Emma Meesseman has been with the Liberty for not even two weeks. That didn’t stop her from calling out her new team after another frustrating loss.
The one-time WNBA Finals MVP said the Liberty beat themselves in Sunday’s 83-71 loss to the Lynx with their lack of hustle, poor execution and unfocused play.
The team’s second loss this season to last year’s runners-up came down to the fact that the Lynx played harder and more intentionally. When the Liberty’s toughness was challenged in the second half, the defending champions conceded.
The Liberty committed 13 of their 20 turnovers over the final 20 minutes. Some of those giveaways were self-inflicted errors.
“The ones that definitely could be avoided was just, again, attention to detail — pass to the open side — or we were not always on the same page,” Meesseman said. “It’s fundamentals, really. Maybe it’s not bad to just get back to the basics and how you learn as a kid.”
The Liberty are without Breanna Stewart, Kennedy Burke and Nyara Sabally, but Meesseman believes the team’s biggest issues have nothing to do with their absences.
“Just the discipline, attention to detail, like I just said passing — pass to the open side, or cut with purpose, play with purpose, stick to plays, pay attention in timeouts, I feel like it’s just that,” Meesseman said. “No matter who we have on the court, no matter what level, players [or] what league, it’s all about hustle. I don’t think you can practice that. So we just have to go out there and fight.”
Meesseman, 32, knows what she’s talking about. Widely considered one of the best Europeans in the game and a WNBA champion in 2019, she’s also been part of a different team that, by all accounts, could have won a WNBA title but didn’t. Meesseman played for the Sky in 2022 during their title defense that ended with a shocking semifinal exit.
Only four games in with the Liberty, Meesseman is still finding her footing with the team.
“I’m still new to the team, so I’m kind of still looking from the side [at] really, how is everybody reacting? What does everybody need individually?” Meesseman said. “But I think I have a lot of experience in different cases like losses, wins, championships, lost championships … so just trying to be a good teammate for everybody.”
The Liberty are 20-11 and tied with the Dream for second in the league standings, with both teams sitting 6 ½ games behind league-leading Minnesota.
With 13 games left, including Tuesday night in Los Angeles, the gap between a first and second seed in the playoffs now may be too large to overcome.
The Liberty are far more concerned about getting to the playoffs with a clean bill of health than playoff seeding.
Could the team’s forward outlook on the playoffs be actually hurting it? The Liberty have been burned several times for their passive play, including during a disastrous third quarter in Dallas last week.
The Liberty made a point Sunday to have a better start to the second half. They wanted to punch first and knock the Lynx off balance. At the start of the third, that’s what the Liberty did.
But the Lynx countered with a run of their own while the Liberty downshifted.
“We started it [well] but we just didn’t finish it,” Meesseman said. “Again, I think that’s more on us than on Minnesota forcing us.
“It’s just kind of … in this league, in this game, nothing is going to go by itself. You have to keep forcing it and demand from each other that you have to play hard and discipline. And we were just giving bad passes and not being disciplined in that part, so yeah, we have some work to do.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
