Two wins. Ten losses. Dead last in offensive rating, dead last in scoring, dead last in net rating. This is the Connecticut Sun in 2026 — a franchise that won 91 games over the previous four seasons, made one WNBA Finals appearance, and was considered one of the most consistently excellent organizations in professional basketball.
And now they are playing their final season in Connecticut, boarding a one-way flight to Houston in 2027, lurching through a 2–10 record that is as historically poor as it is genuinely complicated. Because when you peel back the box scores and the blowout losses, you don’t find a team that is simply bad. You find a team that is broken in ways almost entirely outside of its own control — and one that, beneath the wreckage, might still be worth believing in.
How Far the Mighty Have Fallen: The Numbers Are Brutal
Let’s not soften this. The Connecticut Sun’s 2026 statistical profile is among the worst the WNBA has seen in recent memory.
Their offensive rating of 94.8 ranks 15th out of 15 teams — dead last in the entire league. Their 75.5 points per game is also last. Their net rating of -16.0 is the worst in the WNBA. Their average scoring margin of -12.8 points per game tells the story of a team that is not just losing — it is being outclassed, routinely and systematically. Notable blowout defeats include a 31-point hammering by the New York Liberty, a 29-point loss to Las Vegas, and a 27-point dismantling at the hands of Golden State.
On May 15, A’ja Wilson dropped 45 points on them. That kind of performance becomes possible when a team cannot generate consistent offense at one end and cannot contain elite scorers at the other.
Connecticut’s shooting problems are not isolated to one player — they are systemic. Diamond Miller, acquired from Dallas and expected to be a key wing contributor, is shooting a deeply concerning 33.0% from the field and 23.7% from three. Charlisse Leger-Walker sits at 37.5% from the floor. Saniya Rivers, the team’s assist leader, is converting just 34.4% of her field goal attempts and an alarming 16.7% from beyond the arc. The team’s turnover percentage of 17.2% compounds the damage. The best two-man pairing on the roster — Leger-Walker and Rivers — carries a -18.7 net rating per 100 possessions, one of the worst two-man unit figures in the entire league.
The advanced metrics are unforgiving in their clarity: Connecticut’s projected win-loss record based on underlying performance is exactly 2–9. There is no hidden competitiveness here, no unlucky bounce of the ball masking a better team. The numbers match the record. The record reflects reality.
The Injury Crisis That Broke Everything
Here is where the story becomes genuinely important to understand, because writing off this roster as simply a collection of bad players would be both lazy and inaccurate.
Connecticut entered 2026 with a specific vision. Head coach Rachid Meziane, in his second season at the helm, designed his system around Leïla Lacan as the offensive engine — a 21-year-old French guard with the passing instincts and pick-and-roll creativity to make his European-style ball movement principles come alive in real time. The projected starting unit of Lacan, Rivers, Miller, Aneesah Morrow, and Brittney Griner was, on paper, the most complete lineup Connecticut had assembled since their dynasty years.
That lineup has never played a game together.
Lacan suffered a left lower leg injury during the preseason and has appeared in just 3 of 12 games. In those three appearances, even while clearly not at full health, she averaged 8.7 points and 4.0 assists — flashing the playmaking upside the team desperately needs. Her absence is not just an individual loss; it is a structural one. The offense has no true architect without her.
Brittney Griner, signed to provide interior dominance and the kind of size that forces defenses to collapse, has played just 6 of 12 games — hampered by a right eye injury suffered in late May. When she is available, she shoots 54.5% from the field and blocks 1.5 shots per game. The best lineup Connecticut has fielded, featuring Griner alongside Miller, Morrow, and Rivers, carries a net rating of just -2.9 per 100 possessions — still below average, but a universe away from the -16.0 the team posts at full chaos.
Aaliyah Edwards, one of the most important two-way players on the roster and one of the few holdovers from the 2025 rebuild, has also appeared in only 6 games — dealing first with a left thigh injury, then a concussion. Kennedy Burke, the veteran wing brought in for championship IQ and versatility, has battled illness and availability concerns throughout.
