Being an elite athlete requires mastery of mind, body and, occasionally, some unorthodox skills. As part of the December 2024 Total Athlete issue, SI explores how today’s complete competitors are expanding what’s possible with new fitness frontiers, cutting edge technology, mental training and more—from the behemoths of the NFL’s offensive line, to a versatile WNBA veteran, to a special group of athletes who forgo the fundamentals and go against the grain.
Alyssa Thomas cannot really shoot a three-pointer. This is not to say she struggles to make them. She literally cannot shoot them.
“I can get it to the rim from the three-point line,” she says, and surely she is the only elite pro basketball player who has ever uttered those words. “But I’m sore for a couple days if I shoot a few of them.”
Thomas, who has spent her entire 10-year WNBA career with the Sun, has played with a torn labrum—the ring of cartilage that stabilizes the shoulder joint—in each arm for seven years. She refuses to get them fixed because, she says, “They said the surgery and recovery is harder than the Achilles.” And she knows how hard that is: In January 2022, she tore that tendon in her left leg, which required eight months of grueling rehab.
A lot of people in her condition would not have the pain tolerance to simply give a high five, which is too bad, because she deserves a million of them. In the past three years, with the repaired Achilles and two bad shoulders, Thomas has played the best basketball of her life. She has made first- and second-team all-WNBA and first-team all-defense. Before tearing her Achilles, Thomas had zero career triple doubles. Since coming back, she has had 15—more than any player in WNBA history has had in their career.
It is tempting to call her a medical marvel, but since Thomas has declined surgery, she is mostly just a marvel. Stories about her tend to begin, quite naturally, with her toughness. But there are plenty of tough basketball players, and you don’t see them thriving with two torn labrums and a repaired Achilles.
Thomas has done it because she has qualities that are extremely rare, even in the world of professional sports. Some, like her strength, are easy to spot. But others are hard for even other players to understand. Six-time WNBA All-Star DeWanna Bonner played against Thomas for five years and says Thomas made no impression on her whatsoever. Then, in 2020, Bonner joined Thomas on the Sun. Now Bonner is smitten by Thomas’s game (and by Thomas—the two are engaged). Bonner says, “I didn’t know how good she was until I actually played with her.”
When we say some athletes are built different, Thomas should be Exhibit 1A. As Sun strength and conditioning coach Annalisse Rios puts it: “She is just that sort of human.”
Start with the obvious: A torn labrum is a serious injury for any athlete who needs to raise their arms, and as you have probably noticed, basketball rims are not knee-high. Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant and Indiana Pacers guard Bennedict Mathurin both tore a labrum in early 2024 and underwent season-ending surgery that sidelined them for more than six months. Comparing injuries requires the caveat that no two tears are exactly the same, so this is not meant as a direct comparison to Morant or Mathurin at all. It is just to say that playing with two torn labrums is a big deal, and by continuing to play, Thomas keeps tearing them.
The problems in her right shoulder started in 2015, her second season in the league. In the ensuing years, she says she injured it “multiple times.” This was manageable because, although Thomas is a natural righty, she had always shot the ball left-handed. But then, when she was playing in South Korea in ’17, she tore the labrum in her left shoulder so severely that she started airballing free throws. Suddenly, the injured right shoulder seemed like a good option. Rather than undergo surgery, Thomas switched shooting hands.
In the WNBA bubble in 2020, it was her right shoulder’s turn again: She dislocated it in a playoff game. But when the Sun returned to the court two days later, so did Thomas. She played 38 minutes and had 23 points and 12 rebounds in a 77–68 victory.
“I always joke with AT that she’s a superhuman, or she’s somehow bionic,” Rios says, and it’s not entirely a joke. “She has all these stabilizer muscles that take over the job of the labrums.” And Thomas’s recuperative powers don’t seem to be confined to her shoulders. “I honestly think that she has so much strength in her that, even with an ankle roll, her muscles are so adept at adapting to that change of motion being able to, almost like, catch it before it becomes too bad.”
Those souped-up stabilizers—the smaller, deeper muscles that support the major joints—help explain why Thomas can stay on the court. But they do not eliminate the pain. That is just part of her life. “Sleeping is a little uncomfortable,” Thomas says. “I toss and turn a lot. You just can’t stay on your shoulders for a long time, and I’m not really a back sleeper.”
Bonner says sometimes the 6' 2" Thomas will reach to grab something from a kitchen cabinet and have to ask for help if it’s on the top shelf. Yet in 2023, Thomas led the WNBA in getting the ball off the top shelf: She won the league’s rebounding title, averaging 9.9 per game.
While other players might limit themselves to avoid exacerbating an injury, Thomas embraces her various ailments, turning them into strengths. She doesn’t just bull her way through the pain; she constantly modifies based on whatever hurts most. “One thing that I’ve done throughout this whole thing,” she says, “is just get more creative.”
