The playoffs loom for the Mercury. So does the end for Diana Taurasi

Earlier this season, with a big road game in the balance for the Phoenix Mercury, Diana Taurasi gave someone else the ball.

There were 5.1 seconds on the clock, and the Mercury trailed the Minnesota Lynx, 79-80. In the huddle, first-year Mercury coach Nate Tibbetts drew up a play that ended as so many had over the past 20 years — with the ball in Taurasi’s hands.

No, the Mercury legend interjected, the ball shouldn’t come to her. It needed to go to Kahleah Copper, the team’s marquee offseason addition. Tibbetts adjusted the play, Copper drained the game-winner, and the Mercury stole a road win to move to 5-6.

The significance was hardly lost on Copper. Sure, the Mercury newcomer was enjoying an MVP-caliber start for her new team, but the shot she took belonged to Diana Taurasi. It belonged to the former MVP and 14-time All-Star, the WNBA’s all-time highest-scorer — by nearly 3,000 points — and the surefire future Hall of Famer.

Even at 42 years old, Taurasi was meant to have that game-winner. And she’d given it away.

“She could have easily been like, ‘OK, cool, let's run it for me,'" Copper said after the game. “But it speaks to her character being unselfish.”

It may have been more than unselfishness. It felt like the passing of a torch.

For the past two decades, it would have seemed impossible to imagine the Mercury or the WNBA without Taurasi in it, her hair pulled back into a tight bun as she drains shots. The team quickly became hers after the Mercury took her with the first pick in the 2004 draft. She claimed the league for her own not long after.

But as Taurasi wraps up what many expect to be her final season as a player, the legend has embraced a spot in the back seat. Game-winning shots go to Copper, not her. Though Taurasi made her record sixth Olympic appearance for Team USA in Paris this summer, she didn’t play a single minute in the team’s gold medal-clinching win over France. Only Taurasi knows how near the end she truly is — she has not said if she intends to play beyond this year — but she’s appeared more and more willing to cede the spotlight.

And if this is it for arguably the WNBA’s greatest player, the Mercury are giving Taurasi a fitting send-off. The team recently clinched a playoff berth, extending Taurasi’s swan song past Phoenix’s Sept. 19 season finale and giving her a chance at a fourth WNBA title.

And then, whatever happens in the postseason, the Mercury may have to confront a Taurasi-less existence for the first time in 21 years.

‘One of the greatest’

Taurasi making it to 2024 was never a given.

In 2019, a herniated protrusion in her back threatened her career. The injury caused nerve pain, and by the time she had surgery, her right leg had atrophied to a third of its normal size. Taurasi played just six games that year. She was 38 years old.

Right then, she could have walked away as one of the league’s greatest players.

Recruited out of Chino, California, by the great Geno Auriemma to come to the University of Connecticut, Taurasi won three NCAA championships in four years. She added more hardware early in her WNBA career, winning a championship in year four and MVP in year six. Taurasi became a brash, electric face for a league that eventually made her silhouette its logo. She nurtured a loyal Phoenix fan base, the X-Factor, while winning two more championships in 2009 and 2014.

But despite all that adoration and a full trophy case, Taurasi wasn’t finished. She played less than a full season in each of the next two years, but finished seventh in MVP voting in 2020 and made the All-Star team a year later, leading the Mercury to another WNBA Finals. It seemed like she’d never stop.

This season, though, often has felt like a celebration of Taurasi just before she walks off the court for good. She was named to Team USA — and not without controversy — which allowed her to play in one more Olympics and also in front of the home crowd at the 2024 All-Star Game in Phoenix.

“We knew maybe it would be Dee's last Olympics,” Mercury president Vince Kozar said in June. “Still don't know if it'll be her last season or not. But this was kind of one last opportunity to do that for her and for her to play in front of our fans.”

In July, team owner Mat Ishbia led the grand opening of a new team facility, including a practice court named after Taurasi. As Taurasi took in the team’s new “top-notch” digs, she couldn’t help but consider a future in which her name is on the court but she’s not.

