Candace Parker retired in April, on the same day WNBA training camp began. On her Instagram, she shared a sepia-toned photo of herself as a kid, holding a basketball bigger than her small torso. The caption was thankful and considered; Parker had known in her body for some time that her tenure as a professional basketball player was over, but her mind needed a beat for it to sink in. But Parker’s team, the Las Vegas Aces, didn’t know, nor did her competitive contemporaries in the W. New York Liberty star, Breanna Stewart, was visibly shocked when the announcement broke during practice. “Wait, right now? She’s not playing any more [games]?” Stewart said, mouth slightly agape and pointing at the court.
I was as shocked as Stewart. Partially because we’re never prepared for our titans to leave us, their excellence having become a constant, something like gravity. And because there had been zero hints it was going to happen, which is surprising given basketball media is a world of leaks, scoops, and inside sources. That no one but Parker and her family knew what she’d been mulling over throughout her final season is a unique accomplishment in this industry, and it would have been incomprehensible if it were a male athlete of her stature, like LeBron James, who would never quietly post a goodbye and move on. There would have been suspicions and intense scrutiny, not to mention a huge production budget. The basketball world would stop. Which makes me think about how much easier we’ve made it for women, no matter how big the professional shadow they cast, to walk away.
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Watching Parker play in college feels like standing in a funhouse where the floors subtly tilt downward; she made the entire game spin around her. There was that same lurching feeling in her drives, her stutter-stepping spins, her deep three-pointers, where the ball seemed to find the basket like water hurrying to a drain. She knew, too, how to use the momentum of a game to her advantage and deliver in crucial moments. She had that rare ability to manipulate time, which the best ball players have: to draw time out or jam it forward. That was what Parker did when she was the first woman to dunk in an NCAA game.
Not to say her college career was a cruise. In 2008, Parker led Tennessee’s basketball team and defending National Champions, the Lady Vols, to the NCAA Regional Finals and dislocated her shoulder in the first half of the first game. She left to have it looked at and promptly checked back in, only to get hurt again. With the game tied and ten minutes left on the clock, Parker returned and played wearing a shoulder brace. She finished with twenty-six points. The Vols won the game and eventually the championship. The legendary Lady Vols coach, Pat Summitt, who coached the team for thirty-eight years (during which she polished fourteen Olympians, twenty-one All-Americans, and thirty-nine pro athletes), said Parker was the greatest talent of them all.
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When I started looking into the competitive accolades of retired WNBA players, it didn’t take long to realize how much more, on average, they tend to achieve than their NBA counterparts. Some might chalk it up to the WNBA being smaller than the NBA, (this season there are 144 rostered WNBA players compared to the NBA’s 560), but in both leagues, awards like MVP and Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY) tend to repeatedly go to only a handful of players. Compare Sylvia Fowles, who played fourteen seasons before retiring in 2022, and NBA player Nikola Jokic, for example. Fowles’s impact on the defensive end of the floor is on par with Jokic’s ability on offense. Jokic is in his ninth season; he’s a one-time NBA champ, six-time All-Star, and just won his third MVP award. Fowles, by contrast, was a two-time champ, two-time Finals MVP, eight-time All-Star, four-time DPOY, eight-time All-Defensive First Team, a three-time Turkish Cup and two-time Europe SuperCup winner, and a EuroLeague champion. And that’s also only about thirty percent of the total awards she received over her career.
Parker is obviously no slouch: she’s a three-time WNBA champ, one-time Finals and two-time regular season MVP, seven-time All-Star, seven-time All-WNBA First Team, a one-time DPOY, two-time Olympic gold medalist, the first W player to win three titles with three different franchises, and the only rookie in WNBA history to ever win MVP in her rookie season (she also won Rookie of the Year in that same season). Not to mention she played part of her rookie season pregnant.
It isn’t just retired players with long careers who have stacked up on awards either. The Aces’ A’ja Wilson (seven seasons, twenty-five W-sanctioned awards), New York Liberty’s Sabrina Ionescu (four seasons, seven W awards) and Breanna Stewart (seven seasons, twenty-nine total awards), who are all in their prime, are also outshining NBA players with their accolades. (Unlike athletes in the NBA, W players can add to their career highlights overseas, which is where most play during offseason to garner a second income. Like Fowles, Parker played overseas—in Turkey, China, and Russia—and won the Russian League five times. Even if they would prefer to take time off, for many W players it’s just not financially feasible yet.)
Ultimately, I believe most W players would prefer a meaningful bump in their salaries, consistent team flight charters, and five-star accommodation (the 2020 WNBA Collective Bargaining Agreement was the first to stipulate each athlete get their own hotel room on the road) over being named to another All-WNBA roster. Nonetheless, if accolades are how we tend to judge and eventually commemorate the very best, then by now we should have memorized the names and faces of so many WNBA athletes. Instead, most basketball fans might be able to list two or three W players, but will debate ad nauseam, for years on end, who the greatest sixth-man on any given NBA roster was.
Part of the reason for this discrepancy is that, for a long time, there weren’t as many opportunities to commit women basketball players—their moves, their skills, their names—to memory. Major broadcasters believed that people didn’t want to watch women’s sports, and so people couldn’t watch them—which only reinforced this belief—because the games were hardly broadcast anywhere. Actually, like Lebron James, whose well-known “Decision” (to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and sign with the Miami Heat) was broadcast as an ESPN special, Parker also made it on ESPN—before her pro career even started. She announced her commitment to Tennessee in her senior year of high school on ESPNEWS, becoming the first female college player to have her choice broadcast. Parker is the exception, and she still didn’t come close to receiving the kind of visibility her male counterparts enjoyed.
Is Parker’s influence enough to make up for this difference? Is it enough that her style is emulated across the league at large? That athletes like Wilson and Stewart borrow from her broad repertoire of plays as a power forward, a “big,” who played like a guard? That a proficiency in ball-handling, lateral footwork, and hybrid positional moves, are now almost a necessity to stay competitive in the W and the NBA, can be traced back to Parker? I know when I see the ball ricocheting out to center court after a swatting block under the basket; or a quick dip to feign a drive and throw the defender off-balance, so they’re latched to the hip of the shooter who then careens unobstructed to the hoop, that I’m seeing Parker. But her game is like a regional dialect: one has to already be fluent to track it. It’s a legacy, certainly, but a quiet one.
What would help close this gap is if names like Parker’s were brought up alongside Lebron James and Michael Jordan in debates about the GOATs of the game, which are endless, cyclical, and practically rote. I want the mental space that we reserve for male athletes—there is so much of it!—to be crammed equally full with these women, who can exist there without constant comparison to the “men they play like.” (I know I’m guilty of this here. To establish the importance of Parker I felt the need to place her in the wider basketball lexicon, one stacked with men.)
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Parker retired on her own terms. She stayed true to a promise she made to herself through ten surgeries and each recovery: when she was no longer capable of giving 100%, and when the game stopped shimmering with fun, she’d walk away. She’s since been named the President of adidas Women’s Basketball and has taken an active role there because she knows the numbers (less than 5% of basketball shoes are designed with women in mind), just like she’s taken an active role as an owner of the NWSL’s Angel City FC and the new pro volleyball league, League One Volleyball, which she’s financially invested in. She wants to eventually own a WNBA team and an NBA team, and I believe she will.
But I still wish the reaction to Parker retiring quietly was one of uproar—people despairing because, even though we got to watch her for so long, we didn’t get to watch her for long enough. It would never have been long enough. I wish you could fight with strangers on the subway about her, using only her last name. My consolation is that it’s starting to look like that wish may soon come true.
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