Diana Taurasi is the single most prolific scorer in the history of the WNBA. Across her 16 seasons in the league, the Phoenix Mercury guard has scored a whopping 8,931 career points.
That’s the most in WNBA history by a pretty wide margin: Diana has scored 1,443 more points over her career than Hall of Famer Tina Thompson, who holds second place on the all-time scoring leaderboard. To add further context, there’s a wider gulf in career points scored between Diana and Tina than there is between Tina and Sue Bird, who ranks eighth in career points scored.
But Diana is more than just a bucket. She’s a winner. With three WNBA titles, three NCAA championships, four Olympic gold medals, three Basketball World Cup gold medals, six EuroLeague championships, and seven Russian National League titles, Diana has harnessed her fatal, preternatural offensive ability to lead teams to victory all over the globe for over two decades. And she’s not done yet.
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To help capture the scale of Diana Taurasi’s accomplishments as a player, we at QBC have put together the following three maps: the first captures Diana’s regular season scoring across her WNBA career against various opponents, the second her playoff numbers, and the third how Diana fared in her four Olympics. The circles at each city are scaled based on how many points she dropped on that team in her career.
Finally, we have to shout out Kurtis Zimmerman and his work at Across the Timeline – there’s a real chance all these numbers would’ve broken our team of English majors; any time we had a question about whether a stat existed, he came through with the information (often organized in a much more intuitive way than our abstract queries). Now, let’s break down some buckets.
Click here to expand the regular season map in another tab. You can also download it.
Click here to view the playoffs map in another tab (and download it if you’d like).
Click here to view Diana’s Olympic scoring map in another tab (and download it if you like).
As we gathered our data, we came up with some extra Diana Taurasi trivia that didn’t make the graphics, but we still wanted to share.
2. Diana has never come off the bench in any of her 456 games played.
3. Diana Taurasi scored 3,047 points at Don Lugo High School in Chino, CA. While at UConn, she netted 2,156 points. She’s scored 8,931 thus far in her WNBA career. Altogether, she’s scored 14,134 points domestically since high school.
4. There have been 14 games in WNBA history where a player has attempted at least 15 threes. Ruthie Bolton (1997), Shanna Zolman (2007), Kristi Toliver (2017), and Riquna Williams (2019) have each done it once. Diana Taurasi has accounted for the other 10.
5. The Phoenix Mercury won titles in 2007 and 2009. Sandwiched between those titles was 2018, where they failed to qualify for the playoffs. That season, Phoenix led all 14 teams with a 106.8 offensive rating. However, they finished dead last in defensive rating, with a matching 106.8 mark.
6. Despite being a better scorer from home throughout her career, Diana scored over five PPG more as a member of the “visiting team” during the neutral-site Bradenton games in 2020.
7. Diana Taurasi ranks fourth all time in All-Star Game scoring with 85 points. Maya Moore (119), Tamika Catchings (108), and Lisa Leslie (102) are the only players above her on the list.
8. The only longer tenured member of the Phoenix Mercury is Scorch, the team’s mascot, “born” on June 9, 2002. Despite Scorch’s extended membership with the team, Diana Taurasi is just two days short of being a full two decades older than him.
9. There are only three coaches that have faced off against Diana Taurasi without her beating them: Derek Fisher (2-0), Michael Adams (2-0), and Rick Mahorn (1-0). All three are former NBA players.
10. Diana Taurasi never played against the two Florida franchises – the Miami Sol (folded after 2002) and the Orlando Miracle (moved to Connecticut after 2002 season). She would, however, finally take the court in the Sunshine State in 2020, when the league created the Bradenton bubble due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Still haven’t gotten enough Diana Taurasi? Check out Queen Ballers Club’s full profile on the “White Mamba”. Next up, learn about Diana’s teammate, Kia Nurse, or check out our Ultimate Guide to WNBA Scorers.
Three people collaborated to bring this piece together. Myles Ehrlich (@mylesehrlich) and Dani Bar-Lavi (@dblfluidity) gathered the data and wrote out the text, and Danny Goodman (@ddouglasgoody) created the map graphics.
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