This is not a team playing through adversity. This is a team that has scarcely existed in the form it was built to be.
Aneesah Morrow: The One Constant in a Season of Chaos
Amid the statistical carnage, one player has been unmistakably, undeniably excellent.
Aneesah Morrow, 23 years old, is averaging 12.3 points and 10.9 rebounds per game — ranking third in the entire WNBA in rebounding. Her Player Efficiency Rating of 18.0 leads the team. Her best game came on May 30 against the Los Angeles Sparks, when she posted 17 points and 14 rebounds to carry Connecticut to an 84–81 victory — the franchise’s most important win of the season. It was her seventh double-double of the year, and it was the performance of a player who has long since outgrown the “promising young forward” label and is now, quietly and convincingly, making the case for All-Star consideration.
Morrow is the clearest piece of the franchise’s future. She is the player who will travel to Houston, anchor the reborn Comets, and give WNBA fans a reason to believe that what is being built there has a legitimate foundation. In a season defined by what has gone wrong, she is the most compelling argument for what could go right.
The Relocation Announcement That Arrived at the Worst Possible Moment
On May 13, 2026 — in the middle of what was already a nine-game losing streak — the WNBA and NBA Board of Governors unanimously approved the sale of the Connecticut Sun to Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta for a record $300 million. The team will relocate to Houston ahead of the 2027 season and rebrand as the Houston Comets, reviving the storied franchise that won four consecutive WNBA championships from 1997 through 2000 before folding in 2008.
The business logic is sound. The cultural resonance of the Comets name is genuine. The $300 million valuation is a testament to how dramatically the WNBA’s commercial landscape has transformed. And yet, for Connecticut fans absorbing their team’s worst stretch of play in franchise history while simultaneously learning they are losing that team forever, the timing could not have stung more.
Sun President Jen Rizzotti, to her credit, was direct about what this season must mean: “I think, first and foremost, I want our staff and players to just be able to focus on this season and being present for the 2026 last season in Connecticut. I think our fans deserve that.”
The franchise has responded with a “Sunset Season” marketing campaign — banners reading “Get Close One Last Time” hanging at Mohegan Sun Arena, special venue games scheduled at PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford and TD Garden in Boston, and a deliberate effort to give a devoted Connecticut fanbase the farewell it deserves. From 2021 through 2024, this organization went 91–42 over those four seasons. These fans watched championship-caliber basketball for years. They deserve more than a going-away party framed around a 2–10 record, and the organization knows it.
Context: The Two-Year Collapse That Made This Season Inevitable
To understand 2026, you must understand 2025 — and 2025 was one of the most historically unusual roster implosions professional basketball has ever seen.
Between the 2024 and 2025 seasons, Connecticut lost its entire starting lineup. Every single starter. The Sun are the first WNBA team to suffer comparable roster destruction between playoff appearances — and no NBA team has experienced the same since starters were first tracked in the 1970–71 season. The Sun entered 2025 having returned just 11.4% of their 2024 scoring — a figure so extreme it dwarfed the next-lowest rebuilding team (Phoenix Mercury at 30.3%) by a factor of nearly three. They finished the 2025 season 11–33, ranked analytically as the 16th-worst WNBA team of all time, and missed the playoffs for the first time in nine years.
The 2026 roster was assembled with that context in mind — an attempt to reload quickly around a young core while adding veteran pieces like Griner and Burke for immediate competitiveness. But 10 of 14 current players are in their debut season with Connecticut. Chemistry cannot be manufactured on a timeline. Meziane’s European-style ball movement system demands trust, repetition, and shared vocabulary between players — none of which can be developed in a few weeks of training camp, especially when your most important players keep missing games.
Aaliyah Edwards, one of the few voices of continuity on the roster, has described the team’s internal culture with cautious optimism: “Coach Rachid’s message to the team has just been to execute the things that are going to help us shape our culture for the season… we want to be very disciplined in our defensive concepts, our offensive sets, and to build play with chemistry.” The buy-in appears real. The results, for now, have not followed.
