A technical foul called on Sabrina Ionescu Tuesday night at Barclays Center in Brooklyn sparked something in her that led her to score 31 points in a 102-73 New York Liberty annihilation of the Los Angeles Sparks.
The win moved the Liberty (12-18) into a three-way tie with the Sparks and Atlanta Dream for the eighth and final playoff spot. Their next game is also against the Sparks (Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET at Barclays). New York’s final two games of the regular season are against the Dream.
Tuesday night’s game was incredibly physical and the Liberty were more than tough enough to take it on.
“Well, I love it,” Ionescu said of LA’s physicality. “They can try that on me all they want, it usually just feeds into what I like to do best. And so that didn’t work in their favor, but, at the end of the day we got another one tomorrow. And so we have to make sure that that’s the next biggest game that we have coming up, put this one behind us. And we gotta continue to learn form our mistakes, we made plenty of mistakes tonight and we got to continue to make adjustments. We’re not satisfied with the win tonight and I think that says something about this group, we’re not ok with where we are, we want to continue to strive for the greatness we want to achieve.
“The crowd had our back. That game was getting out of hand a little bit, the refs let it get out of hand a little bit. And the crowd just rallied with us and kept us energized through that entire thing. So it’s always fun. We know when we get into those games, when we get into those fights that the crowd’s gonna have our back. And that fires me up, it fires the team up. And so we’re super thankful for that. They’ve brought that all year and so we kind of expect that night in and night out — to have that crowd have our back.”
Ionescu added six rebounds, four assists and three steals in just 23:49.
Sabrina Ionescu in the Liberty win:
31 PTS
6 REB
4 AST
3 STL…in just under 24 minutes played.
She’s the only WNBA player with 30/6/4/3 or better with less than 28 minutes played.
— Across the Timeline (@WBBTimeline) August 3, 2022
This after she notched a Liberty-record 16 assists on Sunday. In that game she scored just 10 points and shot 3-of-14 from the field and 1-of-6 from three. On Tuesday, she was 11-of-16 from the field and 5-of-9 from three.
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