How active has ownership been in creating the Liberty’s culture and engaging with its audiences?
Clara [Wu Tsai] is an amazing mind who sees the Liberty as having so much potential that she wanted to support it with her own resources, and I don’t just mean financial resources. Clara does interviews, Clara invites celebrities to games, and Clara is the torch bearer for what this will be in the long term—and I can’t ask for anything more than that.
And they’re doing it in the spirit of Brooklyn. The “You Belong Here. We Belong Here” sign that’s in front of Barclays Center. That’s Clara Wu Tsai’s sign, vision, and mystique, and that’s what she brings to the table every single day. So how could you not want to run through a wall and make sure that the business success and the KPIs are growing?
You said during your panel discussion that the Liberty are in a position to lead and take risks. How has that benefitted the organization?
Five years ago, I would have said we’re small, and we need to try some new things to see if we can figure out a way to grow. Today, I look at the things that we’re doing that are innovative as solutions to growth.
The local TV deal on Fox and making our games accessible to all of New York, not behind a paywall, was important to us, and it may be one of the best decisions we ever made in a championship year because mainstream New York knew exactly who we were and knew that we were the hot team all the way through. That’s special.
Ten years ago, that would have probably felt risky. Everyone was on a regional sports network. That was the way that people did things. But if we can be ahead of what the big four men’s sports leagues are doing, then we’ll be better off in the long run.
Things like the Liberty introducing our own direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming platform, Liberty Live, last season … that’s ahead of the curve. Everybody is figuring out a streaming solution, [so] why would we have to wait until everybody’s all fully baked? There are many NBA teams doing DTC in its infancy, but we didn’t want to wait. Now we can work on, in year two, an adoption strategy that lets the streaming service compliment the Fox relationship—that compliments the new national television deal that [WNBA Commissioner] Cathy Engelbert and her team have done where people can watch our team.
At the end of the day, it’s always about accessibility. And if people are writing about us and people are talking about us. It can never be this tree that fell in the woods that no one thought was special.