Clara Wu Tsai Put Her Money on the New York Liberty. Now, the World is Finally Catching Up to the WNBA.
Clara Wu Tsai is standing in the deliciously designed living room of her elegant Brooklyn town house (shoes off, please), disassembling the drop top of her New York Liberty 2024 WNBA championship ring, when we meet in early March. The walls around her bear works by Lorna Simpson and Rashid Johnson. Wu Tsai, who has shoulder-length black hair and is wearing a Miu Miu polo and a gleaming nameplate necklace, gently pulls apart the ring, a white gold behemoth encrusted with white diamonds, black diamonds, and seafoam Paraíba tourmalines; inside are a pair of gold “NY” stud earrings, a miniature rendering of the home court at the Barclays Center, and the phrase “We All We Got! We All We Need!” It was the team’s de facto slogan that historic year, as the Liberty won its first title since the WNBA was founded nearly 30 years before.
The league has, in the last couple of years, come into its own after a series of cosmic cultural events and a vicious union battle that almost threatened to undo every inch of hard-won progress but instead has completely reshaped the W’s future. For the Liberty, the championship opened the door to the dream of becoming a dynasty. For Wu Tsai, a wealthy businesswoman who owns the team alongside her husband, Alibaba Group cofounder Joe Tsai, it also heralded the possibility of a bigger, deeper ambition: turning the Liberty into a franchise worth $1 billion.
The Las Vegas Aces celebrate their 2025 WNBA championship victory.David Becker/ Getty Images.
Later that night she proudly wears the ring to the Barclays Center, the state-of-the-art Brooklyn arena that is, conveniently, the home of the Liberty. She chats amiably with various courtside celebrities; Issa Rae, Ashton Kutcher, and Jason Sudeikis are all in attendance that night. But she sits purposefully with new Liberty coach Chris DeMarco, who towers above her at six feet six, as well as CEO Keia Clarke and general manager Jonathan Kolb, both of whom possess the air of genial valedictorians, high achievers whose days and nights are consumed by basketball.
But on this night, they are going to relax a little bit. This evening, Barclays is actually hosting the semifinals of Unrivaled, the lucrative three-on-three US women’s basketball league that tips off in the WNBA offseason and streams live on HBO Max. Launched in 2025, the league was created by WNBA players Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx and Breanna Stewart (“Stewie” to fans), the decorated veteran and star forward of the Liberty. Pops of seafoam, the Liberty’s signature color, abound at the sold-out game (that’s close to 18,000 seats). But the house is full of women’s basketball fans across the board, all of whom love the WNBA and are, perhaps, treating the game as an amuse-bouche for the season ahead.
The rise of the Liberty and Unrivaled has come hand in hand with the meteoric rise in popularity of women’s basketball in the last couple of years, with the W’s attendance, viewership, and cultural resonance quickly skyrocketing. But it hasn’t been a smooth, or easy, ascent.
“Pay the players!” the crowd chants during the Unrivaled game. The chant grows louder, ripping around the arena with staccato force: “Pay! The! Play-ers!” Some fans even carry small black signs with the phrase emblazoned on it in white letters, which Barclays security guards quietly try to confiscate here and there. The chant is meant to echo beyond these walls and rattle in the ears of WNBA executive leadership, which, at that moment, had been locked in contentious negotiations with the union that represents the players over a new collective bargaining agreement. By then, the talks had stretched on for more than a year.
