Emma Meesseman's European Experience Perfect for Liberty

For the faithful viewers of recent high-profile international women's basketball competitions, closeout games were a metaphorical life-and-death situation. For New York Liberty forward Emma Meesseman, it was just another day.

Meesseman is in the midst of her first WNBA playoff action since helping taking down the Liberty as part of the Chicago Sky's championship defense in 2022. New York faces a closeout opportunity in their latest Barclays Center showing, owning a 1-0 lead on the Phoenix Mercury in the postseason's best-of-three debut round.

"It's been a while since I was in W, but I played overseas, and I've had to play in some chaos in that meantime," Meesseman noted as the Liberty prepped for Game 2 in Brooklyn. "You want to win every single game, but in regular season, you have some time to adjust and everything, Now you have to be there, you have to try to peak at this time."

In WNBA absentia, Meesseman has been grown quite accustomed to the win-or-game situation ... in some cases quite literally.

Meesseman's sabbatical from the American hardwood has been spent between Turkey's renowned Fenerbahçe club and the Cats, Belgium's national team that has made quite the statement in both continental and global tournaments.

Under Meesseman's watch, the Cats just missed last summer's Olympic podium in Paris (just their second-ever showing in the Games since the program's debut in 1950) and has been the last group standing in each of last two editions of the EuroBasket stagings. Fenerbahçe has finished at the top of numerous Women's Basketball Super League events with Meesseman landing countless individual accolades along the way.

Never one to focus on the past, Meesseman said that her efforts in Europe's version of Game 7 could play a part in New York's modern championship defense, one where injuries and self-inflicted errors landed them in the fifth seed.

"I think it's making me and us more ready for the pressure that comes with it, that you're not like blinded by the spotlight, blinded by the attention, blinded by the pressure that's being put on you," Meesseman said of her overseas work. "I think that's [the biggest gain] instead of tactics or basketball, pure basketball, because it is big moment, and it's not always easy to cope with it. "How do you handle yourself? How do you prepare yourself? So I think it's more so in that way, that it helped me."

Such efforts, Meesseman explained, helped her recover from a feeling of being "paralyzed" during one of her early WNBA postseason efforts, namely the 2017 semifinal bout with the eventual champion Minnesota Lynx. She shot less than 30 percent from the field and was unable to contain the rebounding effort led by Sylvia Fowles and Rebekkah Brunson in what became a three-game sweep.

Lessons learned since that cursed 2017 outing were quietly on display in Game 1 of this ongoing series: Meesseman was 1-of-6 from the field in the Liberty's triumph but pulled in eight rebounds in just under 13 minutes of action. That's tied with Kia Vaughn for the most any Liberty reserve has had in a single playoff game in the last decade and she's just the second in league postseason to reach that tally in 13 minutes or less (joining Simone Edwards of the Seattle Storm in the 2004 Finals)

Since the mistakes against Minnesota, Meesseman has gained a reputation as a performer in primetime, sealing such a reputation with a Finals MVP effort during the Mystics 2019 championship run. It's why the Liberty, a team not exactly well-known for in-season additions, went out of its way to obtain her services earlier this summer and she could well take on a larger role if Breanna Stewart is sidelined by the lower-body injury that marred the opening night win in Phoenix.

"I think the thing about Emma is that she's such a professional, and she does a really good job of controlling her emotions," domestic and international teammate Jonquel Jones, a victim of Messeman's 2019 Finals mastery, said. "She knows who she is, and she knows what she brings to the table. My confidence never wavers in her, and I don't think her confidence ever wavers at all. So she understands what we need from her. She understands how important she is to our team and I think she knows that going into [Game 2]."