Mohegan — Jonquel Jones grabbed an offensive rebound early in Tuesday’s Connecticut Sun game and went to put it back up for an easy layup.

Ordinarily, a putback is free money for the 6-foot-6, second-year Connecticut Sun center.

It wasn’t Tuesday night.

Jones missed, grabbed her miss, missed again and was tied up by Los Angeles Sparks center Candace Parker for a jump ball.

It was a bad omen for Connecticut. Those misses caused it to fall behind early and it trailed the rest of the game. The Sun finished with 19 missed layups, which is a really, really bad thing to do against the defending WNBA champions.

“We were so inefficient in the paint tonight,” Sun coach Curt Miller said after an 87-79 loss before 6,899 at Mohegan Sun Arena.

“We shot under 33 percent in the paint. Then it always seemed like they were running out against us (in transition). And if we could’ve scored better in the paint, we could’ve gotten into our halfcourt set.”

It was the second straight loss for the Sun (6-7), and a big part of it was because they made just 9 of 28 layups.

That would be 32.1 percent.

Not good.

Jones had a tougher night than most of her teammates as she missed 8 of 11 layups. She finished shooting 5 of 17 for 13 points with 17 rebounds.

“I wasn’t finishing tonight,” Jones said. “I had a lot of opportunities to put the ball in the basket. I just didn’t get it done. Got to get better.”

It was the sixth straight win for Los Angeles (10-3), which is a challenging team to play inside because of power forward Nneka Oguwmike, the reigning WNBA MVP, and Parker. The latter finished with five blocks.

“Candace has one of the longest wing-spans in the league,” Miller said. “She’s tremendously long and can affect plays around the rim. And then Nneka is clearly the best overall athlete in the entire league. But I just felt that Jonquel rushed around the rim. She was off-balance a lot."

Jones said: “They gave me a lot of what I normally get when I play other teams. I just wasn’t finishing. It’s on me. I don’t think it’s anything that they did. I think it was just me not putting the ball in the basket.”

To be fair to Jones, none of the Sun shot well. They made just 36.4 percent of their field goals (28 of 77).

Connecticut shot the worst in the first quarter as it missed 16 of 22 shots.

By comparison, Ogwumike made all six of her shots in the first quarter and scored 13. It was more than what Los Angeles needed to take a 27-17 lead after 10 minutes.

“The first quarter, they were hot, we were not,” Sun Jasmine Thomas said. “We kept making little runs here and there, but we could never get over that hump. Even when we got it to eight (69-61 with 8 minutes, 21 seconds left in the game), we’d turn around and, boom, easy layup (for the Sparks). We just had to be a little more locked in.”

Connecticut trailed by as much as 63-44 with 4:28 remaining.

Ogwumike had 21 points and nine rebounds for the Sparks and Parker added 14 points and seven rebounds.

Jasmine Thomas scored 19 for Connecticut and Alyssa Thomas had 13 points and 11 rebounds.

“When you play a team like this and only lose by single digits, even when you didn’t play the kind of game that you wanted to play, you can kind of be positive about it,” Jasmine Thomas said. “If we played better defensively and did the things that we know we’re capable of doing, it could be a different game.”

n.griffen@theday.com