Who should lead Liberty next? Familiar faces, rising stars among five candidates

For the third consecutive season, the New York Liberty will have a different head coach.

The Liberty have fired Chris DeMarco after one season on the job . New York won the Commissioner's Cup and swept the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx in the opening round of the playoffs, then lost to the Atlanta Dream in the semifinals. The Liberty finished the season with a 26-18 record.

DeMarco, 40, previously spent 14 seasons with the NBA's Golden State Warriors where he was part of four championship-winning coaching staffs.

Liberty general manager Jonathan Kolb will be making his fourth head coaching hire since getting the job in 2019. He decided not to renew the contract of Katie Smith and hired Walt Hopkins who was dismissed after two seasons. Sandy Brondello was Kolb's next hire, and she led New York to winning the 2024 championship, but was let go after the 2025 season. Kolb then turned to DeMarco, who delivered a mixed bag of results.

The Liberty now need a coach to lead a team with three star players in former league MVPs Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones and four-time all-star Sabrina Ionescu.

Here's a few names to consider as the search begins.

Golden State Valkyries revel in first WNBA championship

After spending 15 years playing in the WNBA, where she was a two-time champion and three time All-Star, the University of Maryland product has spent nearly a decade as an assistant coach in the NBA and WNBA.

Tolliver, 39, worked as an assistant coach with the Washington Wizards and Dallas Mavericks, then became the associate head coach for the Phoenix Mercury under Nate Tibbetts in 2024. She's won everywhere she's been — from winning a national championship with Maryland, to WNBA titles with the Sparks and Mystics, to helping the Mercury make the Finals in 2025.

Over the past few seasons, Tolliver has interviewed for WNBA head coaching gigs. Sooner or later, some team is going to be smart enough to hire her as its head coach.

The Liberty can't undo dismissing Sandy Brondello, but they could hire one of her former assistants. Hodges was on the Liberty bench in 2024 when it won the WNBA championship. Following that season, she joined Rachid Meziane's staff with the Connecticut Sun — now Houston Comets — in an expanded role.

Hodges, 43, is widely seen as a rising star in the coaching ranks. After a lengthy professional playing career that began with the Comets and ended with a club in Spain, she worked two seasons in college basketball as an assistant at Old Dominion and Colgate before being hired by Brondello in New York in 2022. Earlier this season, Hodges filled in for Meziane as head coach for one game and the Sun won, defeating the Mystics.

The New Orleans native was also the head coach of Phantom BC in Unrivaled this past season. Hodges was named Coach of the Year of the professional 3x3 women's basketball league and guided Phantom to an appearance in the championship game.

A Women's Basketball and Naismith Hall of Famer, and one of the greatest WNBA players of all-time, Weatherspoon is a New York Liberty legend. She spent seven of her eight WNBA seasons playing for the Liberty, winning a pair of Defensive Player of the Year awards, earning five all-star nods, leading the league in assists in 1997 and leading the league in steals twice.

The 60-year-old native of Texas and product of Louisiana Tech — where she won an NCAA championship as a player in 1988 — has a long coaching resume, but many would argue she didn't get a fair chance as a WNBA head coach. She was fired after one season leading the Chicago Sky where they went 13-27 in 2024.

Prior to coaching the Sky, Weatherspoon had been the head coach at her alma mater, guiding the Lady Techsters to three NCAA Tournament bids. She was also an assistant coach for the NBA's New Orleans Pelicans and has been a head coach in Unrivaled for the past two seasons.

T-Spoon is widely respected and liked by players around the league. The Liberty could do much worse than giving her another shot at being a head coach in the WNBA.

One of the Liberty's marquee stars, Sabrina Ionescu, is coming off arguably one of her worst years in the WNBA. If her three-game rookie season is removed from the equation, the talented point guard averaged career-lows in assists, rebounds, field goal percentage and 3-point percentage. To get her back on track, why not bring in her college head coach?

Graves has been a college head coach since 1997 and has gone to 15 NCAA Tournaments with three different programs, including a trip to the Final Four in 2019 with an Oregon team powered by Ionescu. Before coming to Oregon, he turned Gonzaga into a mid-major power, advancing to the second weekend of March Madness three times. He's been named conference Coach of the Year 10 times in his career.

If the 63-year-old is tired of dealing with all the changes in college athletics, he could move to the WNBA and simply be a basketball coach and reunite with one of his star players.

The Atlanta Dream and Dallas Wings have found immediate success in hiring coaches from the college ranks who, despite being at mid-major programs, had long track records of success and proved to be winners at every level. Blair-Lewis is someone who fits a similar mold to Jose Fernandez and Karl Smesko.

Blair-Lewis has piled up 415 victories as a college head coach , winning at programs where winning isn't so easy to do. She won a pair of conference championships at Mount St. Mary's, something the program has done just twice since she left in 2007. She then won five conference championships and took Bethune Cookman to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in program history in 2019. Most recently, Blair-Lewis has turned George Mason into a mid-major power, winning 73 games there over the past three seasons and guiding the Patriots to their first-ever March Madness appearance in 2025.

It would be an outside-the-box hire, but it's hard to argue with Blair-Lewis' resume of winning wherever she has been.