The Connecticut Sun are in a deep hole, mostly of their own making. They are dead last in the WNBA standings, by a wide margin. They currently have the fifth-best odds at the No. 1 pick — the WNBA Draft Lottery uses a two-season win percentage to determine the order — but will send that pick to the Chicago Sky as part of the trade to acquire Marina Mabrey last season.
Mabrey has been one of their most productive players this season. She's also an unrestricted free agent who already requested a trade during the preseason, which the Sun chose not to honor. The team's leading scorer, 36-year-old legend Tina Charles, is also a free agent.
The Sun do have two other first-round picks this year, No. 13 and No. 14, and a slew of interesting young players on the roster. But this team is nowhere close to being competitive, and turning things around may mean making things worse before they can get better.
Mabrey and Charles are almost certainly leaving in free agency. The Sun held onto them to try and maintain some semblance of respectability, trying to do something to sell tickets. But that plan hasn't worked at all, and it makes way more sense to try and trade both for any future assets they can grab, instead of just letting them walk for nothing. The WNBA Trade Deadline is typically very quiet, and it's not clear what even may be out there for them. But if they can turn either player into a second-round pick or even a reclamation project like Aaliyah Edwards, it should be a no-brainer. The problem is that trading Mabrey and/or Charles could put them on an ugly trajectory.
The Sun are in danger of becoming the worst WNBA team of all-time
Comparing historic win-loss records is tricky because the number of games in a WNBA season has changed so much over the years with contraction and expansion. However, the Sun are at least in the ballpark of the worst win percentage of all time — in 2011, the Tulsa Shock went 3-31, with a win percentage of just 0.088.
The Sun are sitting at 3-20, with a win percentage of 0.130, the fifth-worst mark in history. They have 21 more games on their schedule and should be able to pick up at least one more win, avoiding tying the Shock for the lowest win total ever and guarantee they won't finish with the worst win percentage ever. But that's far from guaranteed, and Sun fans might be naive to expect much more than that.
Remember, the Sun are getting outscored by an average of 19.6 points per 100 possessions — the fourth-worst point differential of all time and the worst mark since the Shock back in 2011. One saving grace is that they still have three more games on the schedule against the Chicago Sky, the second-worst team in the league.
But, again, this team looks even shakier if they're dumping Mabrey and Charles for picks or unproven young players. Remove those two, and they could be plausibly starting three rookies and running their offense through Saniya Rivers and Aneesah Morrow, who are both shooting under 40 percent from the field and under 30 percent from beyond the arc.
It's not too hard to imagine a rebuilt and exciting Sun team pushing for the playoffs in a few years. But setting themselves up for that could make the rest of this an absolute disaster.