Jonquel Jones has a resume that’s stacked with accolades: she’s a WNBA MVP and a five-time All-Star. She’s won WNBA Most Improved Player, Sixth Woman of the Year, and was named WNBA Commissioner’s Cup MVP when her New York Liberty won the in-season tournament in 2023. In 2019 she lead the league in rebounding and blocks. The accolades alone show evidence of just how versatile a player Jones is, stretching her game way beyond what is expected of a 6’6” center. But the one thing that has eluded Jones throughout the course of her eight seasons in the league is a WNBA Championship.
Jones has come close so many times, losing in the Finals twice with the Connecticut Sun and last season with the Liberty. She's hoping that the fourth time will be the charm, that this will be the year that both she and the Liberty franchise finally secure their first championship. The team is well on their way, entering the playoffs as the top seed after finishing the regular season with a league-best 32-8 record. They swept the Atlanta Dream in the first round of the playoffs, and have won the first game of their semi-finals series against the Las Vegas Aces, the team that has bested Jones’s teams to win the championship in each of the last two seasons.
But now, surrounded by stars like Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, Jones feels like this really could finally be the year. “I think that our chemistry has gone up, and we have learned how to play with each other,” Jones tells Complex. “I think the biggest difference between this year and last year is that we have a deeper bench. The biggest difference between Vegas and us last year was that they had a deeper bench, and their bench came into that game four, and they made a difference. We learned from that and we brought in people that could really help us be dynamic on all different levels.”
But playing around such a talented group of players has meant that Jones has had to adapt her game, too. It’s not just the deeper bench that allows the 2024 Liberty to be more dynamic than in years past—it’s the evolution of Jones as a player, and with a coach who sees the potential in allowing Jones to play beyond her position. A great example of this is Jones’ passing game.
During her 2021 MVP season with the Sun, Jones averaged 2.8 assists per game and had an assist percentage of 17.6 percent. This year, those numbers have gone up to 3.2 and 18.4 percent, which are career highs. But she’s doing more than just passing the ball and passing it effectively—she’s passing it with flair. Jones led the league in no-look passes this season as of the beginning of September.
A lot of that is thanks to the different style of play in New York—under coach Curt Miller, the Sun played a more traditional game with post players staying down low in the post, while under head coach Sandy Brondello, the Liberty play more of a five-out offense. That means that Jones is often in positions that aren’t directly under the basket because the team spaces the floor more.
“If two people are going to double team me—which they do every night—I want my teammates to trust me that I'm going to find them in those open spots,” says Jones. “And I want them to know that I trust them, that they're going to shoot and they're going to make those shots.”
Jones’s passing instincts have been embraced by Brondello, which has allowed Jones to really see what she can do. “Sandy’s letting her throw behind-the-back passes, and I didn’t,” Miller told The Next Hoops earlier this season. The result has been a player who continues to break the mold for what someone who plays her position should be able to do.
Jones has also been in the league long enough to really appreciate how much has really changed this season. “Before, you were going to WNBA posts and you would see crazy stuff, like, ‘Oh, get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich,’” she says. “Now you're missing out if you're not watching the WNBA game. I do want to give credit to the Caitlin Clarks and the Angel Reeses for being themselves and bringing that fan base with them, to the point where WNBA is being spoken about every night. But it feels good as a player that has been one of the players that's bringing it every night.”
Being in the larger market of New York City has also allowed Jones to become the kind of face she has long deserved to be, for a franchise that was recently estimated to be the third most valuable in the WNBA. She guesses that the amount of money she made last year—even before this season’s spike in viewership and hype—was double or even triple what she made as a pro athlete in Connecticut.
“A lot of the things that I've gotten haven't necessarily been personal sponsorships, but sponsorships through our team,” Jones says. “I really appreciate the New York Liberty fulfilling that promise of being able to allow me to build my brand in that way.”
Jones has also been notably vocal about how difficult it has been for her to get the kinds of sponsorships that someone with her talent should be getting. She’s also pulled no punches in calling out the fact that being a masculine-presenting, Black lesbian likely plays a role in preventing her from securing brand deals, tweeting in 2022 that “the seats disappearing from the table as I speak” because of her identity.
The WNBA has seen more eyeballs and more money pouring into it than ever before, with players securing deals at a record clip. “I feel like I'm still fighting for those deals, as… a basketball player that has done so much and continues to do so much,” she says. “I don't know if the opportunities are necessarily there for me, like by myself as a player, but I do know that the New York Liberty (have put me in place to ensure I'm) getting the things that I deserve.”
As the WNBA itself still fails to allow true gender diversity to be on display in its campaigns—the league’s campaign with Skims, Kim Kardashian’s line of intimates, received criticism earlier this season for only featuring feminine-presenting athletes—a franchise that steps in to ensure that its players are supported can make all the difference. That’s evidenced in the fact that Jones debuted her very first shoe with Nike this season, her KD17 PEs. The shoes paid tribute to Jones’s Bahamian heritage, featuring the colors of the island waters and a debossed map of the Bahamas on the heel. She never misses an opportunity to represent her Bahamian roots, even rocking a Jazz Chisholm, Jr. Yankees jersey in the tunnel on the way to a late-season game, while Chisholm wore Jones’s Liberty jersey as his pregame fit, the two New York-based Bahamian sports superstars showing mutual respect for each other.
“I was kind of scared when he got to the Yankees, because I'm like, ‘I don't know if they’re gonna try to take his swag away—but you can’t take Jazz’s swag away,” Jones says of Chisholm’s mid-season trade from the Miami Marlins. “I'm happy that he's there, and I'm happy that we get to support each other in that way.”
Despite playing in a league and a world that has not always been eager to embrace her, Jones has persevered. Slowly but surely, she has built not just an MVP-caliber career, but a lucrative and respected off-the-court brand. Jones, born January 5, 1994, is a Capricorn stellium, which is a short way of saying that she has three or more planets in her birth chart in the sign of Capricorn. Now, maybe you don’t believe in astrology but if you did, this would affirm what you may have already learned about Jones just by observing her.
Capricorn is the mountain goat—the workhorse of the zodiac. Capricorn isn’t necessarily flashy and it’s not always the loudest voice in the room, but it also never gives up on itself. A Capricorn will work as hard as they need to in order to achieve their goals, they will do it in a direct and no-nonsense way, and they tend to have a mind for the business side of things. But then, balancing out all that Capricorn, is Jones’s moon—which rules feelings and emotions—in the sign of Libra. A Libra moon cares about fairness, about justice, about hearing everyone out, about making other people happy and giving everyone else a chance.
Together, an image of Jonquel Jones, the athlete and the brand, begins to form: an unselfish player who is willing to help out her team in any way she can because she wants to win and she understands that doing so requires balancing the different games and different personalities that make up a team.
“I still feel like we can create more spaces for everybody to tell their stories,” she says. “I think sometimes we take for granted how hard it is to be in the WNBA and what it takes to get to the WNBA, and the fact that it's a very small group of people that are in the league. When you only showcase the top 10 players every year, [you don’t] allow all the players that have given their time to this league to be seen, heard, and understood.”
And while Jones and the Liberty hope to bring home the title, she is at a point in her career where she has a different view of success than she may have had when she was younger.
“A lot of us judge our success on whether or not we win championships, but when you've been in the league long enough, you understand that at the end of the year, it's only going to be one team that wins it,” says Jones. “Sometimes you have to really just look in the mirror and understand that there's other ways to gauge the success that you've had.”