Home Teams with Howard Megdal, May 15, 2020
The Sabrina Show Sabbatical — Must-click New York sports links
Good morning! Thanks for making the jump here to Home Teams, where we’ll get you caught up on what you need to know for the day in New York sports every weekday.
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The Sabrina Show Sabbatical
This current moment we’re all in, for the most part, includes an emotional toll derived from the disruption of our most treasured moments from the calendar we all know.
There’s the missing of Opening Day in baseball. The winding down of the NBA calendar, which lately, has included the Nets jockeying for playoff position and the Knicks, earning just enough ping pong balls to miss out on the life-changing player the franchise needs.
But as I reflect on the weekend ahead, my thoughts have turned instead to the event none of us get to see on Sunday, one which doesn’t offer many precedents in the New York sports world.
Sunday was supposed to be the 2020 home opener for the New York Liberty, and Sabrina Ionescu’s first chance to play in front of a packed house at Barclays Center.
The event has no precedent because it is a combination young superstar unveiling and restoration of a proud franchise with a long history in New York. Briefly, for the uninitiated: Ionescu is the point guard the Liberty have needed and sought since, well, Becky Hammon left town, a playmaker who can do everything the position requires and then some, with the work ethic of a (we’ll go NBA comps for newcomers) Patrick Ewing and the shooting stroke, finishing combination of Walt Frazier.
Her skills and tools grade out, to my thinking, as nothing less than the next version of Syosset’s own Sue Bird.
That alone would serve as a signature event, one relatively unparalleled in the city’s history, particularly on the women’s side. What’s the equivalent? Nothing Liberty — the Liberty have never selected first in the WNBA Draft before. Patrick Ewing’s debut at The Garden comes closest, or for recent memory, Joba Chamberlain’s debut at Yankee Stadium (I know, he didn’t live up to the promise, but that was the level of prospect he was).
But about The Garden — that was the Liberty’s home for two decades, before James Dolan left them by the side of the road in Westchester. And Joe Tsai, by purchasing them, buying Barclays Center, and then marrying the two, not only restored them to a proper major league facility in the five boroughs, he reunited the thousands of Liberty fans who could not, in fact, even get to the games for several years with their longtime team.
Whenever that moment comes, the Liberty playing in front of fans again, it is unlikely to be their first game back, or Ionescu’s debut, or to follow unprecedented WNBA media coverage in the city’s tabloids (Ionescu merited back page coverage multiple times in the Daily News and the Post).
It was a zeitgeist that almost never favors women’s basketball in this, the nation’s largest media market, but finally had. And then… the great cancelling.
So sure, I’ll miss the chance to just wake up on Saturday and take my family to Citi Field to watch the Mets — it was supposed to be the Pirates in town, and a Fireworks Night.
But we weren’t going. We had tickets for Sunday, though, along with thousands of other New Yorkers, to see a great unveiling, the start of a new era in the city’s sports landscape, long-sought, and now, postponed indefintely.
Read This
Bob Klapisch, who has covered Dwight Gooden for decades, catches up with him on the 24th anniversary of his no-hitter at Yankee Stadium.
Former Mets manager Art Howe is battling coronavirus.
Bob Watson, the GM who hired Joe Torre for the Yankees, died at 74.
The Giants have a DeAndre Baker problem.
Tweet of the Day
