Chris DeMarco deserved to be fired by the New York Liberty.
The first-year head coach replaced coaching legend Sandy Brondello and the Liberty had a disappointing season, finishing as the eighth seed before upsetting the No. 1 seed Minnesota Lynx in the playoffs. Three weeks after a second-round exit to the Atlanta Dream, it was announced that DeMarco would not be returning as New York's head coach.
That was the right decision, but not for all the reasons everyone seems to be heaping onto him.
DeMarco's critics (mostly) have it all wrong
The New York Liberty are one of the WNBA's legacy franchises, and they are packed with talented players, just two years removed from winning the championship. They play in the league's largest market, with a disproportionate number of basketball media living in or near The Big Apple. It is natural for there to be a lot of coverage of Chris DeMarco's departure.
That coverage has absolutely blasted him. It is rare for everyone to agree on something in the year 2026, but the overwhelming consensus has appeared to be that DeMarco was an absolute bum who never deserved to be hired and was the sole factor for the Liberty's disappointing season. Any positives he brought to the Liberty are unimportant and incidental, while all of his flaws make him the worst coach in the history of the league.
There is some hyperbole sprinnkled into that last paragraph, but perhaps not all that much. DeMarco has been lit up for losing the locker room, as it was clear in postgame pressers at the end of their run that the Liberty's key players were not going to stand up for him. He has been blamed for the timeout snafu that cost the Liberty a chance at winning a game against the Dream.
Some have inexplicably created false narratives that because DeMarco came from the Golden State Warriors, and because the Warriors' best player is Stephen Curry, that DeMarco was hired to make the Liberty Sabrina Ionescu's team. Because Breanna Stewart remains the Liberty's best player, the argument went, DeMarco had to go and someone "pro Stewie" needed to be hired.
Most of all, he has been blamed for being a terrible hire in the first place: a man who came to his position from the NBA, with no prior WNBA experience. Clearly DeMarco was always going to fail, because he was never going to be able to connect with his players, because he was an outsider.
That's not why DeMarco failed as head coach of the Liberty.
WNBA teams hire from outside of the league all of the time, and sometimes it works. Karl Smesko is being praised as an incredible coach who combined modern basketball strategy with a real connection with his players. Nate Tibbetts had no WNBA experience and led the Phoenix Mercury to the WNBA Finals a year ago.
Why did Chris DeMarco need to be fired? Because he wasn't a good coach.
DeMarco's failure is simple to understand
If Chris DeMarco came into the WNBA and was good at the job of being a head coach, he would still be the coach of the New York Liberty. That includes on-court strategy, it includes building trust in your locker room, it includes taking the hit in front of the media when your team messes up, even if you believe it was someone else who made a mistake.
If DeMarco was a good coach, he would have come in and done those things. His background in the NBA meant some parts of coaching in the WNBA would be adjustments, but he would bring other strengths from a league that sees high-level development each and every year. Hiring from the NBA is not the problem; hiring a bad coach was.
That doesn't mean there is not value in WNBA teams hiring women, of course; that's a different kind of argument to be made. Yet it's inconsistent to praise Karl Smesko for his connection to his stars and then blast Chris DeMarco for not having WNBA experience; Smesko is a really good coach, so he is really good at the things a head coach needs to do.
DeMarco had never been a head coach, and he may never be again after this season. That is why he failed: he was bad at his job. All of the narrative building around his failure is largely missing the point.
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