Diana Taurasi’s Illustrious WNBA Career Is One Of A Kind

If 2024 is the last we see of Diana Taurasi on the court, perhaps the greatest piece of her legacy is elevating the WNBA to new heights. The league’s popularity wouldn’t have evolved to what it is today without her serving as a role model for young players across the globe.

You can’t write the history of the WNBA without Taurasi dominating the book. In fact, she’s probably the central character.

One thing is for certain: She was the most entertaining.

The mystifying shotmaking with the clock winding down. The clutch playoff moments that propelled the Phoenix Mercury to three championships in an eight-year span. The raw, unfiltered emotion that made her the WNBA’s fiercest competitor — which also allowed her to toe the line with officials on a nightly basis.

All of the regular season wins, heartbreaking losses, championship rallies, and unbridled screams to the road audience after title-clinching buckets. Every bit of it will be etched in our minds for decades. Those memories will serve as inspiration for the next class of superstar hoopers that try to emulate her success.

While it’s not written in stone that Taurasi will retire once the playoffs conclude, it feels extremely likely.

There was a unique atmosphere in Footprint Center over the last two weeks. Players, coaches, broadcasters, and even Taurasi’s family members let the emotion spill out. They weren’t going to waste an opportunity to pay tribute to her storybook career and express how meaningful she’s been to the Phoenix community.

If she decides to step away, nobody would blame her. She has already supplied her fanbase with memories that will live forever in the city’s culture. Her name and silhouette will remain on the practice court of Phoenix’s new $100 million facility that owner Mat Ishbia opened in July.

But if this is truly it, she gets to determine the how and when.

As an 11-time All-Star, six-time gold medalist, and three-time WNBA champion, Taurasi has earned the right to exit on her own terms. No part of her wanted to dominate the news cycle for the entire season. She had no interest in a ‘retirement tour,’ intrinsically pressuring opponents and fans to shower her with adulation on the road.

It wouldn’t match the selfless style her career has exemplified since 2004, and it wouldn’t be the authentic Diana Taurasi that her current and former teammates have loved and appreciated. Combining her Mercury career and International play, she has shared the floor with 210 teammates since becoming a pro. And she found a way to make an impact on every single one of them.

While she’s an impeccable vocal leader, the work also speaks for itself.

Taurasi has scored 12,101 career points, including the playoffs. It’s 3,540 more than the next player, her former teammate DeWanna Bonner. Strictly looking at her regular season career, Taurasi is the record-holder for points, free throws, and 3-pointers made:

She helped lead the Mercury to 310 regular season wins, amassing a total point differential of 1,159 across her 565 games.

The most impressive championship of the three came in 2014 when Taurasi led the Mercury to a 36-6 overall record, including the playoffs. During that regular season, she set the WNBA record for the highest individual point differential (also known as plus-minus). Phoenix outscored teams by 387 points with Taurasi on the court, which equated to 20 points per 100 possessions. Not even Maya Moore, who many believe was the most talented player of all time, hit those marks in a season.

Taurasi’s record for point differential has since been broken, with the Las Vegas Aces having four players eclipse 400 during last season’s historic run.

If Taurasi wanted to keep pushing and take her unrivaled longevity to yet another tier, she certainly could. That shouldn’t be questioned. At age 42, she just accumulated 1,000 minutes in a season for the first time since 2014. She averaged nearly 15 points on quality efficiency, had one of the lowest turnover rates of her career, and still converted a high percentage of her attempts in the paint.

But, it’s a matter of how much of the training and recovery process she’s willing to endure.

“There are still days where I’m like, I could still do this,” she said. “I still want to play basketball. Then, on the flip side, there’s days where I’m crawling out of bed. I guess that’s the struggle you have when you get to this point of your career. You have to do so much to get back on the court. It’s bittersweet in a lot of ways. I think once the season is over, I’ll have a better idea of what it looks like for me in the future.”

After all this time, there’s really nothing left to prove. She’s already the Tom Brady of the WNBA, the longevity queen that would always be effective on the floor because of her supreme IQ and the craftiness she’s adopted over time.

However, it’s tough to imagine her wanting a reduced role. Especially with the franchise she’s become the face of. Taurasi has started all 565 games of her career, never once coming off the bench.

Arguably more impressive than her two decades as a professional athlete is the fact she’ll complete it in the Valley. From start to finish, Taurasi has been the cornerstone of Phoenix basketball and the most successful player to bless the city.

