UNCASVILLE, Conn. — There’s a certain flimsiness in describing a player like Alyssa Thomas. Nothing seems fully adequate. Even the foundation here is flawed: What is a player like Alyssa Thomas? Here is a forward, but with an uncanny knack for facilitating and running an offense, and here is a guard, but one who plays with a compelling, bruising physicality. A shooter, but with a pair of torn labrums and the unorthodox shot mechanics to match. It’s simplest to say that Thomas is a model of positionless basketball. Yet that’s not quite right, either. It’s not that she has no position so much as that she is every position.
There are few players in the WNBA who can take over a game quite so effectively on both ends of the floor. This was exactly what Thomas did on Wednesday: She led her No. 3 Connecticut Sun to an 87–81 win over the No. 6 Indiana Fever to wrap up the best-of-three series with a sweep and move on to the semifinals. She finished with 19 points, 13 assists and five rebounds, with much of that scoring concentrated in a crucial slice of the second half, when she bent the game to her will.
“This is what I live for,” Thomas said afterward, matter-of-factly, as if it were almost too obvious to bear mention. “This is what I’m waiting for all season long.”
Her show of force came midway through the third quarter. The Fever had nudged ahead for the first time since early in the game. And so Thomas responded immediately: The 32-year-old simply wrested control back. She began driving repeatedly, barreling through any traffic, making it to the hoop again and again. In the last five minutes of the quarter, Connecticut outscored Indiana 14–4. Thomas had scored 10 of those points and had assisted on two. The remaining two were only those she could not possibly have played a role in: They were free throws by teammate Veronica Burton. Every other bit of production ran through Thomas.
“There are times throughout the course of the season where I'm talking to AT about how she needs to shoot the ball more, and not always look for the pass,” said Sun coach Stephanie White. But she did not have to give her star that kind of reminder on Wednesday. It was clear what they needed from her. “She was aggressive to the rim,” White continued. “She was locked in on her finishes. She wanted the ball in her hands.”
Connecticut needed other scoring to win, namely from Marina Mabrey, the guard acquired in a midseason deal specifically to shore up this offense. (She did that capably in Game 2, scoring 17, including a pair of threes in the closing minutes.) But a lead scoring role for Thomas will be key looking ahead, White said. In the regular season, Thomas averaged just 10.6 points per game, her lowest for a full season in six years. Her efficiency was up. Yet she was taking fewer shots than ever. That was fine, even occasionally beneficial, for what this group needed in the regular season. Not in the playoffs.
“When she takes a little bit more ownership of putting the ball in the basket, we're a better team,” White said.
It was a chippy, physical game, and not one that was always officiated cleanly. It was also far more competitive than Sunday’s lopsided Game 1. Indiana tweaked its starting lineup, choosing to bench NaLyssa Smith in favor of Temi Fagbenle, offering more versatility and speed on both ends of the floor. (The move was not exactly a surprise—Smith had seen her minutes increasingly limited over the last few weeks—and it felt like a clear lift for the Fever.) Indiana was able to control the pace much better than on Sunday, playing uptempo, generally looking far more comfortable. Aliyah Boston won most of her battles in the post against Brionna Jones and finished with 19 rebounds. And, of course, as ever, there was Caitlin Clark. The rookie phenom bounced back from a lackluster shooting performance in her first career playoff game and looked her typical self for Game 2, finishing the night with 25 points, nine assists and six rebounds. (She was the first rookie in league history to post those numbers in the playoffs.) But it was not enough against a team as experienced and defensively strong as Connecticut.
That was especially obvious in the final minutes of play. The Fever drew back ahead by a basket with two minutes to go. Yet they could not hold it. The teams’ respective identities were suddenly laid bare in their late-game execution: The Sun looked like a confident, veteran team making its sixth consecutive trip to the WNBA semifinals, and the Fever looked like a group with no experience of the sort. The resulting win gives Connecticut the opportunity to make the Finals for the second time in three years.
That chance will very likely run through Thomas. She is both the longest tenured player on this roster—witness to repeated playoff frustration and heartbreak over the last several years—and the engine of the group. In Game 1 against the Fever, she posted her fourth career postseason triple-double, and in Game 2, her performance was arguably even more impressive. And her signature play of the series was one that did not appear on the statsheet.
Early in the fourth quarter on Wednesday, Thomas guarded Fagbenle, back to the basket. It at first seemed reasonable to say that she had the Indiana center on an island. But as the shot clock ticked down, Fagbenle lost her handle, scrambled to regain it, engaged in a futile, delusive search for help. It suddenly did not look so much like she was on an island. It looked like she was in hell. Thomas never gave her space. If the question of how to guard Thomas can be vexing, the question of how to be guarded by her is even worse. There are no good answers.
The shot clock expired. Thomas grinned. She played on.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Alyssa Thomas Is Built for the Playoffs.
