Leonie Fiebichs emergence has forced the Liberty to shake things up

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 th...