Reasons Not to Give Up Entirely
The 2026 Connecticut Sun are not going to make the playoffs. The math is prohibitive, the conference is increasingly competitive, and second-year WNBA rebuilds do not typically vault into contention mid-season. But dismissing the rest of this season as irrelevant would miss what is actually at stake.
Consider the margins. The Sun lost to Portland on May 19 by a single point — 82–83 — a game that, with better execution down the stretch, goes the other way. They pushed the Las Vegas Aces to 101–94 on May 15, the same night A’ja Wilson was historic against them. They beat Seattle on the road on May 21 in a genuine competitive performance. This is not a team that has stopped fighting.
The path forward, realistically, runs through health. If Lacan, Edwards, and Griner return to full availability and the projected starting five gets consistent minutes together, Connecticut will be measurably different. Not a playoff team — but a watchable, developing, occasionally dangerous one. The bottom of the Eastern Conference (Chicago at 4–6, Washington at 4–5) is beatable. A final record somewhere in the 7–23 to 9–21 range is achievable and, in the context of this season, would represent genuine progress.
Beyond wins and losses, there are individual benchmarks worth caring about. Can Saniya Rivers fix her shooting and emerge as the elite two-way guard her defensive instincts suggest she can be? Can Diamond Miller rediscover the efficiency that made her a sought-after acquisition? Can Morrow cement an All-Star case in the second half? Can the Lacan-Morrow-Rivers core build enough shared language to carry that chemistry into the 2027 Houston era?
These are the questions that give the rest of this season meaning — not the standings.
The Sunset Season Deserves More Than a Scoreboard
Connecticut Sun basketball, at its best, was something genuinely worth celebrating. This was a franchise that reached the WNBA Finals, that built a sustained run of excellence that stood among the most impressive stretches in league history, that made Mohegan Sun Arena one of the most intimidating home courts in the WNBA. The fans who filled those seats through the great years — through the 2019 and 2022 Finals runs, through the 23- and 25-win seasons that carried them there — are not obligated to simply accept a 2–10 farewell as the final memory.
The “Sunset Season” framing is poignant, but it can only carry so much emotional weight if it isn’t accompanied by something worth watching on the floor. The franchise owes Connecticut one last fight — not a championship, not a miracle playoff run, but evidence that the players on the roster care about winning, that the coaching staff is committed to improvement, and that the remaining games at Mohegan Sun Arena will be contested with the urgency the moment deserves.
Griner has already signaled her belief: “I think the fit here is better, and I just think it’s gonna be good.” Meziane has shown genuine self-awareness about his own growth: “I feel myself more prepared and better to approach my second season.” The ingredients for something redemptive exist, even if they haven’t yet combined into anything cohesive.
What Success Actually Looks Like in 2026
Playoff contention is off the table. Championships are a conversation for Houston in 2027 and beyond. But success in 2026 is not impossible — it simply needs to be defined honestly.
Success looks like Morrow earning an All-Star selection and announcing herself to the WNBA’s national audience as a bonafide star. It looks like Rivers solving her shooting struggles before the season ends, because the offensive ceiling she unlocks when the three-pointer falls is transformative. It looks like Lacan returning healthy and proving, over a sustained stretch of games, that she can be the point guard the future Houston Comets will build around. It looks like the full starting lineup finally sharing the floor together for more than a handful of minutes.
And above all, success looks like a proper farewell. Games worth watching. Moments worth remembering. Connecticut Sun fans who have supported this team through the good years — and who have shown up even in the hard ones — deserve to say goodbye to a version of their team that gave everything it had.
The sun is setting on Connecticut Sun basketball. It has been setting slowly, painfully, through two of the most difficult seasons the franchise has ever endured. But sunsets, at their best, are worth watching until the very last light fades. There is still basketball left to be played in Uncasville, in Hartford, in Boston. There is still time to make those final games matter.
The question is whether this team, battered and depleted but not yet finished, will give its fans a reason to watch until the end.