May 25th, 2019: Washington at Connecticut

Just the Facts, Ma'am: Connecticut opened the season strong with an 84-69 win over Washington in the Sun's home opener. Alyssa Thomas led all scorers with 23 points, with Jonquel Jones adding a double-double of 10 points and 14 rebounds. Emma Meesseman led Washington with 14 points.

For free swag, the squad coming through, starters versus reserves, careless cameramen, a poster quest, and energy, join your intrepid and well-traveled blogger after the jump.

Basketball never stops, and neither does your intrepid blogger. We go from home opener to home opener, as the Connecticut Sun open their season with a Saturday night special at Mohegan Sun against the short-handed Washington Mystics.

Somehow, despite the busted seats, the weaksauce air conditioning, and the appalling stench coming from the bathroom, this is still a more pleasant ride than the endless Metro-North ride to That Dump. I'm still wrapping my head around the images of Connecticut in spring. It's so green! And I think I just saw a bus stop. Maybe we're closer to civilization than I thought. We're certainly closer to population; I think we just hit the Stamford traffic jam, unless Connecticut is feeling enthusiastic today and it's actually the Norwalk traffic jam. Well, we are in construction season.

I can simultaneously think it's very cool that the game opened with a traditional (although one presumes modified) Mohegan blessing and be weirded out that the game opened with a prayer, right? That's not too much double-think?

Our bench needs work. Our bench needs a lot of work. Our starters can go toe to toe with anyone in the league and look good doing it. But our bench's inconsistency is going to kill us against teams that aren't sitting a quarter of their roster due to injuries.

Myisha Hines-Allen seems to have bulked up since the last I saw of her, and it was working for her tonight. She gave the Mystics good power inside offensively. I didn't realize she took so many shots until I looked at the box score. Tianna Hawkins made a lot of plays with her butt. These were not always good plays. I think she might actually have deflected the ball with it at one point, and she definitely hit people with it. She's going to need to play a lot better for Washington, especially with their lack of depth right now and the specter of Eurobasket looming.

So... this is what you kept Kim Mestagh for, Coach T? To come in for a few spot minutes as a shooter? She's definitely got that Colorado State touch from beyond the arc, but if she doesn't play it's very hard to gauge her skill on the W level. Shatori Walker-Kimbrough was first off the bench in each half and provided good length, but couldn't finish and made careless mistakes.

I really like what LaToya Sanders brings to the floor for Washington. She didn't do a lot of scoring, but she was very active in motion, setting screens and creating space for her shooters to shoot. She did a lot of hard work on the glass and on the floor, and not all of it is going to show up in the box score. But she was one of the most important players out there for DC tonight, and damn it someone's going to respect her for it. Emma Meesseman's footwork seems to have regressed- she really should have been called for a lot more travels than she was tonight. Like, you know. Any. That's not what they mean by the Eurostep. She's so smooth when she makes the move that it's almost forgiveable. Almost. She's aware of who she has to be for Washington with Delle Donne out, and who she has to be for Belgium, and she's taking on that role.

Kristi Toliver brought her shot tonight, but her game was cut short by a collision with a cameraman with whom she was tangled for quite some time. She left limping and came back with ice on her right knee. We'll see how that goes. She looked so sad and lonely when Coach T threw in the towel and sent in all the reserves he had left. Ariel Atkins kept getting to the line, and I have no idea how. She penetrated, but it didn't look like she was taking the kind of contact that would keep getting her free throws. Maybe she was just taking advantage of us being in the penalty, which is still praiseworthy for clock and foul awareness. She's got touch, but I don't know if she has consistency. Ask me at the end of the season. Natasha Cloud did an amazing job cutting through our defense, and defending on the other end herself. There's an intensity about her defense, a carefully-controlled focus, that's a little bit scary and a little bit cool at the same time. It's like she's determining how she's going to slice you up and if she should use the Ginsu knives or bring out the Henckels.

Washington seems extremely interchangeable. There are days when that will be helpful to them because someone will step up when they need them to. And when they have their full rotation back, then they'll be able to plug in the hot hand and sit whoever doesn't have their act together. But this is a supporting cast in search of a star right now, a problem that will only be exacerbated if Toliver is out for any length of time.

Coach Miller, Y U NO PLAY ANIGWE?

