Liberty’s Clarendon takes on new role
Layshia Clarendon is the most veteran player the Liberty have.
Clarendon turned 29 years old in May, is in her eighth season and just played her 200th game in the WNBA. Those standards wouldn’t normally make someone the most senior player on a given team in the W, but on the Liberty, that makes Clarendon the most ex- perienced on a team whose “oldest” members have been classified as “baby vets.”
In the 201st game of Clarendon’s WNBA career, the Liberty dropped its third-straight game against the Atlanta Dream, 8478. Clarendon notched 16 points, four rebounds and five assists over her 31-plus minutes of play, the longest of anyone else on the young team Friday night. Even Clarendon still has hiccups; her stat line for the night also includes a whopping six turnovers.
Clarendon has bounced around the league since getting drafted No. 9 overall by the Indiana Fever in 2013. She spent her first three years there, then was dealt to Atlanta in 2016, then was traded to Connecticut in 2018, then signed with the Liberty as a free agent in February. Her best seasons were in Atlanta, where she led the league in assists and made the All-Star team in 2017.
Now with the Liberty, her role has taken on a new meaning. Clarendon typically plays point guard, but under new coach Walt Hopkins, the team is emphasizing positionless basketball. Some of the pressure of running the offense is off her shoulders, but it’s been replaced with the weight of mentoring Sabrina Ionescu as she enters the league.
Clarendon was actually one of the first of the Liberty squad to talk to Ionescu after she was drafted in April. Before the WNBA bubble plan was even thought of, after the Liberty rebuild began, Clarendon took a drive to the rookie near her California home to drop off new gear to her (from six feet away, of course).
Since then, the two have grown closer. Ionescu, in an diarylike essay penned in The Associated Press earlier in July, even made it a point to mention she and Clarendon bike to practice every day from their hotel.
“She just makes people better around her,” Clarendon said of Ionescu at training camp on July 15, “and that’s really nice to have as a point guard playmaker myself, it’s like great to have another point guard playmaker knowing like I could be off the ball sometimes and she could bring it out, but we have like multiple people who can play and lead in different positions.”
On Friday the Liberty relied almost entirely on their seven rookies. It wasn’t until the Louisville rookie tag-team of Kylee Shook and Jazmine Jones got into their groove to help get the Liberty back from a 10-point deficit between the end of the first and the second quarters.
The rookies combined for 60 points on the night. Jones finished with a team-high 20 points. Ionescu was taken out of the game in the second quarter after spraining her ankle. X-rays were negative for fracture or break.