Brittney Griner has spent most of 2026 doing what she has always done. She scores, she blocks shots, and she anchors a Connecticut Sun front line trying to salvage a rough final season before the franchise becomes the Houston Comets.
But in a recent clip, she pulled back the curtain on a part of her job that never shows up in a box score. Brittney Griner is personally clipping game film on Indiana’s post players, building out scouting packages by hand, one possession at a time.
“I’m clipping right now, I’m clipping the bigs, the post players for Indiana,” Brittney Griner said. “So basically, you know, each team you get your scout. I haven’t learned who puts the scout paper together and all that and writes all and does all that. I don’t know who does that just yet, but I’m sure I will be on that soon.”
That admission says as much about Griner’s standing on this Sun roster as any stat line could. At 35 and in her first season in Connecticut, she is already embedded deep enough in the process to be trusted with raw scouting duties most veterans never touch.
Her breakdown of the process is methodical. Once a scouting report flags a tendency for an opposing post player, Griner goes hunting for footage that proves it works, not footage of it failing.
“So I got to find the footage of the games of them doing it and making it or succeeding at it, because I mean, you don’t want to show them messing it up at it, because then it’s like, why am I guarding that,” she said. “So you definitely want to show, you know, them making and doing it right, but I got to go find all that.”
She described sifting through one Indiana matchup after another, isolating clips for every post player before moving to the next game and repeating the process until the full report is built. It is unglamorous work, the kind that happens long after practice ends and long before anyone notices.
Griner has earned the right to be candid about how much of it eats into her downtime. “TV is work, so,” she said, closing the thought with the shrug of someone who has made peace with the grind.
Brittney Griner’s Film Study Mirrors A Career-Best Stretch On The Court
The timing matters. Griner is in the middle of one of her most productive stretches since returning from a year in Atlanta that saw her role shrink dramatically. She is averaging 13.9 points, 5.6 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 1.8 blocks a game, numbers that have made her Connecticut’s most reliable frontcourt presence.
She has also been collecting milestones. Griner recently passed Margo Dydek to become the WNBA’s all-time leader in blocks, and she has since climbed to 16th on the league’s all-time rebounding list, passing Sancho Lyttle along the way. Both climbs came while Griner was also managing injuries, including a left quad contusion that cost her two games before she was cleared to return.
None of that has slowed the film work. If anything, it explains it. A player who has already survived being jailed in Russia and a diminished role in Atlanta is not treating advance scouting as busywork. She is treating it as another way to stay indispensable.
Griner has also been vocal about protecting that kind of investment as the league grows. With the WNBA expanding to a 50-game schedule in 2027, she has said the extra exposure is worth it, but only if the league spreads the calendar out rather than compressing it.
“I think our season should be longer, but that’s just me personally, with all the games, so they’re not crammed and injuries don’t start happening with people,” Griner said. “I think our league is growing, we have to have more games. So, I mean, I think the talk of spanning our season out should be talked about.”
That is the same instinct driving her film sessions. Griner is not just showing up to play out a lost season in Connecticut. She is building habits, on the court and off it, that a franchise relocating to Houston will need from her for years to come.
