Bird on verge of joining Taurasi as a career leader

Therewere flashes even in their first game together that the pairing of New York native Sue Bird and sweet-shooting California prodigy Diana Taurasi was going to be something special.

However, even as they were combining for 19 points during that mid-November game in 2000 against nationally-ranked Georgia, it was impossible to imagine the heights the two would reach.

Bird was a member of two national championship teams at UConn, Taurasi led the Huskies to the promised land in each of her final three seasons. They would team up on championship teams in Russia. With the U.S. senior national team they would win four Olympic gold medals. Proving that they can also succeed when playing for different teams, Taur---

asi has led the Phoenix Mercury to three WNBA titles while Bird has been a member of two championship teams with the Seattle Storm.

Later this week could come perhaps the most remarkable feather in the cap of what figures to go down as the best backcourt in women’s college basketball history.

Taurasi became theWNBA’s all-time leading scorer earlier this season, and if Bird dishes out three assists on Friday against Washington, she will break Ticha Penicheiro’s WNBA record for career assists.

Think about that for a minute— two players from the same college backcourt holding two of the most cherished individual milestones in WNBA history. As a point of reference, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the NBA’s career scoring leader and if you add up the total number of assists that his UCLA teammates had at the NBA level, it would not be good enough to break into the top 15 in NBA history.

“To have the two of them be in the same backcourt and then be together for four Olympic gold medals, knock on wood if Sue breaks the record, I’ve always said that backcourt in 2002 was the best backcourt in the history of women’s college basketball, pro basketball, any kind of basketball,” Auriemma said. “I said time will prove that and it certainly has. You are just not going to find that happening ever again, you will never find something like that ever again, that is too improbable to happen again. Those two are pretty special, there is nothing to compare them to.”

Bird was the first UConn player to be taken first overall in the WNBA Draft. That happened in 2002 when four of the top six picks were members of UConn’s 2002 national championship team. Two years later Taurasi was the top pick. The rest, as they say, is history.

Bird has a chance to finish with more than 200 assists in a season, something she previously only accomplished during the 2003 season. This will be the 10th time she hasmore than twice as many assists as turnovers.

“When it comes to milestones like that, you are talking about a full career,” Bird said. “It speaks to longevity, it speaks to consistency, to persistence, it speaks to my lovely teammates putting the ball in the basket. In 10 years, 20 years when I look back at my career, if I do indeed get the record, it will be something I am extremely proud of.”

Taurasi is a five-time scoring champion and the only player in WNBA history to lead the lead in points per game for four seasons in a row.

“It is the funniest one to get, even when I was in school (at UConn) I wasn’t a big scorer,” Taurasi said. “Iwasmore of a distributor my first two years (in the WNBA). I think once (Paul) Westhead got to Phoenix, he put me off the ball and said we need to generate offense, that is when I kind of took off. It is pretty cool when you get on the list with Tina (Thompson), Catch (Tamika Catchings) and these great players in women’s basketball so it is definitely an honor.”

True to their nature, they would rather talk about the accolades of their former teammate than focus on their own individual greatness.

“I amincredibly proud of her as a friend and even as an opponent, she has really put in the work,” Bird said. “If anybody deserves something like that, it is Dee. Not only is she an amazing person but she really puts the work in. For a long time, it was really just an inevitable thing so I knowfor her, now she can put it out of reach.”

Taurasi got emotional at this year’s WNBA All-Star Game in Seattle because she wondered how many more times would be Bird’s teammate.