“I was speechless walking in there,” Taurasi said. “Just to know that that building is going to be there for (Kahleah Cooper)’s next 10 years and (Brittney Griner’s) next 10 years.”

Taurasi knows she doesn’t have a next 10 years in uniform. So do her many admirers around the league, who have used this maybe-final season to lavish the Mercury star with praise.

Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve called Taurasi “one of the greatest competitors that the league or women’s basketball or sports have ever seen.” Reeve knows Taurasi’s game well, having coached her in Paris and game-planned against her in several WNBA playoff series. Taurasi may have talked plenty of smack, started her share of arguments with referees and collected her share of technical fouls, but she’s an all-time competitor.

“A player that we love to hate as an opponent,” Reeve said, “but that means you are really, really doing something great.”

Despite her fire on the court, opponents said Taurasi has the reputation of being a sweetheart off of it. On the national team, she had a reputation for constantly checking in on teammates. Before every game in Phoenix, she connects with the other team’s star players, always leaving them with a hug and a laugh. She has earned the respect of those who have crossed her on the court.

“She is just someone who is true and real to themselves and never switches it up,” said A’ja Wilson, the Las Vegas Aces star and Team USA’s MVP of the Paris Olympics. “We don’t have enough people in the world like that.”

‘Probably it'

Taurasi may not yet know if she will retire after the season. If she does, she won’t show her hand.

As much as she’s seemed to consider a life off the court, Taurasi has chafed at constant chatter about her retirement. During a press conference at the Olympics, she decried the “ageism” she felt was present in each question about her future in the game. After all, also representing the U.S. in Paris was LeBron James, the 39-year-old Lakers star who has had just as long and illustrious a career in the men’s game as Taurasi has had in the women’s. No one constantly asked James about retiring.

“When you dedicate your whole life, your whole career, to something, and you get the question of, ‘Why don’t you just retire?’ … It is a bit disrespectful,” Taurasi said. “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 our sport and for women. Hopefully, we can change that narrative.”

That puts the Mercury in a sensitive spot — celebrating Taurasi in case this is her swan song while also quietly planning for a future without her. Taurasi is not under contract for next season, nor is Griner. In September, the team quietly launched a social media campaign called “If This Is It” that promoted ticket sales for its final home games, since a first-round playoff series would be played entirely on the road.

Copper is the team’s clear-cut best player, and with no first-round pick in 2025, the Mercury will need to build around her. Ishbia, Tibbetts and general manager Nick U’Ren are all relatively new to the organization and may welcome a chance to start a new chapter.

But as long as Taurasi is in purple and orange, she’ll be the face of the franchise. She may have declined from her peak as a downhill point guard and defender, but she remains an effective shooter and scorer who can handle heavy minutes. She’s also poised for just as prolific a post-playing career. Taurasi would be a hot commodity as a coach or in media, and she already hosts an annual Final Four broadcast with fellow WNBA legend Sue Bird. Or the low-key Taurasi could step out of the spotlight entirely.

After the gold medal game in Paris, cameras caught an emotional embrace between Taurasi, her children and her wife, former Mercury player Penny Taylor. Because COVID-10 delayed and kept crowds away from the Tokyo Games in 2021, this summer was the first time Tau  rasi’s two kids were able to watch her play for her country.

One person who was in Tokyo was Bird, Taurasi’s close friend and former teammate at the University of Connecticut. She knows the Mercury guard as well as anyone, and she senses a certain finality to the 2024 season.

“Gun to my head, this is probably it,” Bird said before the All-Star Game. “She might have other things she wants to get to.”

Not done yet

Before then, though, a playoff series looms.

While the standings may shift over the final few regular season games, Phoenix is seeded seventh and currently slated to face the Lynx in the first round. The Mercury are 1-3 against Minnesota this year, with their lone win coming on Copper’s buzzer-beater. For those wondering about Taurasi’s future, another tight game against the Lynx may offer some clues.

In the final seconds — with the game, the season and maybe Taurasi’s career on the line — does she demand the ball?

Or does the best player in franchise history entrust the team’s fate to someone else?