Beyond the Box Score: Why Diana Taurasi Is Vital to USA Women's Basketball

Diana Taurasi stands off to the side of the U.S. women’s basketball team’s practice, observing. Her teammates shoot around, joke with one another, spend time with media members, and generally loosen up for practice.

Cheryl Reeve, the current head coach of the team, approaches Taurasi and engages her in a conversation. It doesn’t have the mannerisms of a typical player-coach interaction – no pointed fingers or broad gestures indicating that Reeve demanded anything of Taurasi. Instead, the two were level. Taurasi made a point and Reeve countered. Taurasi spoke, Reeve listened, and then the roles reversed. It looked more like two coaches interacting than anything else.

“In 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016 – all through those four gold battles, World Championships, Olympics, I almost relied on her as one of my assistant coaches,” said Geno Auriemma, who coached Team USA to two Olympic golds and two World Cup golds.

Auriemma coached Taurasi through two Olympic cycles. But before they won international golds they conquered the NCAA.

Taurasi spent four years on UConn’s campus in Storrs, Conn., learning from one of college basketball’s greatest coaches. She led the Huskies to three NCAA national championships and proceeded to the WNBA as the first overall pick to the Phoenix Mercury.

That was 20 years ago.

Currently, Taurasi is competing in Paris at an unprecedented age of 42.

She fields the same question accompanied by accusatory undertones and disguised within various other questions – questions about what’s next for her career, what’s left for her to accomplish, when will she feel fulfilled?

“When you dedicate your whole life, your whole career to something and you get the question of ‘Why don't you just retire?’ You know, it's something I've been doing since I was five,” Taurasi said. “It's something that I've dedicated my whole life to. And it's just so easy for a question to be brought up in a manner where it's not meant to be disrespectful, but if you're the person being asked, it is a bit disrespectful.

“I'm here to compete. I'm here to play at a high level. I'm here to give to my teammates. I'm here to win a gold medal. That's it. I don't care about the last 20 years. I'm worried about the next 20 years…Only a woman would have 20 years of experience and it's an Achilles heel instead of something that is treasured and used as a way forward for sport and for women.”

The squad is hunting for USA Basketball's eighth straight women's basketball gold medal at the Olympic Games Paris 2024. If the Americans finish atop the podium, it will be Taurasi’s sixth consecutive gold medal. The U.S. has won nine of the last 10 Olympic golds, missing out only in Barcelona 1992 where it won bronze.

“It really doesn't matter what the history is,” Taurasi said in a press conference before the tournament. “It doesn't affect this team or this Olympics. We have to find a way to find our own identity as a team on and off the court.

“Those last eight, they don't promise you anything going forward.”

Taurasi is attempting a feat only two other Olympians have accomplished – to win a gold medal six or more times in the same event. The other two athletes that have done the same are Germany’s Isabell Werth in equestrian team dressage and Aladar Gerevich of Hungary in team sabre fencing.

Taurasi has spent time in the starting lineup of a stacked Olympic roster – one that includes multiple All-WNBA players, former WNBA Finals MVPs, and league MVPs. She has 10 All-WNBA selections herself, two Finals MVPs, and won the WNBA’s MVP award in 2009.

“That's a coach's decision,” Auriemma said. “So, the coaches are saying, ‘Hey, kid, 20 years later, you're still one of the ones that we look to to help us win a gold medal.’ And that's something to be celebrated, because of what it takes to keep your body in that form and your mind still hungry, and your pride still intact, that you want to prove that you can contribute, not just be along for the ride.”

Taurasi’s imprint on the game isn’t always evident in the box scores. She doesn’t score many points, rack up outlandish assists, or gobble up rebounds. At the Paris Games, she averaging just 1.3 points, 0.8 rebounds, and 1.5 assists in 12 minutes per game.

But that’s not why Taurasi’s there.

Auriemma describes a time during his USA basketball coaching tenure that USA assistant Doug Bruno got to coach Taurasi for a practice session. Bruno, the women’s head coach at DePaul University in Chicago, coached against Taurasi but never had the pleasure of coaching her. Until he had a little over an hour with her in the Czech Republic, two days before a world championships tournament.

“I said, ‘Bruno, you’ve never been on the court with Diana when you were coaching her,’” Auriemma recalls. “He (Bruno) said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘You’re in for a treat.’”

Phoenix made the playoffs in 2010, creating a tight window between the WNBA Playoffs and world championships that kept Taurasi away from USA Basketball until just a couple of days before the start of the tournament. Taurasi arrived, and Bruno coached the practice session.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” Bruno told Auriemma afterwards. “I knew she was good, but I didn’t know she was this good…She just practiced an hour and 15 minutes, didn’t take a single shot, and dominated the entire practice.”

“I said, ‘Yeah, Doug, that’s what I’ve been living with. And that’s why I’ve been so fortunate,’” Auriemma said.

Taurasi’s value in the latter half of her career is in those same margins. It’s in her ability to identify a team’s needs and provide for them, to bring a group together and turn its focus to a common goal: a gold medal. Of which she has five.

“How many Olympians have competed in multiple Olympic Games and won multiple medals?” Auriemma asked. “She’s never gone to the Olympics and not won a medal.”

Taurasi knows how to win gold, but more than that, she knows how to give a team exactly what it needs to be successful. It’s a mentality, a contagious attitude that creates an appetite for success within a team that can be satiated only by accomplishment at the highest level.

Thinking the game of basketball is inherently more difficult than executing it athletically. Those with the highest basketball IQ – and the most minute attention to detail – are the ones who can impact a game without needing to touch the basketball. Taurasi is one of these. Her presence on the court and around the team is enough to move the needle.

“She's like another coach,” Napheesa Collier said. “She's had so many years of experience and the way she sees the game is really special. She's really smart in the way that she can break things down and see what's open and how to dissect the game.

“It's really, really such an honor to be able to play with her.”

Taurasi is the ultimate blend between coach and player, and she’s proven it with five complete gold medal quests spanning over two decades.

Now she looks to complete a sixth.

“I hope I can do what [Diana’s] doing when it gets to that point,” A’ja Wilson said. “...Someone that's really put in the time, the work, the effort, the love behind the game, and it shows. And she doesn't have to be the most vocal person, she can just be who she is…These moments I don't ever take for granted when I'm around greatness.

“For me, she is a blueprint of someone that is just showing the longevity of what you can do, and always go after it, and don't let anyone shake you from it.”

But for Taurasi, it isn’t about chasing a sixth gold medal. It’s not about the accolades, the recognition, or the race to etch her name in international basketball history. It’s just about the game itself. And what it takes for her to stay involved in it.

“I think sometimes you can get confused by the winning, the losing, the medals, the trophies, the MVPs, all that stuff,” Taurasi said. “And all that stuff really doesn't matter. It's the work you put in every single day. And if that keeps you coming back then you'll have an opportunity to win your third, your second, your sixth, whatever it may be. It's not the actual consolidation of all these things. That's kind of the byproduct of the work.”

So, she’ll get to work. She’ll get to work on the court, in the locker room, at the team hotel. She’ll relentlessly pursue the effort that it takes to win, and as a result, land somewhere within the universe of success in which she already lives.

Madie Chandler is writing for Team USA as a graduate student in the Sports Capital Journalism Program at Indiana University Indianapolis.