The Connecticut Sun played the final game in franchise history on Thursday night, hosting the Toronto Tempo at Mohegan Sun Arena in a season finale with none of the postseason stakes and all the emotional ones. Both teams entered the night among the worst in the league, with Connecticut at 10-33 and Toronto in the middle of its own rough inaugural stretch. But for a fan base that had seen this ending coming for months, saying goodbye still didn’t feel real until the final horn sounded.
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There wasn’t much left to play for competitively. There was everything left to say goodbye to.
Even Toronto’s players understood what the night meant to the building they were walking into. Tempo forward Isabelle Harrison, shifting her focus to the matchup right after her own team’s Tuesday loss, put it simply.
“Connecticut was always a trip because I knew the fans really were going to show up because they love their Sun over there,” Harrison said.
Twenty-Four Years, Three Cities
The Sun’s Connecticut chapter began in 2003, when the Mohegan Tribe brought the franchise north from Orlando, where it had played as the Miracle since the league’s expansion in 1999.
Uncasville became the team’s home for 24 seasons, the second stop of what will now be three, with Houston next on the list. Along the way, the Sun made the WNBA Finals four times, in 2004, 2005, 2019 and 2022, without ever winning the title.
Franchise legends Alyssa Thomas, Tina Charles, Jonquel Jones and Jasmine Thomas all had their numbers retired over the course of this farewell season, and former coaches Mike Thibault and Curt Miller were inducted as Sun Legends before the finale, the organization’s way of closing out its Connecticut era on its own terms rather than letting the relocation alone define it.
None of that history changed what this particular roster was working with on the floor. Diamond Miller, Leila Lacan, Aaliyah Edwards, Hailey Van Lith and Raegan Beers had carried most of the scoring load down the stretch of a lost season, and Thursday’s finale was as much about them getting one more night in front of the fans who’d shown up anyway as it was about anything on the scoreboard.
Fans Share Emotional Messages on Social Media
The Athletic captured the scale of what was ending with a single detail: a red Jeep that had made the 20-minute drive to every Connecticut Sun season for 23 years, making that same trip one last time on Thursday.
“For 23 years, the same red Jeep has made the 20-minute drive to every Connecticut Sun season,” the outlet wrote. “On Thursday, it will make the trip one last time. The Sun are leaving Connecticut for Houston.”
Fans didn’t hold back their grief online. “I’m crying a lil bit and Sun not even my team 😭😭😭 it’s not right what happened, ” one fan wrote.
Another fan framed it in simpler terms: “Twenty three years is such a crazy run.” She followed that up with, “Truly crazy we are here, the last day of the regular season. The last day of the CT Sun. It’s an exciting and very sad day for the W.”
The Connecticut Sun’s own social account leaned into the emotion with a fan-submitted tribute video on X, captioned, “A special message from our Sun Fam to our players.” The voices in it traveled further than anyone expected for a franchise’s final home date.
“We drove all the way from Vermont to see Hailey Van Lith,” one fan said. “I’ve come all the way from Liverpool in England to see you win,” said another.
“I’m going to miss traveling from Boston to Connecticut to see y’all play. I’m going to miss y’all. Sun, we love you,” another fan shared.
The tributes extended beyond Connecticut’s own fan base. Toronto Tempo, one of the WNBA’s newest expansion franchises, posted its own goodbye directly to the Sun. “It’s always been and will always be only love for our friends,” the team wrote, tagging @ConnecticutSun.
The league offices marked the day too, choosing to frame it around legacy rather than loss. “The sun sets one final time in Connecticut,” the WNBA wrote, previewing a look back at the “dominance that defined” the franchise and its impact on basketball across the Northeast.
By the time the team takes the floor again, it will be under a new identity entirely. The franchise is expected to relocate to Houston and revive the Comets name, a nod to the city’s original WNBA team, under new ownership tied to the NBA’s Houston Rockets.
It’s a new city, a new arena roughly 1,600 miles from Mohegan Sun Arena, and for the players who spent Thursday night on the only home floor most of them have ever known in this league, a new chapter neither they nor the fans in the stands were in any hurry to start. What Thursday made clear is that distance alone won’t be enough to make Connecticut forget what it’s losing.