After a loss to San Antonio on Thursday night — the Liberty’s third straight defeat — coach Bill Laimbeer decided his offense needed some tweaking.
Suffice to say it, even though it has only been one game with the revamped offense, the early returns were encouraging.
Behind a lights-out performance from Cappie Pondexter, who scored 21 points on a tidy 10-of-11 shooting, the Liberty emphatically ended their losing streak with a wire-to-wire 81-64 rout of the Washington Mystics on Sunday at the Garden.
“We needed to open up our offense a little bit more, which we did,” Laimbeer said. “[The players] appreciated that and started to perform accordingly.”
The Liberty (3-5) were locked in from the opening tip, scoring the game’s first 10 points behind the balanced attack of Pondexter and Essence Carson (four points apiece).
“We threw the first punch, and that’s what we always want to do,” said center Tina Charles, who had 14 points and eight rebounds.
Washington found its footing and chipped away, closing to within five after the first quarter following a Kara Lawson steal and buzzer-beating 3-pointer.
But the Liberty shook off the late-quarter lapse and slowly started to run away, as Delisha Milton-Jones hit two baskets early in the second to push the lead back to nine. Pondexter then hit a jumper to restore the lead to double digits at 30-19.
From there, the Liberty seemed to find another gear, as they scored 18 of the game’s next 25 points and opened up a 22-point lead on an Alex Montgomery corner 3 with 1:47 left in the half.
“[Our perimeter shooting] opened things up on the inside,” Pondexter said. “We have Tina and [Plenette Pierson] doing their thing, and so I put up a lot of pressure outside, and it allows them to get easy buckets inside.”
The Liberty overwhelmed the Mystics’ defense in the first half, shooting 65.7 percent from the field. They also had four players finish in double figures: Pondexter, Tina Charles, Alex Montgomery (11 points) and Anna Cruz (10 points, seven rebounds).
Once the Liberty opened up that lead, the outcome was never in doubt, as the Mystics could not trim the deficit below 17 points in the second half.