Deep Dive: Let’s Talk About The Connecticut Backcourt
Tyasha Harris and DiJonai Carrington have been crucial to the Sun's success.
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The core trio of Alyssa Thomas, DeWanna Bonner and Brionna Jones has been together for a while now for the Connecticut Sun, but the team’s success this season goes beyond those three players. Connecticut also boasts a very talented starting backcourt with Tyasha Harris and DiJonai Carrington.
But that backcourt is a relatively new addition to the team. While both players were on the roster in 2023, they started a combined zero games. This season the duo have started every single game.
Connecticut’s 11-1 start is due to a number of factors. Thomas remains one of the most unstoppable forces in basketball. Bonner, at age 36, is on track to have one of her best scoring seasons and one of her most efficient seasons.
But Stephanie White’s trust in her two starting guards who both came off the bench last season is an extremely underrated part of Connecticut’s success. Both have given the team strong contributions in heavy minutes.
A brief history of the Connecticut Sun guard situation
So, how did we get here? Why is a contender starting two players who had started a grand total of 14 games across their entire WNBA careers?
Let’s go back to Carrington’s rookie season with the Sun in 2021. That year, her 9.2 minutes per game ranked eighth on the team among players to play at least 20 games. Briann January, Jasmine Thomas and Natisha Hiedeman were all ahead of her.
That’s a strong guard rotation, so it makes sense that Carrington wasn’t able to crack it as a rookie, but those players pretty swiftly wound up elsewhere. January was off to Seattle in 2022. Thomas tore her ACL early in the 2022 season and was traded to the Sparks in January 2023. Hiedeman stuck around the longest but was traded to Minnesota this past January.
Even with those departures, the path to heavy minutes for Carrington and Harris hit more snags. The Sun signed Courtney Williams in 2022, reuniting her with the team she played on from 2016 to 2019. Hiedeman stepped into a bigger role, and Carrington finished seventh in minutes per game among the players who spent the full season with the Sun in 2022.
In 2023, Connecticut was involved in a five-team deal that landed Harris but it also added Tiffany Hayes, which meant there still wasn’t a path to a starting role for Carrington or Harris. Carrington averaged 17.2 minutes per game while Harris played 16.7.
But in 2023, both players did enough in those minutes to crack the starting lineup this season. Harris was electric from deep, knocking down a league-best 46.4% of her 3-point attempts, while Carrington continued to improve on both ends of the floor.
What Carrington and Harris have done in 2024
I’m not going to sit here and pretend I saw this coming. Entering 2024, the idea of a contender running a backcourt that was relatively unproven was my main concern about the championship hopes of the Sun. Not that I didn’t think both were good WNBA players, but it’s always tough to predict how a player will scale up to a larger role.
Those concerns are gone. The Sun have a net rating of +18.0 in the 287 minutes that Carrington and Harris have shared the floor, which includes an offensive rating of 110.1. For some context, the Lynx currently lead the WNBA in offensive rating at 103.9, so…yeah, Connecticut’s been really good with the duo on the floor.
Harris isn’t shooting the ball quite as well as she did last season, dropping down to 39.2% from three, but that still ranks in the top 20. Part of that is she’s taking more dribble jumpers this season, which usually mean tougher shots — last year, 50.8% of her jump shots came off the dribble per Synergy, while this year she’s up to 57.3% of them. She’s also shooting worse on unguarded catch-and-shoot looks, down to 34.5% from 63.2% last year. That number should go up as the season goes along, as right now it feels a little fluky.
But even with some regression in her shooting, Harris is still a major threat from behind the arc, which is something Connecticut really needs. Thomas is a great player, but she doesn’t shoot from deep. Neither does Brionna Jones. Carrington has taken 24 threes, but is shooting just 16.7%. Having Harris out there to at least provide some spacing helps keep things running smoothly.
And while Carrington is struggling from deep, it’s probably helpful to have her attempting 2.0 attempts per game, simply because it keeps the paint from getting too clogged. If you’re Connecticut, you obviously want her shooting better than 4-for-24 from deep, since you want the defenders to come out to guard her and open up driving lanes. Carrington shot 37.1% from deep last year, so there’s upside there for her as a shooter even if she hasn’t put it together yet this season.
One thing that makes the pair work so well is that they complement each other really well. Harris isn’t known to be the greatest defender, though it’s an assumption that isn’t necessarily true. The perception that Harris struggles on defense doesn’t really show up in the tracking data, as she allows 0.752 points per possession per Synergy as the primary defender, which is actually slightly better than Carrington. She puts a lot of effort in on that end, and the two of them together have made it hard for opposing teams to score.
As for Carrington, she’s an extremely good player on that side of the ball. While her defensive impact doesn’t necessarily show up on the stat sheet, where she ranks 60th in steals per game and 47th in blocks per game, you can see it in the tracking data. Per Synergy, players score 0.763 points per possession with Carrington as the primary defender, which puts her in the top 20 percent of WNBA players.
The perception that Harris struggles on defense doesn’t really show up in the tracking data, as she allows 0.752 points per possession per Synergy as the primary defender, which is actually slightly better than Carrington. She puts a lot of effort in on that end, and the two of them together have made it hard for opposing teams to score.
While the Carrington/Harris duo might not be the most important part of Connecticut’s success this season, it’s been a fairly big part of it. The two complement each other well and fit perfectly into what the Sun are trying to do on both ends. After a lot of uncertainty at the guard position, it looks like Connecticut has its backcourt of the future.
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