Basketball legend Diana Taurasi introduced her retirement in Time on Tuesday, and the tributes are pouring in for one of many biggest ladies’s gamers ever. Taurasi gained three nationwide championships in faculty with the UConn Huskies, two Naismith Faculty Participant of the Yr awards, went on to grow to be a five-time WNBA scoring chief, a 10-time All-WNBA First Group choice, and a three-time WNBA champion. For all of her success, Taurasi’s biggest space of feat might have come on the Olympics.
Taurasi gained six gold medals with Group USA ladies’s basketball over a 20-year stretch from 2004-2024. USA ladies’s basketball hasn’t misplaced a recreation on the Olympics since 1992, and Taurasi performed an enormous function in extending their dominance. Taurasi wasn’t only a winner and champion when the Olympics would pop up each 4 years, she was additionally one thing of a comic.
Taurasi was ruthless each on and off the court docket. The Time retirement story highlighted one occasion in the course of the 2016 Rio Olympics when the Phoenix Mercury star interrupted Draymond Inexperienced — who was taking part in for the lads’s Olympic crew — and completely roasted him for his lack of scoring skill. That is artwork:
In the course of the 2016 Rio Olympics, the ladies’s and males’s U.S. basketball groups once more stayed on a cruise ship. Gamers from each groups, a bunch of NBA and WNBA stars, had been sitting round one night time, having a number of laughs, a number of drinks, and speaking some critical smack, as is the behavior of tremendous aggressive and profitable athletes. Draymond Inexperienced, a famous NBA rabble-rouser identified extra for his defensive instincts, physicality, passing expertise, and penchant for drawing technical fouls and suspensions than his taking pictures and scoring skill, was happening about one thing. Taurasi stated, “Hey, Draymond, how does it really feel to be the one particular person on this room who’s by no means been double-teamed?”
Inexperienced by no means stops operating his mouth, so it serves him proper to need to take some jabs each as soon as within the whereas. You’ll be able to wager Inexperienced goes to be throughout our TVs as an analyst from the second he retires speaking about how the present era simply isn’t as powerful the gamers from his day. When that occurs, simply keep in mind Taurasi burned him pretty much as good as anybody.
Ladies’s basketball is now greater than ever, and superstars like Taurasi paved the best way for the likes of Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers. The sport continues to develop, however we’ll by no means see one other persona fairly like DT.