“I’ve just had so many great memories in this building,” she said. “This city is just second to none to me. It’s home now. And it’s pretty cool to see kids that started coming in 2004, and now they’re married with families and own businesses. You’ve seen them grow up, and they’ve seen me … kind of grow up.”

Her talent, career arc, and on-court demeanor closely resembles another West coast legend that spent 20 years in the same uniform. It was Kobe Bryant who dubbed Taurasi the “White Mamba” years before his passing, equating her Mercury dominance to his prestigious Lakers career from 1996 to 2016. He was in attendance the day Taurasi broke the WNBA all-time scoring record in Los Angeles, citing her work ethic, consistency, and genuine love for her craft as the traits he’d like his daughters to see in action.

As Taurasi mentioned on Thursday, from a loyalty perspective, she’s proud to be in the same conversation as Bryant.

“Kobe set the bar, to be in one place for 20 years,” she said. “You could probably hand pick that many people who have played for one team for that long. It’s not easy being in one place for 20 years. It’s a long relationship of ups and downs, compromise, I don’t like this, and I don’t like that. But at the end of the day, this franchise — through my ups and downs — always had my back.”

The parallels between them are strong. Bryant’s patience was undoubtedly tested in LA when the roster construction wasn’t ideal, and things haven’t always been sunshine and rainbows for the duration of Taurasi’s Mercury tenure. But that didn’t stop either from sticking it out, refusing to leave for a better situation.

Also, both have a special type of leadership style where nothing is sugarcoated.

Taurasi believed in all of her teammates. She pushed them until they reached their potential. If that meant challenging them or giving them tough love, she would do anything necessary to unlock their inner beast.

After the Mercury celebrated the 2014 championship squad last week, I asked her longtime teammate, Brittney Griner, what sticks out about Taurasi’s evolution as a leader over the years.

“I feel like, when I first got here, she was already leading us,” Griner said. “I always called her the floor general out there. She sees everything. The way she sees the game, the way she sees it from every position as well. Those little nuggets that she drops, we’re always trying to soak it in. Over the years, she’s just gotten better at it. When she says something, you can just see how everybody is locked in. When she comes to talk to you on the sideline, or the group, she just grabs our attention.”

She’s more than just a leader on the court.

Forget the type of player she is. You never had to worry about the person everyone calls “Dee” not stepping up and supporting her team, including her rookies and young players that needed some guidance.

“That’s just Dee,” Griner added. “It’s something I’ve always cherished, when she would coach me up on the side. Because I was young and naive, and I needed to learn a lot. I credit a lot of it to Dee.”

This season didn’t unfold the way Phoenix had dreamed. Finishing with a 19-21 record and a worse net rating than the 14-26 Washington Mystics isn’t what anyone expected, particularly after the Mercury acquired former champions Kahleah Copper and Natasha Cloud. Projected to be an offensive juggernaut, Phoenix concluded the season eighth (out of 12 teams) in points scored per possession, seventh in 3-point percentage, and sixth in turnover rate. They failed to hit their ceiling, or meet the lofty expectations bestowed on them.

Losing seven of the final 10 regular season games, the Mercury head into the playoffs with a sour taste that will only be eradicated with a first-round upset. They have their work cut out for them, facing the No. 2 seed Minnesota Lynx with the first two games on the road. Minnesota is anchored by forward Napheesa Collier, the AP Defensive Player of the Year, and Cheryl Reeve, the AP Coach of the Year who also guided Team USA to another gold medal in Paris.

It will be a tall order for Phoenix to steal a road win. If they don’t, Taurasi won’t get to return to her home crowd before the decision is final.

Maybe she hasn’t fully made up her mind. There is clearly more left in the tank, even if the production doesn’t match her apex.

Plus, we know how the most psychotically-driven athletes operate. The all-time greats can often manufacture an ounce of motivation out of nowhere, or trick themselves into believing there’s more on the table.

Perhaps she hearkens back to the 2012 season, being limited to just eight games due to a strained hip flexor. Or, the 2019 campaign, which was marred by back and hamstring injuries that cost her 28 games.

It might be a long shot. But maybe — just maybe — there’s a world in which Taurasi convinces herself there’s still more left to give because of those shortened seasons.

And depending on how the Mercury fare in this 2024 playoff run, there could be some unfinished business for a team that had title aspirations.

“You know, as an athlete, you think you get to write the ending,” she laughed. “But the ending just happens sometimes. I’m just really focused on what this team needs to do to make a playoff push. Because we have it in us.”