The Connecticut Sun have advanced to the WNBA semifinals three years in a row and brought back the bulk of their roster in 2022 en route to the best net rating in the league (plus-9.5) for the second season running.
Heading into this year’s postseason, it seemed a fait accompli that the Sun would make it back to the final four for a fourth consecutive time, especially since they were facing a Dallas Wings team missing their leading scorer, Arike Ogunbowale.
And yet, Connecticut finds itself one game away from elimination on the heels of an absolute rout — on its home floor — in Game 2 on Sunday. The Sun’s usual strengths were nowhere to be found, be it creating offense off of turnovers, control of the glass, and points in the paint. The fact that they were essentially noncompetitive throughout was perhaps more surprising for a team that prides itself on consistent success.
To get a better sense for whether this result was a one-off for Connecticut, or if the Sun are in legitimate trouble heading into Game 3 Wednesday, I brought in Lila Bromberg for this week’s episode of The Whiparound.
Lila covers the Sun and the WNBA at-large for The Hartford Courant, and was on hand for the first two games of the series, so she shared some insight from the locker room about how the Connecticut players are feeling after two blowout games. Lila also offered a few keys for the Sun in the final game of this first-round series as well as what to make of the team should it advance past Dallas.
You can listen to all that and more in the full episode embedded below, and to make sure you never miss a single show moving forward, subscribe to the Swish Appeal podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
