Alyssa Thomas Revives Sun in Must-Win Game 3

Relying on pure will, Thomas turns in a triple-double performance to help keep Connecticut alive.

MONTVILLE, Conn. — Some athletes have to be seen to be believed. With Alyssa Thomas, the more you see her, the harder she is to believe. She has two torn labrums, leaving her with a shooting motion that looks like a waiter carrying a tray, then throwing it in the air and quitting. You might wonder how a player with such obvious physical limitations can do anything in a WNBA game, which is why it’s so incredible that Thomas does everything.

On a day when she made second-team all-WNBA, Thomas performed an extraordinary act of basketball CPR on her Connecticut Sun. She put up 16 points, 15 rebounds and 11 assists to lead Connecticut to a 105–76 victory over the Las Vegas Aces.

“She’s probably the toughest player I’ve ever coached,” Sun coach Curt Miller said. “She’s probably the most consistent player in terms of effort that I’ve ever been around.”

She probably personifies her team as well as just about anybody in sports. The Aces are the more talented, more explosive team in this series, and they should still be considered the heavy favorite to win it. But Connecticut plays old-school, tough, prideful basketball. As forward DeWanna Bonner said Thursday night, “We’re not going to go away. We’re going to force Vegas to beat us.”

There are only so much sleight-of-hand that a team can pull in a five-game series, and Connecticut has fewer tricks than most. The Sun score an inordinate percentage of their points in the paint, either from dumping it in to their post players or on fast breaks off their trapping defense. Vegas allowed them to do both with ease.

“I don’t know if we thought we were going to show up and they were just going to lay down and hand us the trophy, but we should know better by now,” Aces coach Becky Hammon said. “They’re physical and they’re resilient. They have a battle-type mentality and we didn’t match that tonight in any category.”

Both teams talked about the importance of the first quarter—the Sun because they were needed to think small, and the Aces because they often struggle in the beginning of games. Vegas actually played better for the first two minutes, building a 9–2 lead and forcing Miller to use a timeout. I assume he told his team, “Ha, we fooled them into thinking the game is over,” because that’s exactly how the Aces played for most of the first half.

The final score was misleading—Vegas basically folded in the fourth quarter getting outscored 28–7. But there was never a doubt who deserved to win the game.

If you listen closely to the two coaches, you can sense the difference between the teams. After the Aces blew out the Sun in Game 2, Miller gushed over Vegas’s skill, citing the “tremendous one-on-one play that got into the paint all night” and saying how easily the Aces got to their strong hands on drive. After the Sun blew out the Aces in Game 3, Hammon bemoaned her team’s lack of effort: “At the end of the day, as great as they were, we were way below average in things we needed to do, and things we can control … This game was about physicality and mental toughness, and they smoked us on it. Period.”

What neither will say, but remains clear, is that if the Aces play as hard as the Sun, they should win. But they do need to do that. Connecticut, and especially Thomas, are too tough.

There were eight triple-doubles in the WNBA this season. Thomas had three of them. How can a player grab 15 rebounds in a Finals game when she can barely lift her arms?

“That’s a professional athlete right there, because I don’t even know if I would be able to do that,” Aces star A’ja Wilson, the league MVP, said earlier this week. “A regular human being, they’re like, ’No, I’m not doing this.’ But that’s an athlete for you.”

The Sun deserve admiration. Maybe, when the series ends, they will deserve the trophy. More likely, we look back and say they forced the Aces to earn it.

“We just were not locked in on the defensive end,” Wilson said Thursday. “I’m gonna take full accountability for that. We lacked energy.”

The Sun had plenty. They usually do.

Ben Pickman contributed to this article.