Why Sun fans deserved better from the WNBA's 'Sunset Season' in Connecticut: Mike Anthony

UNCASVILLE – The Connecticut Sun were winners Thursday night, stepping into extinction with a 95-81 victory over the Toronto Tempo at Mohegan Sun Arena.

The Sun were losers quite a bit over their final two years in Uncasville.

The Sun were … well, they just were. The team is past tense, for our purposes. History. The long-term organizational success and the recent torturous play on the court – it’s all over now, out of our time zone and out of our lives.

Twenty-four years ago the team arrived from sunny Orlando and went about creating space for itself, figuratively, through the wafting smoke of a casino, and in doing so stood front-and-center in the WNBA’s fight for mainstream relevance and respect. They’re off to Houston now, rebranding as the Comets, and this wildly successful chapter, the Connecticut Chapter, of league history and state sports history is just that.

President Jen Rizzotti and general manager Morgan Tuck will head to Texas with the team. Neither had any say in, or control over, the sale and relocation of the franchise. If they know what they’re doing – there’s no reason to believe they don’t, having stockpiled prospects – the team will be good again in the coming years. It was their job to line up the project this way. It’s just too bad that the first steps into a rebuild had to be the final dribbles in Connecticut.

The Sun’s record last season: 11-33.

The Sun’s record this season: 11-33.

Brutal. Not representative of what the team was over parts of three decades, either.

Maybe the Sun – the Comets, excuse me – nab JuJu Watkins in the 2027 WNBA draft and soar across the WNBA sky from there. That, probably, is no consolation to Sun fans, many on board for 24 years, who sat through the final two seasons of nasty growing pains.

Connecticut native and President of the Connecticut Sun Jennifer Rizzotti speaks after the Connecticut Sun’s final game in franchise history at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., Thursday, September 24, 2026. The team is moving to Houston. (Dave Zajac/Hearst Connecticut Media)

Wouldn’t it have been fun, even appropriate, if the team had come down the stretch of this “Sunset Season” in contention for a championship? Wouldn’t it have been nice to have the final game be a playoff game?

It’s all been a little cruel. Is the entire state distraught today? Not overwhelmingly so, I’d guess. There is, for sure, a void in the state sports scene now – no top-tier professional teams – and a little piece of Connecticut identity is gone, but that’s it. We continue on as a UConn state, basically, and maybe I’m not so plugged in, but I don’t feel sweeping sadness across our eight counties.

That’s not to say this isn’t a bummer for some. A loyal faction of fans, many in attendance Thursday, were screwed by this relocation, and even its timing. The Sun didn’t leave much of a substantial parting gift, despite Thursday’s victory, after which the team gathered on the court, Rizzotti thanked the crowd and a video montage played. This night alone was an appropriate goodbye. It was a good game and a nice event.

This whole experiment-turned-experience, really, was a resounding success. Fans weren’t given much to celebrate in 2025, when they pretty much understood the team had one sneaker out the door, or in 2026, when they knew for sure. But the franchise was a winner, on and off the court, for the better part of its run in Southeastern Connecticut. The various leadership groups, the coaches, the players and the Tribe are all to be applauded.

Beth Regan, left center, chairwoman of the Mohegan Tribe’s Council of Elders, watches the last WNBA home game of the Connecticut Sun, against the Toronto Tempo, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, at Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill) (Jessica Hill/AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

The Sun were good immediately under Mike Thibault, a playoff team in their 2003 debut season, WNBA runners up in 2004 and 2005. Two more WNBA Finals appearances came under Curt Miller, but that first championship never did.

Uncasville was never an ideal free agent destination. Lucrative sponsorships were always harder to come by in a Southeast Connecticut shoreline community than, say, in New York or Los Angeles or … Houston. Unlike every other market, there were never walk-up crowds for Sun games, just the solid base that drove up or down I-395 specifically to attend home games. And there was no backing of an NBA team, financially or otherwise. The Sun were the first franchise to go about this un-tethered, showing a fledgling league a new way of doing business, a model later followed in Seattle and Las Vegas.

Nowadays, the WNBA has never been more popular and the Sun have a lot to do with that because they always did more with less. Mohegan Sun hosted league drafts and staged all-star games. The franchise and its facility were always right in the middle of everything, no matter how far removed in so many ways.

And the basketball product was almost always good.

Just not lately. Heck, the entire starting lineup departed two years ago, not long before rumors of a sale exploration began, and big-name free agent acquisitions Tina Charles and Brittney Griner were past their prime.

Connecticut’s Aaliyah Edwards, left, shares a smile with teammate Hailey Van Lith during the Connecticut Sun’s final game in franchise history at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., Thursday, September 24, 2026. The team is moving to Houston. (Dave Zajac/Hearst Connecticut Media)

Fans are always going to get handed bad cards in such a situation. Relocation is messy. Emotional ties are broken or, at least, tested. It was long rumored that the team would wind up in Boston, what with all this momentum in the Northeast, but the WNBA/NBA wasn’t having that. They wanted the team in Houston, halfway across the country.

The players, while seemingly appreciative for their time here, will ultimately be ecstatic about this move. They’ll probably have state-of-the-art facilities. They’ll be playing in one of the biggest and most diverse cities in the United States. They won’t have to bus to and from Windsor Locks or Providence for flights to ever road game, travel logistics every visiting team complained about, too, over the years.

The Mohegan Tribe bought the team for $10 million and sold it for $300 million. That’s a no-brainer transaction after pouring so much into the franchise – even while getting a lot out of it – for so many years. Charles, because of her first stint with the team, is a franchise legend, like Nykesha Sales and Lindsay Whalen and Alyssa Thomas and Asjha Jones and others.

It was a heck of a lot of fun, summer WNBA ball at Mohegan, for a long time.

Until it got ugly toward the end, which was unfortunate for fans even if necessary for the franchise.

Everyone is set to reconvene in April … in Houston.

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This article originally published at Why Sun fans deserved better from the WNBA’s ‘Sunset Season’ in Connecticut: Mike Anthony.

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