How the Las Vegas Aces and the New York Liberty Changed the W.N.B.A.

In 2018, after putting the New York Liberty up for sale, James Dolan moved the team out of Madison Square Garden—where it had mostly played since the first season of the W.N.B.A., in 1997—to the Westchester County Center, in White Plains, New York. The Westchester County Center was the home of the Knicks’ G League team, but it was not designed with major professional sports in mind. It hosted concerts, the New York Metro Reptile Expo, the occasional cat show. Players had to walk up four flights of stairs to reach the cramped locker rooms. A red curtain behind one of the baskets hid a wooden stage. The center had room for about twenty-three hundred spectators, though seating could be expanded to forty-five hundred. This involved a generous definition of spectating—the court was barely visible from parts of the upper deck. Liberty games at M.S.G. during the previous season had averaged about ten thousand fans. Still, in Westchester, excess demand was not a great concern: some season-ticket holders discovered that getting to the arena in White Plains from New York City could take as much as two hours, once the inevitable public-transportation delays were factored in. The Liberty’s front office described the move as a necessary step toward financial sustainability. As Dolan liked to tell people, the team was losing millions. Read More