LONDON — She floats through the various hemispheres of women’s basketball like a butterfly, stinging like a bee wherever she lands. Diana Taurasi is not the most dominant player on this extraordinary USA women’s basketball team that on Saturday night won the gold medal at North Greenwich Arena. That honor belongs to Candace Parker, who had 21 points and 11 rebounds in the 86-50 walkover against France.
But Taurasi is the driving force — and has been for quite a while — of a movement that has overwhelmed the basketball world and turned Team USA into the indoor version of the Jamaican sprinters.
Without, of course, the vast audience.
“I don’t know how many ways you can say heart and soul,” said Team USA coach Gene Auriemma, who was with Taurasi for three national championship runs at the University of Connecticut. “But however many there are, that is Diana Taurasi.”
Taurasi is six-feet, 165 pounds of raw energy, her face an ever-changing Rorschach, her game a combination of Showtime and Slowtime, for she can play either way, though she vastly prefers the former. Her game against France was typical Taurasi: 9 points, 6 assists, 3 rebounds, three gorgeous pick-and-roll passes to Parker, skin-tight defense on France’s star, point guard Celine Dumerc, who was held to eight points and, most tellingly, one assist.
And all the while, Taurasi never stopped chattering. She is a right-hander who can go left, but she is definitely a right-brainer, a player of instinct and imagination.
Moreover, Taurasi represents the paradigm for what the women’s game has become at its highest level, which is to say the Team USA level. Her childhood heroes were Jordan and Magic. (For the record she is much more like Magic, controlling the game without necessarily scoring.) She starred at UConn, venturing east from her native California because that’s where the big-time game was. She has now been a mainstay on three straight gold-medal winning teams. She won two championships with the Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA. She is the driving force for a pro team in Russia where she has been adopted like a native.
The worst thing about it? Only in Russia is her true basketball genius recognized.
Taurasi and her teammates have written themselves into American sports history as one of our greatest teams ever. If you haven’t noticed, that’s on you. The victory over France was Team USA’s 41st straight without a loss dating back to a bronze-medal win in the 1992 Games, and this gold is its fifth in a row.
This is the usually the point when you write, And we will not see their likes again. Except we might.
There is a chance that all of them will be returning … and one of them is coming back for sure.
“Hell, yes, I’m going to be in Rio,” said Taurasi, her arms draped around veteran teammates Sue Bird and Tamika Catchings.
That’s good news not just for Team USA, but also for a women’s game that needs her energetic example.
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