If that was the case, then Diana Taurasi’s swan song was uniquely her own

MINNEAPOLIS – If that was it, then perhaps there was no more fitting ending.

Diana Taurasi was eliminated for the final time. As she walked to the bench, she shook her head as if to say, “I know, I know,” and then smiled again as if to say, “But of course. What else can you expect?” As the stadium announcers called her name for perhaps the final time, the arena – an opposing venue, no less – rose to its feet to honor a player who shaped and changed the game.

Maybe the fairytale would have been that Taurasi rides off into the sunset with a championship in her pocket, retires at the top, and leaves the game with a win. Maybe that would have felt like a Disney movie. But the reality — if that’s what it was — is that she had that chance. She was a free agent. And multiple times. She could have left the Phoenix Mercury (her team for her entire 20-year career) and joined another squad — one that didn’t welcome a new coach or rebuild with new players. She could have chosen an easier path — with a more idealistic exit by narrative standards.

Standing ovations for Diana Taurasi at the Target Center 👏 pic.twitter.com/JzQxpEbQYa

— WNBA (@WNBA) 26 September 2024

But that’s not Taurasi. She’s not trying to appease writers or critics. At 42 and two decades as a pro, her daily routine of still being on the court makes “the hard way” seem normal. So if that’s what it is, then of course she hasn’t been looking for the way out. This is a player who has worn four uniforms in her entire career: Don Antonio Lugo High School, UConn, Team USA and Phoenix.

So, getting eliminated one last time while traveling with a group of players who wanted to do the unexpected? Yes, that sounds like Dee.

After all, everything she does sounds like Dee.

There was something particularly Taurasi-esque about the announcement of this will-she-or-won’t-she retirement tour/non-tour. The cryptic tweets, the GOAT t-shirt giveaway, the nostalgic video of her wife commenting on Phoenix’s final regular-season home game. Geno Auriemma shows up at the final home game, sitting next to her parents. After the Mercury were knocked out of the first round of the WNBA playoffs in Minnesota on Wednesday night, she did not participate in the postgame media interviews.

Every time she was asked about retiring this year, she dismissed the decision. She would wait until after the season, she repeated, just like in the past. She would think about it and make her decision later.

The whole time, her eyes somehow confirmed that she was lying to your face and knew exactly what she was going to do… and somehow they also conveyed the stark truth that she was addicted to basketball and you needed to pick her up off the floor and you’d be damned if you said otherwise.

That’s always been part of Taurasi’s appeal. She always looks like she sees 12 ways to the same place and she’s just looking for the fastest or best or funniest. She knows more than you know and sees more than you see, simply because she’s Dee and you’re not. So when it comes to the question of whether she’s retiring, she’s not here to make it easy for you by simply saying, “Yeah, see you then!” Instead, like so many newbies before her, she pulls the strings with a certain exuberance. That coy, grinning look. That “I’ll let you hang around here just long enough, newbie, so I can break your soul and then pat you on the back and tell you you’re doing great.”

When Auriemma recruited Taurasi to UConn, he told her he believed she had the potential to be the best basketball player ever. After her freshman season, he told her she needed to grow up and be a leader. The Huskies lost in the Final Four that year, and she vowed they would never lose another tournament game. They didn’t.

She took the game seriously, but never took herself too seriously.

This is the person who forgot to check that she had both a left and right shoe before her first Olympic Games in Athens in 2004 (and subsequently brought two left shoes). The person who happily made innuendo after innuendo on live TV while commentating on South Carolina Gamecocks games. But she’s also one of the few athletes for whom the saying “they hate losing more than they love winning” actually holds true.

Ask at the door in Chicago.

She leaves the WNBA – if that’s what it was – as a three-time champion, an eleven-time All-Star, the league’s top scorer and the first player ever to surpass the 10,000-point mark.

She played the game longer and better than most ever will, and with a fire that, even when it was that, still burns brightly. But at the end of the day, when she left the field for the last time, she was just a kid from Chino who loved the game. Who gave it her all.

On Wednesday night in Minneapolis, one of Auriemma’s legendary phrases kept coming to mind. When asked countless times why he had so much confidence in his UConn team in the early 2000s, he simply answered in some variation, “We have Dee and they don’t.”

I’m behind you every step of the way, Dee. pic.twitter.com/p96IOCtWP2

— Phoenix Mercury (@PhoenixMercury) 20 September 2024

So if that was all there was to her, we should be thankful that Dee was ultimately part of our basketball experience for all of us. Not just UConn or Auriemma. Also her teammates and opponents, the fans and sportswriters, the coaches and support staff, the rookies she ripped off and the veterans she outplayed.

Everyone could share in her experience because her game was bigger than herself. She embodied swagger and trash talk. She operated in an environment where her commitment to the game is something few of us will ever truly understand. She left her mark on the game. She scored more points than anyone else. She made more baskets than anyone else. She won more gold medals than anyone else.

She didn’t just become the best, she became an icon. She is known not by a single name, but by a single letter. She is recognizable not by her profile, but by a single hairstyle. So stubborn that years after her style became a relic, she still wears baggy play shorts that reach her knees.

If that was it, then she left on her own terms and in her own way. Should we really have expected anything else?

(Photo by Diana Taurasi: David Sherman / NBAE via Getty Images)