Thomas’s Basketball Reference profile reads, “Shoots: Left Right.” But if you watch her, you might say she shoots neither-handed. She hoists push shots that are reminiscent of a little kid who must summon every ounce of strength to reach the rim. She says, “I know it’s unorthodox, it doesn’t look pretty.” But it’s the only way for her to shoot. The free throw line is at the end of her range: During the 2024 season she was 62.8% from the stripe. But 214 of her 326 field goal attempts came from inside five feet, and she made 60.7% of those tries. By avoiding shots she can’t expect to make, she was 50.9% from the floor, the second-highest rate of her career.
She adapts in more subtle ways, too. Nobody in the arena would notice this, but when Thomas defends in the post, she can’t really hold her position with her forearm like most players are taught to do. How much she tries to do that “just depends on if I’ve been hit or if something’s tweaked it … it’s happened so much now that I know when I’ve torn a little more scar tissue.”
“Her ability to know exactly what her body needs to move the way it does is just unbelievable,” says Rios. “I haven’t seen anything like that before. And we work with elite athletes.”
Rios calls the connection between Thomas’s brain and body “insane.” Yet it is not surprising. We’ve been so busy talking about her injuries that we forgot to mention something kind of important: Alyssa Thomas is a basketball genius.
Thomas has one of those rare sports brains, a supercomputer competing against flip phones. Most smart, diligent athletes watch extra video of their upcoming opponents. Thomas does not. She has, effectively, placed out of that level of basketball academia. For Thomas, watching extra video of a single opponent would be like an English major studying her ABCs instead of reading classic novels. Instead, Bonner says, “She watches a lot of basketball … all day, every day. She watches the NBA, she watches preseason, she watches Summer League—she watches everything.”
The result is an extraordinary catalog of hoops knowledge—far more information than most players could possibly sift through. Other players try to remember their opponents’ plays and tendencies from film sessions: When Player X sets a screen for Player Y there, Player Z floats to that corner for a possible three-pointer. Thomas pops what she sees on the court into the internal database she has built up over the years, then comes up with a solution in real time. There are moments when she understands opponents better than they understand themselves: In this situation, Player X will go over there, whether she realizes it or not.
“She’ll tell me, ‘Go to this spot and look for this,’ and it will literally be wide open,” Bonner says. “And it’s just like, Man, how did you even see that? The way that her mind thinks is at a totally different level than most players.”
Thomas had to wait a few years before she could take full advantage of her head, but that says more about the sport than about her or the Sun. While the WNBA has, like most levels of basketball, moved toward a more positionless game, it wasn’t that way when Thomas was drafted fourth overall out of Maryland in 2014. At least in Connecticut, where former Sun coach Curt Miller looked at her size and lack of perimeter-scoring ability and inserted her into a traditional power forward role. Connecticut had some success, advancing to two Finals and having the league’s best record in 2021, but the team wasn’t taking full advantage of Thomas’s greatest gift: her ability to see the game like a Hall of Fame point guard.
In the past three years—and especially once Miller and star Jonquel Jones left the franchise after the ’22 season—Connecticut has changed its offensive approach. The Sun’s last coach, Stephanie White (who recently took the coaching job with the Indiana Fever), ran what Thomas describes as “a read-based offense,” and much of it flowed through Thomas, positions be damned. Why run a set play that opponents have studied on film when Thomas can pull one out of her mental encyclopedia and surprise them?
“I’ve just been able to freestyle and put my teammates where I see the mismatches,” Thomas says. “They know if they run that I’m gonna find them or get them easy shots.”
Playing with two torn labrums is like driving with four leaky tires: As soon as you get one working, another one goes pfffft. Thomas does take measures to keep herself in the lineup. She gets cupping massages. She takes anti-inflammatory medicine. She also lifts weights after games, including benching a pair of 50- or 60-pound dumbbells, which seems counterintuitive: Why put more stress on what already hurts? But by lifting, she builds up those stabilizer muscles.
For WNBA players of this generation, a long rehab is not just an excuse to delay surgery; time away usually means lost income from playing overseas. (“To have both done, we’re looking at nine, 10, 11 months,” she says.) Thomas is 32. If she had gotten her shoulders repaired when she injured them all those years ago …
She is too smart to play that game.
“I could have easily just given up and had the surgery,” she says. “No telling how that would have went for me, either.”
Thomas has played so well for so long with torn labrums that her career has an if-it-hasn’t-happened-by-now feel to it: “I will eventually have the surgeries,” she says, “when I’m done playing.” In the meantime, the only operations in her plans are the ones she performs on opponents.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Alyssa Thomas Can Barely Raise Her Arms, but She Still Dominates in the WNBA.
