Has WNBA championship window shut for Connecticut Sun after another disappointing semifinal loss?

After suffering an 88-77 loss to the Minnesota Lynx in Game 5 of the WNBA semifinals on Tuesday, the Connecticut Sun struggled to find answers for the disastrous first half that ultimately doomed their season.

The Sun gave up 31 points in the first quarter alone and trailed 53-34 at halftime, allowing Minnesota to shoot 60% from the the field and 57% from 3-point range. The first was Connecticut’s worst defensive quarter of WNBA Playoffs, and despite outscoring the Lynx 43-35 in the second half, they could never get the early deficit back to a manageable place.

“I don’t know, they just punched us in the mouth in the first quarter,” Sun star DeWanna Bonner said. “When you get down like that against a team at home that’s playing really, really well and trying to make it to the Finals, it’s hard to dig yourself out of that hole. But I can’t even tell you what happened. Literally, I think they just kind of punched us in the face, and it was like we got shell-shocked and couldn’t fight back.”

The 2024 Sun are the first team in WNBA history to be eliminated before the Finals after beginning the season with nine consecutive wins. Their Game 5 loss ended the team’s streak of three consecutive victories in winner-take-all playoff games dating back to 2022. Connecticut is also the league’s only franchise to reach the playoffs eight seasons in a row without winning a title — in fact, six of nine franchises with streaks longer than seven years won at least two titles during their run.

“I don’t know, because every team is so different. They’ve been there — this group has been there. They’ve been to the Finals,” Sun coach Stephanie White said. “Being right there, sometimes it’s like, are you a piece away, a shot away, a play away? Certainly the way a season works, it does take a little bit of luck, too, and unfortunately we had a good opportunity in front of us, and we weren’t able to take advantage of it.”

Getting over the proverbial hump has become a centerpiece of the Sun’s narrative since they lost two Finals series in four years under former head coach Curt Miller from 2019-2022. Those rosters also included 2021 league MVP Jonquel Jones, who left as a free agent in 2023 to join the New York Liberty. Jones’s Liberty are now the favorite to win the 2024 WNBA Finals as the No. 1 seed. Lynx guards Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman will also chase their first titles against their former teammate after each played five seasons previously with the Sun.

Connecticut is facing a reckoning as the league moves into the new era with five players set to become unrestricted free agents for 2025. While the team is likely to retain superstar Alyssa Thomas under the core designation, All-Star center Brionna Jones has already been cored twice by the Sun since she was drafted in 2017 and will be free to hit the open market come January.

Bonner will also be a free agent after signing a one-year dear for 2024, and the 15-year veteran has said throughout the season that the end of her career isn’t far away. Bonner is still playing at an elite level, averaging 15 points and six rebounds to earn All-Star honors this year, but the 37-year-old is a short-term piece for Connecticut at this stage even if she chooses to resign for 2025. The Sun have a helpful bargaining chip to keep Bonner around in her fiancée Thomas, but Bonner reportedly considered offers from the Phoenix Mercury and the Seattle Storm during her 2024 free agency.

Recruiting free agents is an increasingly difficult task for Connecticut as ownership groups with deeper pockets invest more heavily in the WNBA. Three teams currently have multi-million dollar dedicated practice facilities, and the Chicago Sky broke ground Wednesday on a building of their own. The Golden State Valkyries will also enter the league as an expansion franchise in 2025 with state-of-the-art resources, and two more expansion teams in Portland and Toronto are set to follow in 2025.

Though Sun president Jennifer Rizzotti promised in August that a practice facility is “100% in the near future,” there’s no question that the team is playing catch-up in a race where it already had a disadvantage as the only franchise based outside of a major metropolitan area. Connecticut has only signed one former All-Star as a free agent away from another team since 2019, former UConn guard Tiffany Hayes from the Atlanta Dream 2023. Hayes briefly retired from the league last December after her single season with the Sun before returning to play for the Las Vegas Aces in June. She went on to earn WNBA Sixth Player of the Year.

“The TV rights deal, the expansion teams, all of the things that are happening around the league right now … that is what’s driving some of the conversation with all of the teams around better facilities,” Rizzotti said in August. “It’s also driving conversations around increasing the length of the season, having players here in the offseason more than they ever were, so now the conversation is, we have to have these facilities — and we want to have them — for our players. We want this to be a destination that they want to come to, and we want the value of our team to remain high. That’s where we’re turning the corner and (owners) are starting to see the importance of that stuff.”

Connecticut is practically a lock to make the playoffs as long as it has Thomas and Bonner, especially after DiJonai Carrington’s breakthrough season in 2024 and the addition of sharpshooter Marina Mabrey. Carrington is an restricted free agent in 2025, meaning the Sun have first right of refusal any offer she receives from another franchise, and Mabrey is under contract until 2026, so Connecticut will likely have the pieces to make a ninth consecutive postseason next year.

But there are very few scenarios where the Sun get dramatically better next season, especially after losing their only first-round draft pick to the Chicago Sky in the trade for Mabrey. Much of this year’s group, as White noted postgame, had been to the WNBA Finals together before, but the team has come up short again and again when it runs into the powerhouses of the league. The Las Vegas Aces, which have the highest valuation in the WNBA, have won two titles and made three Finals in five years. The New York Liberty assembled a “super team” in free agency that has now made back-to-back Finals appearances. The Lynx are the winningest franchise in the history of the WNBA playoffs and are seeking their fifth all-time championship this year.

“This year I think this group, I would say, was resilient,” Jones said after the season-ending loss Tuesday. “I think there was a lot of things, a lot of adversity this season, and we just stuck together through it all. I think tonight we didn’t get it done. We fell short, but I knew for a fact that this group was gonna stay together and see what happens.”