CHICAGO — Jonquel Jones picked up the Most Valuable Player trophy, then said something that stopped the room.
“My aunt passed away not too long ago,” she said, “and today is actually her memorial.”
The disclosure came after a performance that required no additional weight to be remarkable. Jones, coming off the bench, finished with 22 points, 13 rebounds and 8 assists as Team Spoon defeated Team Coop 129-122 at the United Center before 19,783 fans — a new WNBA All-Star Game attendance record. The specifics of her game warranted the award. The context behind it was something the box score could not capture.
The game was the centerpiece of the WNBA’s 30th anniversary weekend, and the broadcast numbers confirmed what the crowd at the United Center already reflected. The game drew 3.2 million viewers, up 44 percent from the previous year, according to Yahoo Sports. The attendance mark had stood since 2018. The record Chicago crowd cleared it.
The award Jones accepted also completed something that had not been accomplished in the league’s 30-year history. She now holds, across her career, the WNBA MVP, the Finals MVP, the Commissioner’s Cup MVP and the All-Star MVP — a combination no player had previously assembled. The sport has produced dominant performers at every stage of its existence. None cleared all four before Jones did this weekend in Chicago.
That she did it on the same day her family was holding a funeral is not something the league scheduled and is not something Jones left unspoken.
The two teams were named after the WNBA’s founding generation. Teresa Weatherspoon and Cynthia Cooper — players who built the league before it drew audiences of this size — served as general managers, drafting rosters from the 22 All-Stars selected this season. Conference affiliations dissolved for the weekend: Caitlin Clark captained Team Spoon while Kelsey Mitchell, her Indiana Fever teammate all season, ran Team Coop’s offense. Mitchell led all scorers with 28 points. Marina Mabrey added 23 for Team Coop, all before halftime, a sprint that kept the game close before Jones’s third-quarter production settled it.
Clark, in her third All-Star appearance, scored 17 points. The number matters mostly in relation to the one that preceded it: she scored 4 at her 2024 debut. The game has found her better each time. Indiana entered the weekend as the only franchise to place three players in the starting lineup — Clark, Aliyah Boston and Mitchell — though Boston, managing a long-running right lower-leg issue, played just five minutes. Four days later, Boston would absorb a hard fall in Seattle that left her status for the stretch run uncertain and sent a more urgent question about Indiana’s title credentials through the league.
The United Center also hosted an absence nobody had planned for the league’s anniversary showcase. The Chicago Sky, the building’s resident franchise, became the first host team in All-Star Game history to not send a single player to any All-Star Weekend event — not the game, not the Shooting Stars competition, not the 3-Point Contest. Nearly 20,000 fans packed the arena for a weekend the Sky had no representative in. The league issued no statement on the distinction.
Azzi Fudd of the Connecticut Sun won the 3-Point Contest on All-Star Friday with 30 championship-round points, becoming the first rookie to claim the title in the event’s history. CBS Sports reported she immediately challenged Steph Curry to a rematch, without specifying a format or a venue. Curry had not responded publicly as of Thursday. The terms of the challenge remain open.
Dominique Malonga, 20 years old, dunked. She became the youngest player to do so in a WNBA All-Star Game and the first since Sylvia Fowles in 2022. The reaction in the building was immediate and specific — the kind of noise that belongs to a moment and resists translation to a broadcast, though the broadcast was carrying it.
Nneka Ogwumike’s career All-Star total reached 127 points during the weekend, the most in the event’s history. The record belongs to a player who entered the WNBA in a different era and has watched the league’s attendance figures and viewer counts grow from what they were then into what the 30th anniversary weekend produced.
What the second half of the season will determine is not answerable from an All-Star Game. Minnesota’s Olivia Miles, who joined Candace Parker as the only rookie in WNBA history to record 30 points, eight rebounds and eight assists in a single game, heads into August as one of the most closely watched first-year players in recent memory. Whether the 3.2 million people who found the league over All-Star Weekend return for October, and whether that number continues moving in the direction it has been moving, are questions that a 30-year anniversary game could raise but could not resolve.
Jones’s aunt was memorialized elsewhere this weekend. The MVP found its way to the right place.
