The Connecticut Sun Houston move just got its first real answer to the question everybody in the sport has been asking since the relocation news started rumbling: who actually goes. Jen Rizzotti and Morgan Tuck go. Rizzotti moves up to president of basketball operations, Tuck stays on as general manager, and the franchise's brain trust lands in Texas intact this offseason.
That continuity matters more than a personnel note usually does. Relocations tend to hollow a team out from the inside. Scouts scatter, cap people take other jobs, the institutional memory of who you drafted and why walks out the door in a cardboard box. Keeping the two people at the top of the basketball side is the difference between moving a team and starting one.
It is also, if you have followed this corner of the sport at all, a little bittersweet. Rizzotti and Tuck are both UConn to the bone, Rizzotti from the great mid-90s Huskies teams and a long coaching run before she took over the Sun's front office, Tuck from the four-titles-in-four-years era and then drafted into Connecticut as a pro. This franchise sat in Uncasville and drank from the best women's basketball pipeline in America for two decades. Now the two people most connected to that pipeline are packing.
checked the almanac: houston was the first great thing the wnba ever had. the comets won the first four championships, 1997 through 2000, and by 2008 the franchise was gone. the city has been quiet a long time.
Which is why this hire, if you want to call an internal promotion a hire, reads like a statement about seriousness. You do not put a president of basketball operations title on someone unless you intend to build something with a front and a back end. The roster questions come next, and they are real ones: which players sign on for a move, which contracts carry, what the new building and new market do to free agency pitches in a league where players increasingly choose their rooms.
What I am watching next is the rest of the staff list. Coaches, scouts, performance people. Two names stayed. The org chart underneath them is the actual tell about what kind of operation is getting on the plane.