Taking stock of the Connecticut Sun, the Storm and the WNBA Semifinals

The Connecticut Sun smashed the Aces in Game 1 while the Lynx and Storm had their WNBA Semifinals matchup delayed. Here’s everything you need to know.

The WNBA semifinals began on Sunday afternoon, with a best-of-five series between the Las Vegas Aces and the Connecticut Sun. Connecticut won Game 1 handily, 87-62.

Game 1 of the other semifinal, the Seattle Storm taking on the Minnesota Lynx, was to begin Sunday as well, but got delayed by multiple inconclusive COVID-19 tests. As of now, the plan is to try and play Game 1 on Tuesday night.

Whenever we get to full basketball, It is striking how different the four paths are taken by these semifinalists, from who played their best basketball, to styles each of the four coaches involved deploy.

And while the top two seeds, Las Vegas and Seattle, are considered fairly heavy favorites, there is no homecourt advantage to speak of in the #wubble in Bradenton, Florida. So truly, this will come down to which team can play best over a five-game span.

Let’s start with the Aces-Sun matchup. And when the Sun are involved, you can count on three things: a free-flowing offense centered around the many skills of Alyssa Thomas, Florida-appropriate button-down shirt patterns on head coach Curt Miller, and declaring that someone, or even no one, showed the Connecticut Sun #DisRespect.

The Sun actually have a case here, as opposed to last season, when they were considered a favorite to at least reach the WNBA Finals, and then did just that. (Rest assured, their Game 1 rout should put a rest to it.)

This season, they began 0-5, before rallying behind the return of Briann January, inspired play by DeWanna Bonner, both Thomases (Alyssa and Jasmine), and a bumper crop of rookies pressed into service. Jasmine Thomas scored a career-high 31 in Game 1 against the Aces, but more typically plays a secondary scoring role, while running the team’s offense. Kaila Charles, in particular, is someone to watch, a dangerous combination of quickness and strength as a wing off the bench, who can shoot the 3 and defend. Bri Jones has been a solid stand-in for Jonquel Jones at center, with Jones opting out over health and safety concerns, and Bri is doing what she does — grabbing boards, finishing with efficiency around the rim.

Ultimately, though, this team rises or falls with the combo of Bonner and Alyssa Thomas. The former has taken over primary scoring duties with Courtney Williams off to Atlanta, and absolutely embraced the role of top banana, after a decade next to Diana Taurasi. And Thomas is just a player who needs to be seen to be believed. She’s not as tall as most bigs in the league, just 6-foot-2, but she is a ferocious rebounder. She made exactly half of her shots this season, but she cannot raise her arms properly, with torn labrums in both shoulders. And she’s tired of talking about her shoulder injuries, which reflects just how long she’s been performing at an all-world level with these injuries. Apparently she has a hand injury, too? Doesn’t matter. She’s unstoppable offensively, and per Synergy, she finished with the lowest defensive points per possession allowed of anyone in the league, minimum 100 possessions.

The Aces, though, were playing as well as any team in the league, and while the Sun had to win both on Tuesday against Chicago and then Thursday against Los Angeles, Las Vegas got a week of rest to recharge, following the final weekend’s regular-season wins over Los Angeles and Seattle that earned them the number one overall seed. Las Vegas finished 9-1 — no other team had fewer than three losses in their last 10 games.

The league’s second-ranked defense and offense has been powered by 2020 MVP A’ja Wilson, freed to fully unleash her game in the space occupied last year by both Wilson and Liz Cambage, the latter a medical exception for 2020. Alongside Wilson is a rejuvenated Angel McCoughtry, who just posted the best Win Shares per 40 number of her career, no small feat when her resume features five other All-Star campaigns. Danielle Robinson, at age 31, has become a reliable 3-point shooter to go with her ultra-quickness and playmaking abilities, while Dearica Hamby is a bench player in only the technical sense of the term — a 6-foot-3 big with range from anywhere and an uncanny ability to rebound the ball who will earn 2020 Sixth Woman of the Year honors unless the WNBA media elections get hacked by a foreign adversary.

