UNCASVILLE, Conn. — There’s a certain flimsiness in describing a player like Alyssa Thomas. Nothing seems fully adequate. Even the foundation here is flawed: What is a player like Alyssa Thomas? Here is a forward, but with an uncanny knack for facilitating and running an offense, and here is a guard, but one who plays with a compelling, bruising physicality. A shooter, but with a pair of torn labrums and the unorthodox shot mechanics to match. It’s simplest to say that Thomas is a model of positionless basketball. Yet that’s not quite right, either. It’s not that she has no position so much as that she is every position.
There are few players in the WNBA who can take over a game quite so effectively on both ends of the floor. This was exactly what Thomas did on Wednesday: She led her No. 3 Connecticut Sun to an 87–81 win over the No. 6 Indiana Fever to wrap up the best-of-three series with a sweep and move on to the semifinals. She finished with 19 points, 13 assists and five rebounds, with much of that scoring concentrated in a crucial slice of the second half, when she bent the game to her will.
