In the games and months — most of the season, really — before Leonie Fiebich’s breakout moment, before the Liberty’s lineup switch Sunday that slid her into the starting group for Game 1 against the Dream and the career-high 21 points that all but ensured she’d stay there, there was the learning curve.
It’d happen to any rookie.
Six minutes here. Five minutes there.
Eventually, when Courtney Vandersloot and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton both missed a game, a first start.
Sandy Brondello knew that Fiebich, whose rights were acquired last year and who signed with the Liberty ahead of the 2024 campaign, needed to adapt to the WNBA.
The Liberty, who returned their entire starting lineup from last year’s run to the WNBA Finals but revamped their bench, needed to learn how the wing would complement the rest of the lineup, too.
But that all changed June 9 against the Mystics, when Fiebich played the entire fourth quarter over Kayla Thornton — who’d started with Vandersloot out — and closed the Liberty’s narrow five-point win alongside Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, Jonquel Jones and Laney-Hamilton.
This wasn’t a blowout, either. Instead, it served as one of the first glimpses of their lineup that Brondello opened with Sunday, when Vandersloot moved to the bench and Fiebich started.
Back then, and throughout the rest of the regular season when Brondello needed that collection of players, they were just the closers.
Their cameos together were limited to smaller clusters at the end of games.
Since the Olympic break, though, the net rating with the Liberty’s lineup including Fiebich and the other four regular starters sat at 22.1 across 36 minutes, and their 23.8 for the season leads all combinations across the league.
In the 68 minutes with Vandersloot in the lineup since the break, the net rating dipped to 1.6, with the defense experiencing the most significant drop-off.
“We knew,” Brondello said following the Liberty’s shootaround, before they attempted to close out their first-round series against the Dream at Barclays Center on Tuesday night. “We study analytics. We go with the numbers and what works, but it’s not even about analytics. It’s about what you see. Sometimes, I go by what I see, what’s working best and go with my feel out there, what I see, too.
“But yeah, the analytics, it shows just how harder we are at both ends, tougher we are at both ends when we have Leo in there. And Leo’s the denominator.”
It took time for everything to come together, though.
Took time for the Liberty to realize what would eventually become their best combinations.
Their new-look lineup that opened Games 1 and 2 of the playoffs still logged just 122 minutes together across 21 games during the regular season.
Vandersloot missed time due to personal reasons.
Laney-Hamilton spent a chunk of the season out due to a knee injury and then recovery from minor knee surgery.
Stewart, Jones and Ionescu all missed games, too.
Still, there wasn’t a distinct difference between the lineups entering the Olympic break.
The lineup with Fiebich possessed a net rating of 24.6.
The lineup with Vandersloot, a four-time WNBA All-Star, sat just one point beneath that.
Eventually, though, the lineup with Fiebich emerged as their strongest.
Stewart said the length — Fiebich is 6-foot-4, with everyone in the new starting group at least 6-foot tall — has allowed the Liberty to avoid mismatches.
Stewart can pick up a guard in transition. Fiebich or Laney-Hamilton can pick up Stewart’s original task. And everything falls into place from there.
“I think it just sets the tone on defense,” Fiebich said Tuesday. “I think if we came out like we came out last game, it’s really hard to go up against us when we play defense like that.”
There could be long-term ramifications to the lineup pivot, too. Fiebich has quickly gone from bench spark to potential piece for the future.
Vandersloot, who Brondello wants to carry the Liberty’s second unit as the primary ball-handler in the postseason, will hit free agency following the campaign and enter the 2025 season at 36 years old.
In the present, though, Brondello followed the analytics. She followed her instinct. And it led to Fiebich.
“I think defensively wins championships,” Brondello said. “We need our best defensive lineup out there, and I think that’s what we got.”
