The Clock May Be Ticking on the Sun’s Championship Window

Jonquel Jones & Co. fell short yet again for Connecticut in the WNBA playoffs. Where is the franchise headed?

All but one member of the Sun had exited the court as the Aces’ WNBA title celebration broke out around the free throw line closest to Las Vegas’s bench. 2021 League MVP Jonquel Jones remained, however, wanting to deliver a final on-court message to the player she had spent four games battling. Amid the jubilance, the Connecticut star walked across half court and found Aces star A’ja Wilson for an embrace. “It was just a congratulations,” Wilson said. “So before I even got my interview with [ESPN’s Holly Rowe], I had to go speak to her because she played her heart out.”

Then, as Wilson rejoined her teammates, Jones strode toward one of the tunnels leading to the underbelly of Mohegan Sun Arena and gave the crowd one last round of applause in gratitude.

Against Las Vegas, Jones tried to bring her franchise what Wilson eventually brought hers: their first-ever championship. She scored a team-high 20 points in Connecticut’s blowout Game 3 win and notched five of her 13 points in a crucial third-quarter stretch in Game 4, while adding two blocks—both on Wilson and both of which jolted the sellout home crowd of 9,652 people. But to the 28-year-old forward, such successes, at least in the present, are marred by the emotions of another difficult defeat.

“I’m just trying to process this right now,” Jones said afterward. “All I know is it hurts me, and that’s all I’m feeling.”

Minus Game 3, which saw the Sun erupt for 105 points, Jones and her Connecticut teammates struggled to crack Las Vegas’s defense. While the Sun held the Aces to a season-low 67 points in the series opener, they scored just 64 points themselves. In Game 2, their offense showed signs of improvement—finishing the loss with 71 points—but they were uncharacteristically outscored in the paint, and their usually stout defense was overwhelmed by the Aces’ individual shot creators. On Sunday, they again totaled 71 points, and they failed to score in the final 1:50 of the game.

Sixth Player of the Year Brionna Jones played a huge role in the Sun’s trip to the Finals :: Jessica Hill/AP

Throughout the season, with their vaunted frontcourt of Jonquel Jones, All-Star forward Alyssa Thomas and Sixth Player of the Year center Brionna Jones anchoring them, the Sun learned to find gratification in their grinding style of play. Coach and general manager Curt Miller often talked about wanting to make games “messy.” They had the No. 2 defensive rating, and, in an era of basketball that revolves around pace and space, they were constructed from the inside out. The Sun made only 6.4 three-pointers per game in the regular season (second worst in the league), but instead took pride in banging on the boards with elbows and heart. “Not everybody is built for that,” guard Courtney Williams says.

Adds her backcourt mate Natisha Hiedeman: “We learned how to not play perfect. The game’s not gonna be perfect, and we don’t want it to be perfect.”

In recent years, experience has been a great teacher for the Connecticut franchise, which had six of the same players on the 2019 team that lost to the Mystics in the Finals. It’s why up until double zeros on the clock Sunday, they remained optimistic about their chances to claim the franchise’s first championship. Game 4 was their fifth elimination game of this postseason, and, ahead of Sunday’s loss, multiple players spoke not of feeling pressure but of playing with urgency.

But nevertheless, here the Sun are again, with a final buzzer having sounded on a season, forced to ponder what’s next. Key free-agency decisions await them, and they are well-aware their title window won’t stay open forever.

“We know that each and every year your team rarely looks exactly the same,” Miller said earlier in the series. “Our team is different than last year, was different from the year before, and we know it will be different again.”

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Perhaps no player on the Sun recognizes the rarity of a deep playoff run like guard DeWanna Bonner. At 35, she is the lone member of the team to have won a championship, doing so most recently in 2014 with the Mercury. On the night before Game 4 of its semifinal series against Chicago, with her team facing elimination, she had done enough sulking. “We ain’t going out like that,” she told Thomas, her partner. “We ain’t just gonna lay down and quit.”

The two discussed what needed to be done to extend their season. The first step, Bonner realized, was a players-only meeting, and she asked Thomas when the best moment to hold it would be.

The following morning, minutes before the team’s scheduled film session, she went up to Miller and said that instead of watching tape she wanted to gather the group together. “You always listen to your players at this level,” says Miller, who acknowledged he is “probably coaching less” this year as a function of having an experienced group.

With everyone seated at their lockers, Bonner first had an equipment manager bring out Starbucks—“you gotta make everybody feel good,” she says—then proceeded to lead the 20-minute conversation. She talked about the scarceness of having potential title-winning teams and that they “gotta want this for each other, for ourselves,” in the words of reserve wing DiJonai Carrington. Bonner said that the Sun had felt tense thus far in the playoffs and that she wanted her teammates to have fun again.

“I think it just relaxed everybody,” Jonquel Jones says.

Adds Bonner: “That was a time for me to pull us in a little bit. The opportunity I couldn’t let pass up.”

In 2021, the top-seeded Sun entered their series with the Sky riding a 14-game winning streak. But they lost the semis in four games, a defeat Jones still says “was a very bitter moment.” She says it was disappointing to be “that team that was good in the regular season but couldn’t get over that hump.” This year, Connecticut, which was 25–11 on the season and No. 3 heading into the playoffs, was determined to move through to the next round.

In Game 4 of the semis, the Sun cruised to a 24-point victory. Back on the road in Game 5, they trailed by 10 entering the fourth quarter and by nine with 4:46 left in the game. During a timeout 22 seconds later, assistant coach Chris Koclanes entered a huddle in which “the togetherness in there was insane.”

