New York Liberty’s Championship Ring Is a First in More Ways Than One

Style|The New York Liberty’s Championship Ring Is a First in More Ways Than One

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As with most sporting gear, championship rings — those pieces of jewelry that are effectively wearable trophies — were originally made for men and then altered (resized, feminized) to fit women.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.

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.