Diana Taurasi is gone. Where do the Phoenix Mercury go from here?

Is retirement sad?

That’s the question Diana Taurasi recently fielded from her young son, Leo. Born in 2018, he’d only ever known his mother as a basketball player. Now, after she announced she was retiring after 20 seasons with the Phoenix Mercury, the reality was just setting in for him.

At a press conference to discuss her retirement last Thursday, the 42-year-old Taurasi recounted the question — and her answer.

“It is sad, I am sad,” Taurasi said. “It’s the game that I played since I was 7, it’s all the things that in life I always loved to do, and that was play the game of basketball. I think it’s more emotional for my family and my friends. They were always there, they were always behind me in everything I did.”

It’s sad for far more people than that.

It hurts for the growing staff of the Mercury, an organization Taurasi built from the studs. It hurts for the entire X-Factor fanbase, which made WNBA games electric long before the Caitlin Clark phenomenon hit the league. Taurasi was Mercury basketball, and without her — and without fellow stalwart Brittney Griner, who signed with the Atlanta Dream in the offseason — the team and the city begin the impossible task of forging something new.

It can be easy, amid skyrocketing fan engagement around the WNBA and Caitlin Clark mania, to forget that Taurasi joined a team and a league whose future was not assured. She arrived from the women’s basketball capital of the world — the University of Connecticut — and invigorated the WNBA with a brash competitive spirit and indomitable attitude.

Taurasi is leaving the franchise on strong footing, buoyed by the respect and three championships she brought it. Her twilight years with the team saw new owner Mat Ishbia hire a general manager and head coach from the NBA ranks and build a practice facility specifically for the team, a rarity in the WNBA. But replacing everything Taurasi brought to Phoenix, from her scoring to her leadership to keeping the refs in line, is impossible.

Looking forward

But the Mercury will try. This offseason, they set about remaking their core, bringing in two-time WNBA Defensive Player of the Year Alyssa Thomas and 2023 Most Improved Player Satou Sabally. Thomas asked to be traded by the Connecticut Sun this offseason to find a new home where the investment by ownership matched her winning intensity. Sabally did the same, and is just hitting her prime. Their versatile skill sets and selfless styles should mesh well with Kahleah Copper, the prize of the 2024 offseason who earned an All-Star nod with fearless drives to the basket and game-winning buckets.

Playing in Phoenix represents a new start for them just as much as it does for the franchise. All three have often referred to the chance they have with the Mercury to just play, to take advantage of the team’s resources and just be athletes. To play for an organization that Taurasi put on such solid footing.

A 32-year-old veteran with three consecutive top-five finishes in MVP voting, Thomas brings stoic leadership. And, after falling just short in Connecticut for 11 seasons — the Sun lost in the Finals or semifinals each of the last six years — she is hungry.

“I don’t think anything changes,” Thomas told Phoenix New Times. “I’m going to come in and be the same person and try to get us where we belong.”

Sabally represents the future of basketball, a point forward with shooting range and elite defense. But back, Achilles, ankle and shoulder injuries have held limited her to playing in just 57% of possible games in five pro seasons. The French forward stated publicly after requesting a trade out of Dallas that she would only go to a team with committed ownership. When you’re trying to replace your franchise icon, that’s a good reputation to have.

“I’m like a sponge,” Sabally said at her introductory press conference. “I want to soak everything in, and that really drives me. Because I feel like I can’t let anyone down wearing a Phoenix Mercury jersey. It comes with pride and it comes with history and legacy, and I take that very serious.”

A winning future?

The Mercury could use a sudden infusing of winning. Taurasi may have defined the team for two decades, but the team was far from dominant over the last few years of her career. Since the team’s last Finals appearance in 2021, Griner was arrested in Russia and spent most of 2022 in prison there on what many felt were trumped-up charges. Star guard Skylar Diggins-Smith asked out after that season. The team has had four head coaches in four seasons and gone 43-73 over the last three.

There is building a competitive roster, and then there’s building a core. General manager Nick U’Ren’s moves should improve a team that finished 19-21 and was swept in the first round of the playoffs last year. At the same time, the best teams in the WNBA, including the reigning champion New York Liberty, are led by cores that have been together for multiple seasons.

The Mercury may have been bracing for Taurasi’s retirement, but U’Ren said he didn’t go into the offseason planning on renovating so much of the roster. The chance to acquire stars like Thomas and Sabally changed the calculus.

“It’s natural in professional sports that teams and players go their separate ways,” U’Ren told New Times. “That’s the way things go in this league and during free agency, things evolve.”

That’s what made Taurasi’s run so special – that “natural” parting never happened. She and the Mercury were tied at the hip. The lengths to which U’Ren and Ishbia have gone this offseason to replace her shows how seriously they are taking the task of keeping that momentum going.

But Mercury fans won’t cheer for any other player like they did for Taurasi, or for as long. No matter how much winning occurs in the next era of Mercury basketball, it’ll always be missing something. If there’s one bit of good news, it’s this: The Mercury will retire Taurasi’s No. 3 jersey sometime next year.

And fans will get to cheer for her one more time.