She does not regret taking this shot.
New York Liberty point guard Sabrina Ionescu told The Post this week there was no foul when she boasted that her now-finals-bound squad is better than the Knicks.
“As far as I’m concerned, we’ve been playing the best basketball that’s been played in New York City for a very long time,” she said in a pre-game interview, before scoring 29 points in their playoff-opener win against the Washington Mystics.
The 25-year-old California native — and youngest player in WNBA history to post multiple career triple-doubles — said she isn’t sorry she made the comment.
“I just said what I felt was right,” she ahead of Game 1 of the WNBA finals on Sunday.
“And it’s exciting to see us continue to put that together and have the season that we’ve been having and hopefully we’ll continue to win.”
When asked if she attends Knicks games, she replied, “Knicks games? No, I don’t.”
Last month, Nike honored the 5-foot-11 powerhouse by releasing her first signature sneaker, the Sabrina 1 — the first unisex shoe the brand ever released.
“I thought that was just super important not limiting the shoes to just be for one particular athlete, but just allowing anyone to be able to buy them and wear them to do whatever it is that they want to do,” she said.
Ionescu, 25, who announced her engagement to Las Vegas Raiders’ offensive lineman Hroniss Grasu in January, said she is not yet certain if she’ll be wearing the kicks to her upcoming wedding. “I don’t know,” she said, laughing.
The pair met as alumni of the University of Oregon and Ionescu said she was already a football fan before laying eyes on her future husband.
However, she’s been too busy on the court of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center — where the team moved in 2020 after playing at Madison Square Garden since 1997 when the WNBA was founded — and hasn’t been to any of her fiancé’s games this year.
“The season just started and I’ve been here, so no Raiders games yet,” she said.
The couple are also both first-generation Romanian-Americans — and Ionescu said that whenever her family is in town for a game, she brings them to her favorite local restaurant, Romanian Garden in Sunnyside.
She spoke about the sacrifices her dad — who left communist Romania around the time of the 1989 revolution — and mother, who was unable to join him until 1995, made for their children.
“Immigrating here from a different country, not knowing any English, and just starting a life, that was a sacrifice in itself, and being able to do that to provide a better life for their kids is what they did,” she gushed.
“It’s nice to see how happy and rewarded they feel just watching us do what we do.”
Ionescu — the only player in NCAA history, male or female, with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, and 1,000 assists in her four years at Oregon — didn’t want to speculate on what Kobe Bryant, her close friend and mentor, would have told her in this pivotal moment of her career.
“I honestly don’t really know,” she said. “I don’t really like talking about that.”
