Sue Bird deserves significant credit for the worldwide growth in women’s basketball over the last two decades. She led the U.S. Olympic gold-medal streak and the WNBA on the precipice of an explosion, spent a decade competing overseas and was a stateswoman as well as a competitor who’d happily rip your heart out.
She did this work for the game she loved, shepherding a generation of players and cementing a foundation for a sport, league and legacy. The problem is when you’re good enough to build something that can outlast you, if you stick around long enough, you might end up battling some of the beasts you raised.
So, congrats?
Bird, a five-time gold medalist, is now the U.S. women’s national team managing director, tasked with selecting coaches and rosters for the most successful basketball team. As the , Bird and Team USA must contend with upholding the standard she helped set as the world has made strides in catching up.
Teams like France and Italy grew up in a basketball world where Bird was the perennial player standard, and now, they are closer than ever to knocking the United States off its perch. Meanwhile, recovering from a nagging injury in preparation to run it back with the Las Vegas Aces, prioritizing the league Bird helped build at the expense of the team Bird currently helps run.
Even if the U.S. skates to a gold medal on Sunday, it’s impossible to ignore the signs of a shifting world order. It’s not just that France came within a point of the U.S. in the 2024 Olympic gold-medal game in Paris. Last week, Les Bleus set a FIBA record by hitting 22 3-pointers (compare that to the U.S., which is currently shooting worse than 30 percent from beyond the arc). They appear to be the team most primed to upset Team USA, which owns four consecutive World Cup golds.
Then there was that game against Italy in pool play. Italian guard Cecilia Zandalasini looked unfazed as she led all scorers with 14 points. In a game in which no U.S. player seemed ready to take over (until almost too late), Zandalasini, who plays for the Golden State Valkyries, was more than happy to be the buoying force on the floor. And why not? Why would she feel out of place? She has played in 126 WNBA games, some alongside players wearing Team USA uniforms. Her current WNBA coach, Natalie Nakase, is an assistant for Team USA. A week from now, Zandalasini will be back in the Bay on the same sideline as Nakase. In her Italian uniform, she had Team USA on its heels.
Belgium, a team that has retained nearly half its roster from the 2018 World Cup, is coached by Mike Thibault, the three-time WNBA Coach of the Year who retired after the 2022 season. He won Olympic gold as an assistant on the 2008 and 2024 Team USA squads, and now he’s tasked with catching up to (and potentially toppling) the legacy he helped build.
This comes at the same time as — and because of, and alongside — the rise of the WNBA and its own power.
Days before they were set to fly to Germany, Kelsey Plum (Phoenix Mercury) and Wilson withdrew from the U.S. roster. Plum later announced she will miss the remainder of the WNBA season with leg injuries.
The whispers around Wilson were that she hadn’t been 100 percent for quite some time. Twice in August, she was listed on the Aces’ injury report for a nagging back injury. With the absence of NaLyssa Smith, who was ruled out for the rest of the Aces’ season in late August, the four-time MVP knows the responsibility of a title will fall even heavier on her shoulders.
With a longer WNBA season, players have talked increasingly about keeping their bodies right. There’s a financial benefit to doing so — under the newly minted collective bargaining agreement, WNBA champions earn $60,000 apiece, and the WNBA Finals MVP pockets an additional $30,000. Add that to the fact that with the World Cup taking place earlier than usual (it has typically occurred following the conclusion of the WNBA season), players must navigate a delicate balance of prioritizing play and rest, injury management and exertion — all against the backdrop of an increasing physical level of play in FIBA basketball.
Without Wilson, make no mistake, the U.S. still has the most talented individual players. Still, its roster would be better if the best player in the world — even if she were playing 20 minutes a game — were on it; but would that be the better option for the best player in the world?
For all the debate swirling around Wilson’s decision to withdraw from the roster after averaging nearly 33 minutes a game for the Aces during August, can’t you imagine that in some WNBA circles there was a sigh of relief when she announced she’s staying stateside? After all, a player prioritizing the WNBA and her team’s success has long been a league goal. It’s why player salaries are going up: The season is expanding (to 50 games by 2027), and it’s taking more time and effort from its players. The W wants to be the fulcrum around which players schedule all else.
It wasn’t long ago that Bird was pushing Team USA to include more basketball for its players. Following the 2018 World Cup, she and Diana Taurasi approached national team director Carol Callan and requested the annual program’s run-up to the 2020 Olympics expands to include more playing time together.
Bird had just led the Storm to its third WNBA title and Taurasi was coming off a season in which she became the first WNBA player ever to hit 1,000 triples and score 8,000 points in a career. Bird, at the time, was no longer playing overseas in the offseason while Taurasi was entering her first WNBA offseason without plans to compete in Russia or Turkey. The WNBA season had finished earlier that month, and almost immediately, the 12-member team had boarded their flights for Tenerife. Still, Bird felt there was an important piece to the next level of Team USA’s prep: more basketball.
In 2019, USA Basketball added games against college teams all over the country (memorably, dropping a game in Eugene, Ore., to the Ducks, who were led by then-senior Sabrina Ionescu’s 30 points). The pandemic interrupted the expanded program.
In 2020, Bird — then a vice president for the Women’s National Basketball Players Association — helped strengthen the league with a new CBA and made the league a more viable option for players long-term. In 2021, she led Team USA to its seventh Olympic gold medal (her fifth).
After the 2022 season, she finally hung up her playing shoes.
Now, her second act in the sport has coincided with an explosion in attention for the women’s game and a landmark WNBA CBA. Money is flowing into the league like never before, creating roster spots for an increasingly international game and making the league a priority like never before. The talent level everywhere is improving, and the gap between the best and the next-best is closing.
None of these things exists in a vacuum, as each feeds the other. Ultimately, her front-row seat to the most talent-filled World Cup competition is both the byproduct and fuel of all of her work.
This article originally appeared in
