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Epiphanny Prince and Tina Charles were sitting in the cafeteria at the New York Liberty’s training facility earlier this month, discussing how exactly they had gotten from the streets of New York’s outer boroughs, surviving an arrest, an assassination, and missed layups, to suddenly find themselves as the two best basketball players on their hometown’s most successful basketball team. (Sorry, Knicks.) Consider just one of the obstacles: Six years ago, when she was 21, Prince spent a year playing in Russia, which had its challenges both pedestrian — “I’m a very picky eater” — and exotic. One night, she and several teammates were planning to attend a Beyoncé concert in Moscow, as a gift from the team’s owner. But when the players went to get the tickets, they found out the owner, a former KGB spy turned businessman, had been shot ten times while sitting in the back of his car at a stoplight. Prince had just seen Taken, and moved in with a teammate. “I was thinking, Are they gonna get the players next?” she says.

They didn’t, and she and Charles — childhood friends turned high school rivals turned professional teammates — reunited in New York this year. In their first season together, the Liberty have recorded the WNBA’s best record, and have a shot at winning the first championship in team history. It might be the most surprising sports story of the year, if only anyone were paying attention. Earlier this year, the franchise was widely pilloried for hiring Isiah Thomas, the former Knicks executive who had once been the subject of a sexual-harassment suit brought by a female employee, as team president. But Thomas has remained almost entirely behind the scenes, and engineered the trade that brought Prince to New York.

If the Thomas news is the only thing you’ve heard about the WNBA this year, you aren’t alone: The league registered its lowest-ever attendance this season, games are absent from SportsCenter, and the only league news that leaked into the popular consciousness this year has been the domestic-violence charges against star center Brittney Griner. The lack of attention has made the league’s economic position perilous, which is how Prince found herself in Russia. The WNBA's maximum salary is $107,000; abroad, players can make seven figures, so most every top American player spends the offseason toiling in Turkey, Russia, China, and elsewhere. This year, Diana Taurasi, a nine-time WNBA All-Star, made waves by choosing to skip the WNBA season entirely, so she would be fresh for her Russian team. Less prominent players are wise to keep all options open: Erica Wheeler, the Liberty’s backup point guard, has a LinkedIn page that mentions her sales-associate position at True Religion jeans last year.

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