PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Brionna Jones pushes a referee’s opening tip to Alyssa Thomas, who corrals the pass, scoots around a defender and finishes an uncontested layup. The basket is scored so quickly that it clears the net before the game clock even starts. The timing issue, of course, is out of the ordinary — it does get corrected after an official timeout — but Jones finding Thomas for an easy hoop? That is routine.
You can scan box scores from Maryland’s 2014 Final Four run to find occurrences of Thomas and Jones sharing the floor as Terrapins. Since 2017, upon Jones entering the WNBA, the two bigs have been teammates with the Connecticut Sun, appearing in 129 regular-season and postseason games together in that span. The aforementioned basket, however, occurred in a different locale — it was the first hoop in an uneventful 102–65 early January win for ZVVZ USK Praha, over KP Brno, in Czech league play. Here, they are in their fourth year alongside one another. The pair is an anomaly in an international basketball landscape where major roster turnover is the norm.
In recent years, Thomas and Jones have become perhaps the most inseparable duo in all of professional women’s basketball. Having long-standing twosomes in the WNBA is not all that uncommon (scan…
