividing the rest. (That gave the Tsais three voices in the W future. They are the only governors who own their own WNBA team, an NBA team and hold a piece of the new investment vehicle.)

The aggressiveness sometimes got them into trouble with the league’s more moribund ownership groups. When in 2021, the Liberty quietly went against league policy forbidding charter travel and booked their own flights, it sent the league into a tizzy. Other owners saw the Tsais trying to get a competitive advantage and fined them $500,000 (after considering even more draconian measures like shutting them out of the league.)

The $500,000 fine, as more than one NBA and WNBA executive has noted, turned into a highly publicized investment. If the Liberty owners were willing to take that big of a financial hit to ensure player comfort, said free agents, count me in! The Liberty slowly began building, drafting Sabrina Ionescu, seen as a transformative player, in 2020, then signing two former MVPs in Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones as well as Courtney Vandersloot, the W’s leader in assists as well as finding diamonds in the rough like Leonie Feibich and Benijah Laney-Hamilton and investing in a proven head coach, Sandy Brondello.

Wu Tsai even flew to Istanbul to woo Stewart, the North Syracuse native, two summers ago,

And as we noted in 2019, The Liberty’s biggest move may have been hiring Jonathan Kolb as GM. Kolb, who worked in the WNBA’s headquarters, is seen as a systems guy, with an eye towards analytics, not something the women’s league has fully embraced.

As Vorkunov and Pickman wrote:

Entering the finals, New York has been re-energized and is viewed around the league as one of the franchises responsible for raising the bar…

They reshaped the roster and the business, too. In New York’s opener against the Indiana Fever, it recorded $175,000 in merchandise sales, a single-game record for the Liberty and the Nets. Attendance is up to an average of nearly 13,000 fans per Liberty home game, up 64 percent from last year. They have 53 sponsors, up nearly 61 percent year over year, with revenue generated from such partnerships up 68 percent. Wu Tsai said the franchise is heading in the direction of profitability.

“I couldn’t be happier about the demand for tickets for our games, the interest from sponsors and the viewership,” Wu Tsai said.

When the Tsais sold a 15% stake in BSE Global this summer, the Liberty part of the deal was valued at $200 million, a very nice profit in the five years since James Dolan virtually gave the franchise away. Wu Tsai told a group of fellow Harvard alumni earlier in the year that she expects the Libs to be the first women’s sports team with a billion dollar valuation. (The Nets should have as much luck with the Mikal Bridges trade.)

Of course, winning helps and the Liberty are in their second WNBA Finals in two years, having lost to the Aces last season. But it’s more than that. A Liberty game at Barclays Center is a happening. Ellie the Elephant, the team mascot gains about 2,000 followers a week every week on Instagram and is the mascot du jour in pro sports. Celebrity Row, officially CeLiberty Row, attracts as many big-timers as the Knicks legendary courtside seats. Spike Lee, the Brooklynite who has long anchored the MSG gang, now sits courtside in seafoam and green next to Wu Tsai at Finals games!

Wu Tsai has said the Liberty are mostly her responsibility and the Nets are Joe’s, but she plays a role with the Nets as well, reportedly helping moderate issues between their former superstar players and management. Some jobs are thankless.

On Sunday, the Liberty sold out Barclays Center for the Finals Game 2 win over the Minnesota Lynx 18,040, their biggest crowd yet. Earlier in the day, 2,500 Nets fans showed up at the Potomac Playground, in Bed-Stuy for their annual Practice in the Park, but it proved to be a Liberty pep rally as well with more than a few players, fans and staff adorned in some combination of black-and-white and seafoam-and-black gear. The cross-fertilization of fandom is becoming a thing, a New York thing.

There’ve been reports as well that the Liberty will become the next WNBA team to have its own training facility, sited somewhere in Brooklyn, probably like the Nets, not far from Barclays. Yet another big investment.

All we need now is a parade!