“Their commitment to each other and just the positive self-talk. They were just so into it and not deflated or dejected at all,” he says. “It was just incredible. I sat down and just felt it and didn’t even need to say anything.”

Says Hiedeman: “We all looked at each other in that moment and basically just went back to what we talked about” before Game 4. They closed the series on an 18–0 run to claim victory in the winner-take-all affair. It would prove to be the year’s high point.

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Coming into this season, the Sun knew they had to figure out how their roster would fit together. While their core has been in place for years, in recent seasons they have seldom been at full strength. “Our team is full of stories of unintended consequences,” Miller says.

They’ve grown used to reinventing themselves. Thomas missed almost the entirety of 2021 due to an Achilles tear, moving Brionna Jones into the starting lineup and making Jonquel Jones a centerpiece on both ends (and eventual league MVP). Jonquel did not play in the WNBA bubble the year before that, allowing Thomas and Jones to get reps together.

When starting point guard Jasmine Thomas tore her ACL just five games into this season, the team’s backcourt rotation changed and Hiedeman moved into the first five. An ACL tear by reserve guard Bria Hartley at the end of July was another hiccup. “It’s been a lot of experimenting,” Alyssa Thomas says. “A lot of ups and downs, and just trying to figure out what would make us successful.”

No example of the team’s trial and error was more evident than how Miller handled his star bigs. Before the All-Star break, Jonquel Jones, Brionna Jones and Alyssa Thomas played together in 20 games, averaging 10.6 minutes per appearance. After the break, they played together in just three regular-season games, for six total minutes. Conversations were had between coaches and with the aforementioned players. “We just thought we needed to play everyone at their natural position,” Miller says.

Doing so, though, took sacrifice. Jonquel Jones averaged her fewest minutes total since 2018, playing just 26.4 on average. She did so saying that the team’s success was more important than individual accolades: “I would give up my MVP to win a championship.” Brionna Jones changed roles entirely, going from starting and averaging more than 30 minutes per game last season to coming off the bench and playing fewer than 30 minutes in all but six contests in the ’22 campaign.

“Sometimes it may not feel perfect,” Koclanes says. “It hasn’t been easy, but our players have been receptive and bought in because ultimately they want to succeed, and they want to win.”

Despite going away from the group for much of the year, in the fourth quarter of Game 4 as they tried to extend their season, Miller leaned on the trio. “Some of it was certainly the scheme, and then some of it certainly is that’s our core group,” he said. “Those are who you run with. Those are who have put us in position year after year after year.”

The three helped erase a four-point fourth-quarter deficit and eventually gave the Sun a lead with 2:22 to play in the game. But Las Vegas, fueled by a scrappy and undersized lineup, went on a 8–0 to close the series and claim the title.

“We were just kind of pulling straws over there,” Aces coach Becky Hammon said afterward. “I just felt like, I don't know if we’ll stop them but I don’t think they can stop us, either.”

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Miller is the longest-tenured member of the Sun organization, having been hired after the 2015 season. But 15 years before he took the Connecticut job, he was an assistant coach at Colorado State, when the team’s star player was Hammon.

On the morning before Game 4, Miller was fumbling through his backpack and saw a challenge coin commemorating the 1998–99 CSU team, which went 33–3 and eventually lost in the Sweet 16. He chuckled to himself. “It was a great reminder of being in the moment, be present and don’t take for granted that, Wow, this is a pretty great opportunity,” he says.

Miller has long sought to make the most out of situations, whether in game play or practice. Back then, with the team in need of practice players, Tom Collen, the Rams’ coach from 1997 to 2002, often enlisted Miller to suit up in sessions. On one occasion during the 1998–99 campaign, Hammon crossed Miller over to such a degree that he injured his ankle “badly enough that I was out for the next four to six weeks,” he remembers.

Says Collen: “Becky probably damaged a lot of ankles, because her ballhandling ability was uncanny and her ability to shift directions at any given moment was too.”

Today, though, Hammon looks on from the sideline, as star guards Chelsea Gray—the Finals MVP—and Kelsey Plum put on ballhandling clinics. Guard Jackie Young, too, has developed into an elite slasher thanks to the tutelage of Hammon and was an All-Star starter. And, oh by the way, there’s A’ja Wilson, the 2022 league MVP, who looked unstoppable at times as well. The Aces were talent-rich. The Sun were energy-rich. “When you tell them they can’t do something, it’s going to make them try even harder and compete like crazy,” Miller said after Game 3. “There’s just so much pride in that locker room that we are who we are.”

But pride doesn’t necessarily translate into made baskets, and the Sun shot only 44.6% in the series, a number inflated by their 105-point Game 3 showing.

With the offseason now here, how they proceed will again be a central question. Brionna Jones is a free agent and is poised to attract attention from other center-needy teams around the W. “I haven’t thought about it yet,” she said of her future after the series-ending loss. “Because I have so many other things to do and think about before that point.” Hiedeman and Williams could also sign elsewhere.

Miller said afterward he too hadn’t thought about possible changes. Instead, he reflected on the journey his franchise has been on in recent years.

“We were charged with trying to rebuild something and we have had a remarkable sustained run,” he said. “We’ve equaled the most playoff wins since 2016 of anyone in the league. We are one game behind the most regular-season wins. So the sustained success is really special.”

But, he added, “in pro sports, you want banners, and we are going to keep grinding and grinding until we can try to hang a banner.”