Tina Charles, back with the Connecticut Sun, has agency — Danielle Robinson talks Los Angeles Sparks

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Charles last played for Sun in 2013. That was so long ago, the New York Liberty have utilized three different primary home floors since Charles called Uncasville home (Madison Square Garden, Westchester County Center and now, with a push from Charles herself, Barclays Center). Sparks front office hire Danielle Robinson was in her third season as a player, having arrived in the league after Charles, and playing for a team, the San Antonio Silver Stars, that hasn’t even existed since 2017.

So it’s been a while. And for Charles, too, it’s been a journey with plenty of bumps along the way, stops in DC, Phoenix, Seattle and Atlanta, along with two full seasons away from the league entirely — in 2020, out of an abundance of health and safety caution, and in 2023, when the way things ended in Phoenix and Seattle limited her market.

She nodded to this in her answers on Wednesday, saying that if she hadn’t gotten a chance to play and lead in Atlanta for Tanisha Wright and Dan Padover in 2024, “I’m not here unless they put belief in me last season to have me on the team.”

Having enjoyed the privilege of covering Tina Charles for over a decade, I’ve come to see her as a complicated figure, one who has often challenged her own circumstances, but who with the benefit of hindsight, was doing so within a career framework that asked entirely too much of her, most notably when her homecoming turned Kafkaesque.

After four years with the Sun, Charles pushed for a trade to her hometown New York Liberty, only to get stuck on a roster that lacked the star power and depth of fellow contenders in Minnesota and Los Angeles. Early playoff exits came at the hands of a flawed, since-discarded playoff system which allowed for one-off shooting performances from Diana Taurasi and Kristi Toliver to prematurely end some of New York’s most promising seasons. And then Jim Dolan decided to leave Charles’ Liberty by the side of the road, exiling her to the suburbs.

Each of these twists and turns, Charles never leaned into the skid. It isn’t how she operates. But to really appreciate Tina Charles is to experience her in the aggregate, to be able to average some of the difficulties she faced within the overall body of work. This is a star who routinely led her teams to the top of the Eastern Conference standings in New York without a legitimate second scorer, let alone a third one, and averaged 4 assists per game in 2016 all the same, an Alyssa Thomas before AT.

This is a 32-time Player of the Week honoree, with a 11-year spread between her first and what is, for now, her last such honor in 2021. I wouldn’t be surprised if she adds another in 2025, and makes the spread 15 years.

This is the only woman in WNBA history with more than 4,000 rebounds, yet someone who also turned herself into a viable three-point shooter midway through her career. In her first six WNBA seasons, she shot 2-for-17 from deep. Since then? 183-for-561, good for 32.6 percent. A modern big, not from team fit or organizational imperative, but from long, lonely sessions shooting the ball after practices in White Plains, and even out on the court pregame, around the world from long range as the middling crowds limited by James Dolan’s utter lack of imagination and vision arrived to see, primarily, her.

Tina Charles continues to work this hard at her craft, even though she doesn’t need to — she doesn’t need the WNBA at all, actually, and has donated her entire WNBA salary to her charity to her Hopey’s Heart Foundation, a charity she started in 2013 in memory of her aunt. Charles saw a problem — without Automated External Defibrillators, people would die unnecessarily — and she’s worked, quietly, to fix that problem ever since. She told me on Wednesday that Hopey’s Heart Foundation plans to pass 500 AEDs distributed this year.

She may never get that WNBA title, a pursuit that once drove her as well. She was good enough to do it in Connecticut, she came achingly close in New York — that 2015 Liberty team simply needed to win an elimination game at home against the Indiana Fever to reach the WNBA Finals against a Minnesota Lynx team they’d beaten both times they’d faced them in the regular season — and she’s still largely the player she’s been throughout the second half of her career, less dominant at the rim than during her MVP-level run in Uncasville over a decade ago, but in many ways a more complete player now, and one who fits seamlessly into the way WNBA teams operate at both ends here in 2025.

Both she and Sun general manager Morgan Tuck insisted that Charles came to Connecticut to win. And the part of Tuck’s argument that resonates most is that the Sun signed Tina Charles to do vintage Tina Charles things. This is not the 36-year-old version of Charles’ teammate a decade ago, Swin Cash, still a vital, respected voice in that locker room, but a tertiary figure on opposing scouting reports when teams would face New York.

“Tina’s gonna be a great mentor, but we didn’t just bring her back to be a mentor,” Tuck told me Wednesday. “You know, Tina, she may be 36 but we know what she can do on the court, and so we need that as well.”

Whether the Sun have enough to put around her to turn Connecticut into a contender remains an open question, with even Tuck pointing out that she still has “work to do” this offseason. But what is assured, by Charles signing with the Sun, is that she’ll get the opportunity to display her game, one which has made her an easy Hall of Famer once she retires, for at least a little longer.

A vital figure in the history of this league — you’ll find her right around Becky Hammon and Rebekkah Brunson among the all-time leaders in win shares — has often pushed back against the limits of both each individual opportunity she’s received and the aggregate ceiling of a league which was not nearly big enough for Tina Charles’ ambitions. But now, Tina Charles gets to spend the summer reliving some of her finest moments in front of appreciative fans. She gets to go fishing in Mystic, survey the wine trails and the restaurant scene around her all summer long. And could her Sun surprise people? Go back and look at what her Liberty teams did, what the Atlanta Dream did with an engaged Charles just last season.

“For me, the flexibility of me being in the W again, it just goes back to my passion for wanting to play,” Charles said. “You know, I love this game, and I still believe I’m able to compete at a high level and and and be alongside of the best of them.”

As the WNBA expands what is possible for its biggest stars, Charles gets to write at least the next, if not the last, chapter in her own story. That kind of agency for Tina Charles is long overdue.

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Five at The IX: Danielle Robinson, Los Angeles Sparks

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