PARIS — Van Chancellor knew he wanted Diana Taurasi on the 2004 Athens Olympic team. She was young, talented, confident and courageous. He expected her to change into a central figure in American basketball for years to return, but he also knew she could still contribute to the group of superstars chosen for his team — members of “Dream On” who had helped re-center the world of ladies's basketball by winning gold again in Atlanta in 1996.
On Taurasi's first day with the U.S. national team this yr, only one morning after helping UConn to the national title against Tennessee, she sat next to Chancellor on the bus and asked him a really direct query: “What do you expect from me, Coach?”
“I want you to act like a beginner,” he told her.
“Coach Chancellor,” she said, “if that's all you need, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to help this team.”
That's how Diana was 20 years ago. And that's how she was 4 days ago, when coach Cheryl Reeve benched her within the quarterfinal match against Nigeria after 33 consecutive Olympic starts for the U.S. team and brought in 26-year-old Jackie Young, the second-youngest player on the team. When the team broke up the group, Taurasi hurried back to the bench as if the ball was going to be thrown there. She sat down, rubbed her hands and concentrated.
What did the team need from her on this game? Exactly that. To be one of the best leader and teammate, to pass the torch a little bit and encourage everyone else in the method.
On Sunday, Taurasi will play her final Olympic basketball game. It's hard to assume a U.S. basketball world through which Taurasi doesn't play a task. Of the team's 60 consecutive victories, she has been involved in 43.
“She has left her mark on American basketball,” Reeve said. “I don't know of a stronger competitor. … In that respect, Dee is Mount Rushmore.”
“She has left her mark on US basketball,” says US coach Cheryl Reeve about Diana Taurasi. “I don't know of a stronger competitor.” (Marvin Ibo Guengoer – GES Sportfoto / Getty Images)
After the team won gold in Tokyo in 2021, Taurasi, then 39, surprised everyone when she stared into the NBC camera and ended her post-game interview with the words “See you in Paris!” before leaving the sport. Sue Bird, who was also present on the interview, looked back on the camera with fun and remarked, “She said what she said.”
Many thought the statement was a joke, nevertheless it wasn't. She said what she said. And then she did it. She got here to Paris and led this team. First from the starting lineup after which from the tip of the bench.
She didn’t play in the primary half against Nigeria, but was the primary to leap out of the reserve when her teammates made good moves and to assist the players once they got here to the bench.
After the semifinal win over Australia, Reeve said when it's throughout, she'll find a way to talk more truthfully concerning the burden of carrying the legacy of eight straight gold medals and the expectations of this program. She barely slept, slaving away within the film room as a substitute, imagining how basketball might be unfair to among the finest teams of all time. She said she received a message from Dawn Staley, who coached the team to its seventh straight gold medal in Tokyo, saying, “I can't tell you anything. I know how you feel. You just have to get through it.”
You can imagine Taurasi saying this.
Being benched, as ambitious as Taurasi is, speaks in some ways to the selfless nature of this team. To be as stable as possible in a world where Reeve has to feel like Atlas at every turn. To be someone that Reeve doesn't need to worry about when she looks on the bench. Because they’ve Dee. She's seen all of it. Nothing fazes her.
Taurasi’s answer could be,
In her sixth and final Olympics (it is a fact—she joked to reporters in London before the Olympics that she could be seen in Los Angeles… “on the beach with a beer”), her inclusion in that squad was contested by keyboard jockeys who couldn’t name three players on the team.
But she's the identical in 2024 as she was in 2004 – she's here to assist this team. It looks different today than it did ten or twenty years ago, nevertheless it's the identical Diana. At 42, she still leads the defensemen and wingers through every drill. She's the primary one to rise up off the bench and clap. The first one to present her teammates a high five. The first one to tug players into the huddle and the primary one to talk in that huddle.
Diana Taurasi has taken on the role of mentor on this US team, coming off the bench in each of the Americans' last two games. (Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
If that sounds trite and unimportant, possibly it's because this team faces its own unique set of pressures. Other teams don't need a Dee because other teams don't operate in that unique space of perfection.
Perhaps there isn’t a higher validation for Taurasi than the indisputable fact that the 2 best players on the earth – A'ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart – are giving up their space, their speaking time and their opportunity to “be first” to another person.
“What I love most about DT is that she doesn't change,” Wilson said. “She's always so consistent in what she does – that's a sign of greatness.”
Taurasi's greatness was evident in these games. In big and small moments. In the best way she behaved. In the generosity with which she understood her role and the way it modified. In the best way she stayed true to herself not only in these six games, but additionally in her last 43 games.
“Think about it — two decades, not two Olympics,” said Geno Auriemma, a former U.S. national team coach and Taurasi's college coach at UConn. “The commitment and the passion, the love of the game — all of that alone would be monumental. But when you add to that the fact that for two decades she was the face of the team, the best player, the best teammate and the greatest winner in the history of the game.”
With that commitment and time has come age. For several years now, Taurasi has made an effort to care for her body in a special, more intentional way – she goes vegan, does longer stretching and treatment exercises before and after training that last more than the training itself. She has made sacrifices to find a way to maintain playing and to proceed to be there not just for herself but additionally for her teammates.
On Sunday, Taurasi will placed on her No. 12 USA jersey for one final time on the Olympics. No other athlete has ever done what she has done before, and it's hard to assume her doing it again. She has spent nearly half her life representing the USA on the international stage. But before Taurasi got here along, it was hard to assume 60 consecutive wins or eight consecutive gold medals. Now Team USA is on the verge of doing just that.
Her legacy is cemented and has been for a very long time, but in these final Games she has shown each her teammates and the subsequent generation of players what is feasible. Stewart calls her the “gold standard” of U.S. basketball, and he or she is. And not simply because she has already won five gold medals.
Every Olympic coach she's had has asked her to do something different for her team – be a rookie, be a scorer, be an elite passer, be a pacesetter, be a veteran, come off the bench, use her voice greater than her passing skills. In short, be Dee.
“I'm here to compete. I'm here to play at a high level. I'm here to give something to my teammates and I'm here to win a gold medal – that's all,” Taurasi said when she arrived in Paris. “I don't care about the last 20 years. I'm worried about the next 20 years.”
The next 20 years of the US team are in good hands. Taurasi has made sure of that. Just ask Young. Or Wilson. Or Kahleah Copper. Or Sabrina Ionescu.
And in 4 years, when this group is competing for the gold medal in Los Angeles, hopefully they will probably be sitting on a beach somewhere drinking a chilly beer. They greater than deserve it.
GO DEEPER
Can the remaining of the world catch as much as Team USA? Our women's basketball experts discuss.
image credit : www.nytimes.com