Locked On Women’s Basketball: Jen Rizzotti joins the show, explains the Connecticut Sun’s new era

Rizzotti first explained how the Sun approached this off-season, including the many conversations she had with general manager (GM) Morgan Tuck.

“I’m almost four years into my time here with the Connecticut Sun, and we had a roster that was very consistent for a long time, right?” Rizzotti said “So I will admit that we were prepared for this. This didn’t catch us by surprise. We knew this would be a busy off-season. It’s something that [Morgan Tuck] and I talked about a couple years ago when we hired [former general manager and current chief basketball strategist Darius Taylor], and we kind of started to groom [Tuck] to take over as the GM. We talked about this potentially being her first off-season officially as a GM, and making sure that we were prepared with our own strategic vision as to what we were trying to accomplish during this time.”

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“When I took this job in April of [2021], and Curt Miller was still the coach here, we were talking then about what the length of our championship window looked like, right? And we were looking to re-sign [Jonquel Jones], she agreed to come back for one more year to give it a run. Last year, we were in the same situation. We had [Alyssa Thomas] and [Brionna Jones] under contract for one more year. We were asking [DeWanna Bonner] to come back and give it one more run. So we’ve known now for three years that we’ve extended this championship window probably a lot longer than people would have expected us to. And so we were making decisions in [2023] and [2024] to win now, like that was it, we’re going to win now,” Rizzotti continued.

“So making that trade mid-season last year for [Marina Mabrey] was a win now trade, right? It was a decision in that moment that we had this window. It was closing. We knew DeWanna, Alyssa and Breezy were coming off of contract, and we had to make decisions to win now. And so, you know, I think at the end of the day, we tried to look at this off-season as we knew that window was closing, let’s open up a new window and a new door and think about retooling the roster in a way for the future. And I think every team in the league right now is either in a win now mentality or they’re in a build for the future mentality, and you can still be competitive and retool your roster creatively to win without completely rebuilding. And I think [for] Morgan, Darius [and I], our priority was to retool without completely rebuilding and making sure we had good pieces to build around for the future.”

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Tune in to hear more from Rizzotti about the many different ways the Sun are using the Draft in their rebuilding process, the players Connecticut currently has on its roster, her outlook on the upcoming CBA negotiations and more. Make sure to subscribe to the Locked On Women’s Basketball podcast to keep learning about the WNBA, women’s college basketball, basketball history and much more!