Sabrina Ionescu wouldn’t be the first person who graduated college and moved to New York with quickly thwarted dreams of instant stardom. Nor would she be the first person who had to then spend her early 20s cycling through a few versions of herself before finding one she liked. What a treat that she’s arrived at this version this season, faster and stronger—a little bit new and a lot improved. She carried the Liberty to the WNBA semifinals with one of the best performances of her career, scoring a playoff-high 36 points in Tuesday's 91-82 win against the Atlanta Dream, along with nine assists and three steals.
Improvement is imagined to be linear, or at least, iterative—a foundation of skills established and built upon. But this season, Ionescu feels more like a disassembled and reassembled product. Consider what looked like her defining skill last year: She put up a 44.8 three-point percentage on high volume in 2023, one of the best outside shooting seasons in WNBA history. A pair of lights-out performances on national TV helped sustain that reputation. After her absurd WNBA Three-Point Contest win, Ionescu proved a worthy challenger to Steph Curry in their offseason duel, even if she couldn’t topple the game’s greatest shooter. This year, she’s not so dead-eye. With its short schedule, the WNBA is league of small sample sizes, prone to some aberrance. Ionescu's 33 percent clip from three is more in line with her pre-2023 averages, but she’s changed her shot profile and improved enough as a scorer from other areas of the floor that the regression beyond the arc doesn't even matter all that much.
Earlier versions of Ionescu were slower to the basket and weaker at the rim. Last year, she made 54 percent of her 74 field-goal attempts in the restricted area; this season, she’s been a 61 percent finisher there on 81 attempts. Ionescu's midrange game went from nonexistent to credible: She shot just 14 percent from there last year, but is shooting 40 percent from midrange this year on twice as many looks. Against Atlanta last night, 21 of her 36 points came inside the arc or at the free-throw line.
The WNBA’s positionless All-WNBA voting tends to squeeze out guards in this power forward’s league. Ionescu, who slumped after the Olympic break, will probably be edged out by Caitlin Clark on most first-team ballots. But the improvement should pay off in more important ways: Players succeed in the playoffs when they’re irreducible, when they do too many different things for a defense to stop, when there has to be more than one sentence on the scouting report.
Which brings us to the challenge that awaits her next: a rematch of last year’s Finals, this time one round earlier. For Ionescu, a series against the Las Vegas Aces is an opportunity for redemption. Her playoffs last year were memorable only for the time she puked in a trash can mid-game. Ionescu had her moments in New York’s regular-season series with Vegas last season, but those also tended to be games where she got hot from three. This series will test her growth as a ball-handler, and her newfound quickness (she’s been a generally competent defender this year, for what it’s worth).
The Liberty are surely glad she’s entering this semifinals of death with the confidence and aggression on display at home against Atlanta. Not all of the old Sabrina Ionescu needed to go: She’s retained her college gift for showmanship, and sometimes her Kobe-patterned self-seriousness gives way to a goofier sense of humor. At Tuesday's postgame press conference, Jonquel Jones cracking up beside her, Ionescu theorized about the team’s surge after they'd trailed at the half.
“Spike Lee gave me a high-five as I was going to take the ball out of bounds and I felt like New York was just, like, injected into my veins,” she said. “You was like Spider-Woman or something,” Jones added. With all due respect to Spike Lee, offseason workouts probably explain more of Ionescu's transformation. But maybe the high-five finally made her a real New Yorker.
