 Janel McCarville and Shameka Christon know the Liberty should be much better than their 4-7 record.
Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE/Getty Images
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“I don’t think we all assumed we were going to be good, we knew we could be good,” center Janel McCarville said. “I think with how the season started, and a couple of games getting away from us early, that put a damper on it. It’s been kind of a little roller coaster here at the start.”
New York’s 4-7 record puts them in fifth place in the East. All but one of their losses has been by less than 10 points. The players, notably the veterans, aren’t naïve to the fact that they should be doing much better in the standings.
“Have we started out the way we wanted to? Absolutely not,” forward Shameka Christon said. “I have confidence in this team, and I believe that we all have confidence in each other that we’re a pretty good team and we’ll get things turned around.”
Last season, New York had the youngest squad in the WNBA. Lack of experience typically translates into growing pains; instead, it was exactly the opposite. After a 7-7 start, the Liberty pulled out an 8-3 record in July to finish the year at 19-15. That mixture of raw talent also led the Liberty to the Eastern Conference finals, where they took the Detroit Shock down to the final minutes of a deciding Game 3.
“It came down to the wire in Detroit,” McCarville said. “You can’t do hypothetical questions, but that’s the one thing you have to look at is what if we played a complete 40-minute game.”
Both McCarville and Christon believe the Liberty are suffering the same trouble this year.
“There’s got to be a time we get over this hump and handle our business for 40 minutes,” Christon said. “We can’t sit there and take two minutes off here, three minutes off here because we are such a young team and we are playing against older teams that will capitalize on our mistakes. They will do that and I think they have done that.”
Nine of the 11 players on the Liberty’s roster were part of last year’s successful season -- they drafted Kia Vaughn and traded for Sidney Spencer (Los Angeles), while they said goodbye to Jessica Davenport (Indiana), Erin Thorn (Chicago),
“Most of the things we do wrong, we kind of inflict on our own and for the most part they’re all fixable,” McCarville said.
Christon and McCarville are two of the Liberty’s top stars. Christon is averaging 17 points, five rebounds a night, while McCarville is dropping 10 points, six rebounds and three assists a night. As a team, the Liberty are playing the second-best defense, holding opponents to just 70.7 points per game. The problem is they’re only averaging 70.3 points a night.
“This year, we’ve had games where we’re up and I think we just got relaxed and really, really nonchalant about things and teams came back and beat us,” Christon said. “That can’t happen.”
The Liberty have shown improvement since starting 2-6. In the three games since, they’ve picked up two wins, including a 16-point blowout at home against Detroit. Christon, along with second-year guard Essence Carson, have been a big reason behind this run. Christon is averaging 18 points and Carson 14 points over the stretch.
“I want to give a lot of credit to my teammates because we started out really bad, not what we expected, considering how we ended the season last year against Detroit,” Christon said. “This team keeps coming in every day, working hard, fighting, trying to get better and fixing the things that kill us in games.”
The Liberty are just 1.5 games out of second place in the East. With Indiana playing on another level, the other three playoff spots are still up for grabs. McCarville believes her team can make another run similar to last season.
“We feel like we can compete with anybody in the league, night in and night out,” she said. “I think it’s just a mindset of doing it day in and day out, competing with everybody, having that mindset and coming out and getting the job done.”
If history has a way of repeating itself, the Liberty will be just fine.
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