Diana Taurasi Leads a Women's Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2027 Built on Titles and Trailblazers

Diana Taurasi spent two decades collecting every trophy basketball hands out. Now Knoxville gets to hand her one more.

The Women's Basketball Hall of Fame announced its Class of 2027 on Thursday, and Taurasi leads a six-person group that also includes coaches Sandy Brondello and Mike Thibault, longtime official Dee Kantner, UCLA athletics pioneer Dr. Judith Holland and WBL scoring machine Molly Bolin Kazmer, per ESPN (opens in a new tab) and The Canadian Press. The class will be enshrined June 26, 2027, at the Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville, according to the Hall of Fame (opens in a new tab).

The GOAT's paperwork

There is no real debate about the headliner. Taurasi played all 20 of her WNBA seasons with the Phoenix Mercury and retired as the league's all-time leading scorer with 10,646 points, still the only player past 10,000, per Arizona Sports. She also left as the WNBA's career leader in made 3-pointers and third in assists.

The trophy case reads like a typo. Three WNBA titles with Phoenix, two Finals MVPs, the 2009 MVP award and 10 All-WNBA first-team selections, per ESPN, plus 11 All-Star nods, per Arizona Sports. At UConn she won three national championships and two Naismith Player of the Year awards. Internationally she won three FIBA World Cup golds and six EuroLeague titles.

Then there is the number that settles every argument. The Hall of Fame's own induction page lists six Olympic gold medals for Taurasi, one each in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024, a record. Phoenix already retired her No. 3 and put her in its Ring of Honor in August. This is the next stop.

Two coaches, one shared history

Brondello's résumé runs straight through Taurasi's. She coached the Mercury from 2014 to 2021 and won the 2014 title and Coach of the Year with Taurasi, per Arizona Sports, which notes the pair will be the eighth and ninth Mercury figures in the Hall. Brondello later led the New York Liberty to the franchise's first championship in 2024 and has coached Australia's Opals since 2017, taking them to Olympic bronze in Paris, according to the Hall of Fame.

She was a force as a player too: a 1999 WNBA All-Star and a three-time Olympic medalist for Australia in 1996, 2000 and 2004. Her current job is the hardest of her career. As the first head coach of the Toronto Tempo, she just went 11-33 in the expansion club's debut season, The Canadian Press noted.

Thibault is the builder of the group. He spent 10 seasons with the Connecticut Sun and 10 with the Washington Mystics, winning 379 games and three Coach of the Year awards, and he guided Washington to its first WNBA title in 2019. Before any of that, he won two NBA championships as a Los Angeles Lakers assistant, per the Hall.

The pioneers

The other three inductees explain how the sport got here. Kantner has officiated for more than 40 years, working 26 NCAA Final Fours and 16 national championship games, and was one of the first two women hired to referee in the NBA, per the Hall of Fame. She also worked the 2000 Olympics and later supervised WNBA officials.

Holland built UCLA women's athletics nearly from scratch as the school's first full-time director of women's athletics. She oversaw the first full athletic scholarship UCLA gave a woman, to Ann Meyers, hired coach Billie Moore, served as AIAW president in 1977 and ran basketball competition at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

Then there is "Machine Gun" Molly. Bolin Kazmer was the first player signed by the Women's Professional Basketball League, shared the 1980 MVP award and set league records with a 55-point game and a 32.8 points per game season, according to the Hall. She played in three women's pro leagues from 1978 to 1984 and spent years advocating for women's pro basketball before the WNBA existed.

"We cannot wait to welcome the Class of 2027," Hall of Fame CEO Michelle Marciniak said, per Just Women's Sports.

The last word

Most Hall of Fame classes have one obvious name and a handful of deserving ones. This one has a clear thread. Taurasi is the player who made the modern WNBA's highlight reels, Brondello and Thibault are coaches who turned franchises into champions, and Kantner, Holland and Bolin Kazmer kept the women's game alive long before anyone was selling out arenas for it. June in Knoxville is going to be a reunion, and the guest of honor will probably have the best one-liners in the building.

Sources: Women's Basketball Hall of Fame, ESPN, The Canadian Press via TSN, Arizona Sports and Just Women's Sports. More WNBA coverage on Undrafted.

Photo Credit: Phoenix Mercury.