The Aces won both regular-season games between these two teams fairly easily, but the latter of the matchups came without Jasmine or Alyssa Thomas playing — no real harbinger of anything at all, as we found out on Sunday Alyssa Thomas vs. A’ja Wilson alone will be worth the price of admission throughout this series, and the Sun have plenty of other options to keep this one interesting, and could even win it outright. No #DisrespeCT here, friends.

Who is looking like the favorite in the WNBA playoffs?

In the other series, the Seattle Storm, on paper, look like an easy winner. The Storm had the league’s best offense and best defense, making for a net rating of 15.0. To put that in perspective: the 2019 champion Mystics had a net rating of 14.8, and when the Storm last won the title in 2018, their net rating was just 9.2. The last team to finish a regular season with a better net rating? The 2000 Houston Comets.

And yet.

Much of this statistical damage took place in the early part of the season. Breanna Stewart, for instance, looked like the obvious MVP after returning from her torn achilles somehow every bit as good as she was when she left — that there were no stories about Stewart adjusting was, itself, a primary story of the 2020 season. But Stewart shot 48.2 percent from the field and 42.3 percent from three in her first eight games — in her last 12, that dipped to 43.2 and 32.1, respectively.

Again, that can only be disappointing by Breanna Stewart standards, but it was a noticeable drop.
She played in 20 games because she missed the last two games due to a knee injury. Sue Bird also missed time as she’s returned from a knee injury that cost her all of 2019, and after a similarly shimmering start, regressed some over the latter part of the season.

Are the Storm vulnerable? That seems hard to imagine, with the brilliant Gary Kloppenburg running the show for coach-in-exile Dan Hughes, a recent cancer survivor who was therefore considered high risk and wasn’t medically cleared to join the #wubble. There’s talent up and down the roster, with rookie Ezi Magbegor and 2019 Defensive Player of the Year Natasha Howard offering bruising forward options, future starter at point Jordin Canada and shoot-from-anywhere guard Sami Whitcomb giving the Storm perimeter offense off the bench, and Alysha Clark, who can stop any opposing team’s best guard or wing while hitting 58.8 percent of her twos and 52.2 percent (!!!) of her threes this season.

Even so: the two most important Storm players are Stewart and Bird. Seattle had four two-person lineups this year with a net rating of at least 20. Bird or Stewart is in all four of them, and the highest mark of any two-person lineup is… 27.2, Bird and Stewart. So yes, Seattle has plenty of talent. Bird and Stewart are the most transcendent among them, and if they’re not at 100%, it could matter.

And then there’s the COVID-19 scare the team is currently dealing with. There are a lot more important parts ot that than basketball, but to expect it not to alter the team’s preparation for a playoff series isn’t realistic.

As for the Lynx, they have questions of their own. Sylvia Fowles, the best center in WNBA history, was seven games into another extremely Sylvia Fowles season when a calf injury cost her the remainder of the regular season. She returned on Thursday night in Minnesota’s win over Phoenix, but managed just 18 distinctly un-Syl minutes, while head coach Cheryl Reeve expressed some doubt in postgame over whether she’d even be able to return for the series against Seattle, let alone approach her customary level of play.

The Lynx are not bereft of options, though. Napheesa Collier improved in every major statistical category in Year 2 after winning 2019 Rookie of the Year honors, and gets to relive practices of old at UConn, by serving as primary defender of Stewart. Damiris Dantas is every bit the stretch four any elite team needs now, and Crystal Dangerfield, the 2020 Rookie of the Year, is a combo threat at point guard. There’s plenty of shooting from Odyssey Sims and Rachel Banham, and don’t sleep on the all-around game of Bridget Carleton at the wing.

With Minnesota, it’s less about flashy star power, and more that with every one of their players, there’s a clear purpose on the roster, and there tend to be fewer flaws in their games. That their coach, Cheryl Reeve, earned Coach of the Year honors for a third time is an indication that the voters see that as well.

Can she gameplan enough wrinkles to topple the Storm? If you think I’m betting against either Cheryl Reeve or Breanna Stewart, let alone pretending I know what the future brings in 2020, you’re showing me some real #DisRespeCT.