Liberty about to get a schedule wake-up call after recent tear during soft stretch revived season
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She has missed just one game this season.She is among the league leaders in minutes per game.But when the two-time MVP was reminded of a recent stretch in which the Liberty suffered eight losses in 10 games, Stewart sounded shocked, as if she were hearing about the inexplicable slump for the first time.“Dang,” Stewart said following Wednesday’s win against Seattle, “2-8? Wow.”It was easy to forget after the Liberty (19-13) won for the sixth time in seven games, while setting a franchise record by scoring at least 90 points for the seventh straight game.But the Liberty are still not playing to the potential of the preseason title favorite, recovering from its mid-season tailspin after facing five sub-.500 teams — including the past two games at home against the league-worst Storm — in its past six games.Despite the soft schedule, the Liberty’s past six wins have come by an average of less than five points per game.
Monday’s win against Seattle (6-27) is the Liberty’s only double-digit win since July 3 and its only wire-to-wire victory since May 29.“I think what we’ve been talking about is just embracing where we are as a team,” Jonquel Jones said.“I think at the beginning of the season we were so used to being that team that would come out, blow people out, have a certain type of win, that I think sometimes it would cost us — not to have a negative vibe, but the expectations of, ‘Wow, we should be up by more.’ So there were times that we would even be winning and it would kind of feel like we were down because we had such a high level of expectation for ourselves.“Right now, it’s about us embracing it.
We’ve been on the other side and there’ve been close games that we lost, so right now we’re taking the ‘W’s, we’re gonna learn from ...