PHOENIX — On the court, Alyssa Thomas is a problem. She’s physical, she talks, she uses every inch of her presence to get under an opponent’s skin. Off it, she’s calm. Almost serene.
DiJonai Carrington? She’s the opposite in a lot of ways. She’s always smiling. She’s the one hyping up teammates in the huddle, laughing in warmups, carrying that energy everywhere. But when the ball goes up, something shifts. That’s where the two players start looking a lot alike.
Carrington won Most Improved Player in 2022. She made an All-Defensive team. A lot of people saw her coming out of the 2021 draft as a scorer, but she became something else in Connecticut: a two-way headache who helped the Sun make deep playoff runs.
And Thomas saw it before anyone else did.
“I was on her a lot,” Thomas said Tuesday before the Mercury played the Sky. “The biggest thing was just her knowing people’s tendencies. Once she learned that, she was athletic, strong. That made it easy for her. I definitely didn’t make it easy for her because I saw what she was capable of. It was just a fun journey to watch her grow over the years.”
Thomas got traded to Phoenix in 2025. Carrington bounced to Dallas, then Minnesota, all in the same year. But the bond from those early seasons in Connecticut never faded.
What rubbed off
Thomas plays defense like it’s personal. She’s talked before about how effort is the thing people miss — the actual want to guard somebody. During a Phoenix dry spell this season, she said the team lacked that. She said it’s a will thing.
Carrington picked up on that fast.
“You can see it trickle down onto the defensive end,” Carrington said after Tuesday’s shootaround. “Playing so hard, whether that’s going for every loose ball or being in the correct coverage and doing it right every single rep, not taking any reps off. That’s a huge thing. You can just feel it. When you’re on the court with her, you don’t want to let her down. You want to go hard because she’s going hard. She’s playing 40 minutes a lot of the time. So it’s like, I’m out here for however many minutes. I’d better go hard. I don’t want to let her down. And she’s consistent with that.”
Carrington used to think about scoring first. Then she had to guard Thomas in practice. That changed everything.
The ripple effect
Thomas has been in MVP conversations. She’s made All-Defensive and All-WNBA teams year after year. Her game starts with stopping someone else, and everything else flows from there. And the players around her tend to have career years.
DeWanna Bonner. Brionna Jones. Carrington. All of them were part of that 2022 Connecticut team that made the Finals. All of them played harder because Thomas demanded it.
Every team knows the trash talking. They know the physicality. What they don’t always see is the care Thomas puts into the people who want it as bad as she does. Carrington is proof of that. And she’s far from the only one.
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