When Clara Wu Tsai, an owner of the New York Liberty, and Keia Clarke, the chief executive, were deciding on the look of the team’s first championship rings — the ones unveiled to great fanfare on Saturday in a televised ceremony just before the Liberty’s first game of the season — they wanted three things.
They wanted the rings to take up the same space as the men’s championship rings and to be just as outrageous, the better to reflect the growing power of the W.N.B.A. But they did not want them to look like the men’s rings. And they wanted to make history.
That is not as simple as it sounds.
As with most sporting gear, championship rings — those pieces of jewelry that are effectively wearable trophies — were originally made for men and then altered (resized, feminized) to fit women. The approach was essentially the jewelry equivalent of “shrink it and pink it.”
For years, women’s basketball jerseys were simply smaller versions of men’s jerseys, even though men’s jerseys classically had enormous arm holes, and on women those arm holes acted mostly as unnecessary windows to the sports bra. Like the practice of wearing white shorts in soccer or bikini bottoms in track, it was not until a female athlete said, “Hold up, why are we doing this?” that anyone thought to redesign the garment.
Well, finally the same thing is happening with rings.
It began, really, with the Las Vegas Aces, who won the W.N.B.A. finals in 2022 and 2023 and whose rings took the bling to a whole new level. (Their 2022 style had so many diamonds that it was said to be the most expensive in W.N.B.A. history.) But Ms. Wu Tsai wanted to raise them one. She and her husband, Joe Tsai, who also own the Brooklyn Nets, have been deliberate about making sure their women’s team is given the same treatment as their men’s team.
So the ring “became a major priority, more quickly than I think I even anticipated,” Ms. Clarke said. “We won the championship on a Sunday, and by the next Friday I already had calls scheduled with the major players in the industry. We definitely weren’t going to just take, say, what the Boston Celtics did and ‘Libertize’ it.”
To do that, she and Ms. Wu Tsai enlisted Jason Arasheben, the founder of Jason of Beverly Hills, a jeweler who has been making championship rings since 2009. (He has made eight of the last nine N.B.A. rings as well as rings for the N.H.L., the N.F.L. and M.L.B.) Then, to add some local flavor, they brought in the Brooklyn jewelry designers Dynasty and Soull Ogun, who had been recommended by Swizz Beatz and were the founders of the brand L’Enchanteur, as collaborators. It took them all about four months to come up with the final design.
“If you look at rings from even five years ago, they were small, they were simple,” Mr. Arasheben said. “But recently, we’ve seen them get bigger and bigger and bigger, partly because there is a certain level of competition between players and owners and also because it allows for more real estate to tell the story. Now with the New York Liberty, we’ve gone even further, even more over the top.”
Also, Ms. Wu Tsai said, even further beyond the team logo.
The result is a ring composed of approximately 110 grams of white gold, as well as white diamonds, black diamonds and Brazilian paraiba tourmalines the color of the Liberty blue. The front features an oversize flame sandwiched between the “N” and “Y” of New York, while one side displays a player’s name and number around an image of a tree breaking through concrete to symbolize Brooklyn’s concrete jungle and triumph over adversity (and a run of bad seasons).
There are 28 stones in the leaves to represent the 28 years of the Liberty; and 11 black diamonds in the “Y” of “NY” to represent the playoff wins, with 32 points to represent the regular season wins. The top unscrews to reveal an image of the Liberty’s home court at the Barclays Center along with the unofficial slogan of the last season: “We all we got! We all we need!”
But the top, rather than transforming into a medallion, as some men’s rings have done, actually conceals a pair of gold stud earrings in the shape of “NY,” wearing the Statue of Liberty’s crown on top.
“I think that from a technical standpoint, this ring is the best ring in W.N.B.A. championship history,” Mr. Arasheben said. “We have ball bearings in there, we have screws in there, we have springs in there, and this is the first ring in championship ring history that has not only a twist-off top, but a compartment that houses a pair of stud earrings.”
That may not sound like that big a deal, except that realistically, a championship ring “is not really a ring to wear,” Mr. Arasheben acknowledged (with some understatement). It looks more like a ring that could be used to zap an alien.
Earrings, on the other hand, are a different story. They reflect, Ms. Clarke said, the need to consider the next stage of the athlete’s evolution.
“Players are starting to think about their everyday looks,” she said, referring to the growing importance of the tunnel walk for the W.N.B.A. as well as for the N.B.A. With the earrings, she said, their championship trophy “can be part of it.”
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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