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If Natasha Cloud has stopped smiling at all since mid-March, she has done so only in the privacy of her own home. She beamed when she met Ellie the Elephant at Liberty training camp last month. She and Breanna Stewart laughed it up on Cloud’s Instagram stories during a recent team excursion to Yankee Stadium. After New York’s home opener against the Aces, the crowd cheered at the sight of Cloud’s happy face on the jumbotron; she finished with 22 points, six rebounds and nine assists.
And can you blame her for smiling through it all, in disbelief of her life? The trade that sent her from Phoenix to Connecticut in exchange for Alyssa Thomas this past February scrambled the 33-year-old point guard’s plans. “I just want to be in an organization that truly invests from top to bottom: facilities, team, location, all of that. I want to compete for championships,” she said after the trade, which definitely stood in the way of all that. But then came a second trade, the biggest glamor upgrade she could hope for. Shuffled from a middle-of-the-pack Mercury team to a tanking Sun team to the defending champion Liberty, Cloud was so over and so back in the span of two months.
Her Liberty teammates and coaches probably haven’t stopped smiling either. Three games into the Liberty’s season, Cloud can take plenty of credit for their three wins. On the final possession of Saturday afternoon’s road game against the Indiana Fever, Cloud drew the Caitlin Clark assignment and won it with a game-saving steal, sneaking a hand under Clark’s right elbow to brush the ball out. (The CBS broadcast played a mostly unhelpful angle over and over, but finally gave us a good look at a clean steal and celebration as they signed off.)
On New York’s roster, Cloud is both flatterer and flattered. The Liberty have done well to put a bunch of playmakers next to Sabrina Ionescu, freeing her to move off-ball where she’s best. But Cloud also makes up for Ionescu’s defensive issues in a way that Courtney Vandersloot and Marine Johannès couldn’t. Her hands flutter in the way of passing lanes. Against Indiana, she came up with five steals. “They just let me be me,” Cloud said after the game. “I knew that I was coming to a well-oiled machine and all I wanted to do was add to it.”
The Liberty, in turn, make Cloud’s life easier. If there’s a Liberty player smiling biggest, it is probably Ionescu, who felt the pain of Cloud’s attention in the quick but memorable first-round series Cloud’s Mystics played against the Liberty in 2023. But in Ionescu’s postgame comments, Cloud’s offense came up first. “We trust in her and her ability to continue to get downhill,” she said. For all Cloud’s moxie off the dribble, she’s never been especially efficient at the rim. That’s when it helps to have the talent advantage the Liberty enjoy in every game they play. The driving alone is useful, and it has her averaging close to eight assists. In all the traffic, Cloud can kick out to a three-point shooter in the corner, draw contact, or create switches for Stewart and Jonquel Jones to punish. Liberty opponents have so far dared Cloud to shoot—not unreasonably, with the offensive talent around her and her own middling career shooting numbers—but she’s made them pay. Of her 14 attempts from outside, she’s hit seven.
“When you look at our current roster, Tash amplifies what we already have,” Liberty GM Jonathan Kolb said at his preseason press conference earlier this month. She can also be what they don’t have. In Saturday’s game, Cloud paid fine tribute to the departed Vandersloot, slipping entry passes to Jones and Stewart, and flying through screens. She hounded Clark and Kelsey Mitchell the same way the injured Betnijah Laney-Hamilton might. When wing Leonie Fiebich left with an injury in the second quarter, Cloud covered the extra ground. At a glance, two first-round picks might have seemed like a high price to pay for just one year of the veteran guard. But in Cloud, the Liberty get any player they want, and that’s worth paying for.