I like what Rachel Banham can bring to the floor on offense, although on that end she looked a little more hesitant than I like. But on the defensive end of the floor, there were at least two moments where I was putting up prayers for her soul after she was immolated on a crossover or a sudden first step. The effort is there. The energy is there. The skill is not. I was under the impression that Bria Holmes was a shooter. Shooting did not happen. Not much of anything happened from her. There was a point in the game where I was done with Layshia Clarendon, which was about five seconds before she found her second wind and started driving the lane more and making better plays on defense. I'm relieved, because I like Layshia and I want her to do well.

Brionna Jones looks like she'll be very effective for short stretches, and then her conditioning or whatever will catch up to her and she'll start slowing down. She brings the power and she brings the pain, but we're going to need her to be able to play more minutes. I did like the big block she had on Tianna Hawkins. Turtle-on-turtle violence is a beautiful thing sometimes. Morgan Tuck hit a couple of threes in the second quarter that got the crowd going (although, to be honest, Morgan Tuck's continued existence is generally enough to get the crowd going, it's sort of refreshing that they've extended their obsessive love to random Huskies to all Huskies instead of... ahem, select ones) but was getting beaten on the boards by Hawkins. She just didn't have the height to compete with Washington's posts, and in most of Connecticut's lineups, she seemed to lined up against Washington's posts so that the other forwards could exploit mismatches.

There are a lot of crazy arrows on my score card indicating amazing ball movement, and a lot of them originate from Courtney Williams. I'm so used to thinking of her as a scorer that seeing her as a facilitator makes me do a double-take. But she realized that her shot wasn't falling, so she passed back. Some of the ball movement with her and Alyssa Thomas was beyond outstanding- they were the types of quick passes you make when you've known someone forever, Ticha-to-Yo kinds of passes. Jasmine Thomas got victimized by rims that were really being too kind to Washington most of the night, but she made some clutch plays defensively. She's the engine that makes the Sun go, much as Kelly Miller was for the champion Mercury back in the day; even when she's not making a statistical impact, she's making things happen for her squad.

Alyssa Thomas, human wrecking ball, took the offense in hand and made sure Connecticut was going to win this game no matter what. While her teammates put in a lot of work to extend the lead, she was the one who took on the scoring load when the game was tight. She drove the lane and took contact without hesitation and without fear. I'm not always thrilled with her floaters, but they were falling in this game, so that seems fine. I was disappointed in Jonquel Jones's willingness ot follow her shot, but she racked up enough rebounds close to the paint with her sheer height that I can't really complain. I'd like to see her take fewer threes, but at the same time I recognize that her ability to stretch the floor is part of what makes her dangerous. It's just frustrating when those long shots go down and there's no one there to rebound except maybe AT, surrounded by four jerseys in the wrong color. Shekinna Stricklen made some surprisingly good defensive plays- there was one sequence where she forced an out of bounds on the sideline that was really slick- but there always seemed to be more on the floor that she could be doing and wasn't. I'd like to see her develop more of a midrange or inside game, even though I know by now it's not going to happen.

The bench needs to get going faster. We lost too much momentum with the reserves in, and the extension of the lead in the second half was as much because Washington collapsed in the absence of Toliver than it was anyone really stepping up big for the Sun.

Camera guys. Stay in your boxes. After the second collision, which was the one that took Toliver out of the game, the entire Washington coaching staff was out on the floor and not shy about expressing their displeasure about the situation, and the officials were talking to the cameramen afterwards. There seemed to be some pushback, so I can only assume there was a debate about the definition of being in the box versus not being in the box.

Officiating was fairly loose for a while, tightened up for a while, then loosened up again. There were some physical plays that could genuinely have gotten someone hurt, like Atkins going knee-to-knee on someone. She got pulled out of the game for that stunt.

The t-shirts look really nice. Well done, Sun.

Nifty entrance video, well-chosen music. The only change I'd have made would be to have even the casual gear be Sun gear. Cal did something similar a few years ago- still showed the different players' different styles, but showed team pride and team unity. (And also, you can market the merch. Cash Rules Everything Around Me.)

Nice touch: the big entrance video features the orange jersey, the "get loud" hype video features the navy blue jersey. Yay, you get to see both sets!

Our neighbors are cool- older folks, season ticket holders since day 1, willing to get loud and support the entire team. I'm going to feel really bad about yelling around them when the Sun play the Liberty. It's not like I'm not going to, though.

"Game of Jones" is funny, but maybe not timely? Please do throwback episodes with Joneses of the past.

Somewhere, there is a coach looking down on an orange Connecticut and laughing. I love it.

Connecticut is definitely more fun to watch than New York. New York is still my squad, but Connecticut seems to enjoy playing basketball far more than New York does.