42-year-old Diana Taurasi has called time on her incredible career in the WNBA.
She made an impact from her first moments at UConn Huskies in 2000, and she was still as good as ever in the twilight of career, helping to lead the Phoenix Mercury to the playoffs.
“In an exclusive conversation with TIME, Taurasi reveals publicly for the first time that she’s retiring from basketball. “Mentally and physically, I’m just full,” says Taurasi, who played all 20 of her WNBA seasons for the Mercury. “That’s probably the best way I can describe it. I’m full and I’m happy.””
Taurasi scored 10,646 points (and is the only WNBA player to surpass the 10K mark in scoring) in 565 regular season games, and she scored another 1,476 points in 72 playoff games.
Her achievements aren’t even all covered in this list, but we’ve done our best to summarize them:
🔸First player to win six Olympic gold medals
🔸3× WNBA champion
🔸2× WNBA Finals MVP
🔸10× All-WNBA First Team
🔸WNBA Rookie of the Year
🔸3× NCAA champion
🔸2× Naismith College Player of the Year
🔸5x WNBA scoring champion
🔸14x All-WNBA selection
🔸WNBA MVP
🔸Rookie of the Year
🔸3x NCAA Champion
🔸3x World Cup Gold Medals
🔸WNBA’s leader in 3PM
“My scoring record, or the six gold medals, someone’s going to come around that has the same hunger, the same addiction to basketball, and put those records in a different way, a different name,” says Taurasi. “That’s what sports is all about. That’s going to be fun to watch. Hopefully not soon.”
Taurasi first rose to national fame at UConn twenty years ago, when she led the Huskies to three consecutive national titles from 2002 to 2004, which included an undefeated season that many basketball heads say was the greatest in women’s college basketball history.
“I have never, ever heard her say a negative word about a teammate, at UConn, the Olympic team, Phoenix,” Huskies coach Geno Auriemma told ESPN. “But I could say to her, ‘Dee, that was the worst god-damned pass I’ve ever seen in my life.’ If I said that to someone else, they might say, ‘Why are you disrespecting me?’ With her, she never took it personally. She already knew it was a bad pass and she needed to make it better. She wanted to be coached like that.”
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