Sue Bird takes her place in Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame

Percy Allen, The Seattle Times on Sep 6, 2025

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SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — On the biggest stage in the sport, Sue Bird delivered a lighthearted and surprisingly brief 13-minute speech before being inducted in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday.

The former Storm star began with a playful jab at her old UConn coach Geno Auriemma before thanking family, friends, former teammates and a litany of medical support staffers who helped her play for more than two decades.

“You gave me the most important piece of advice I’ve ever received,” Bird said. “I mean, I guess you gave a lot of advice because you talk a lot … but this was really the one I remember. You said: ‘Basketball is not a game of how to, it’s a game of when to. I built my career around it.”

Admittedly, Bird was mesmerized by her latest and grandest milestone.

“This moment is truly overwhelming,” Bird said. “There are hundreds of people in here I could thank and those are probably just my surgeons. It’s been so wonderful though, seeing so many familiar faces.”

Bird, the last of nine speakers, headlined a 2025 class that includes former WNBA stars Maya Moore and Sylvia Fowles, former NBA standouts Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard, coach Billy Donovan, former referee Danny Crawford, Miami Heat owner Micky Arison and the 2008 USA Basketball men’s Olympic team.

“For me, the Hall of Fame is the ultimate capstone not because of the fame part, but because of the hall part,” Bird said. “It’s about being forever connected to this group of peers.

“The real honor is becoming part of a community that includes everyone from the trailblazers who came before us, like Anne Donovan, rest in peace, and Ann Meyers Drysdale, whose faces I used to see on the walls when I visited here as a kid, to all the players still out there changing the game.”

The weekend, which began Friday night when Bird received her Hall of Fame orange jacket and class ring at a tip-off celebration and awards ceremony at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn., was literally a trip back down memory lane for the Syosset, N.Y., native who starred at University of Connecticut.

Perhaps fitting then, that Bird’s remarkably brilliant basketball journey came to end at the nearby Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame on a rain-drenched and stormy day befitting her adopted home Seattle.

“This honor really boils down to one word that Maya, Sylvia and I know doesn’t come easy, especially in the career of a female athlete: belonging. I learned its importance early, because no matter how tough the odds, I found my footing by finding my people, and sometimes they found me.”

Adorned in a burnt orange jacket and pants, Bird traced the steps that led her from basketball immortality.

“Growing up on Long Island, our fifth-grade elementary school yearbook asked us to predict what we (would be) when we grew up,” she said. “I said, a doctor, a lawyer or a professional soccer player. Six surgeries on my left knee, one on each hip and five broken noses later I went on to know a lot of doctors. And lawyers as every athlete in here knows we know a lot of lawyers too. They do all the contracts.

“As for a professional soccer players? Well, I didn’t become one, but I scored one anyway.”

That last line was a verbal nod to Bird’s longtime fiancé, former soccer great Megan Rapinoe.

Between UConn and Springfield, Mass., Bird spent 21 years and played 19 seasons with the Storm where she captured four WNBA titles (2004, 2010, 2018 and 2020) and amassed more assists — 3,234 — than anyone in league history.

The 13-time WNBA All-Star and eight-time All-WNBA honoree is also first in games played (580), second in 3-pointers made (1,001), third in steals (724) and ninth in points (6,803).

She also starred on the USA women’s national basketball team while winning five Olympic gold medals and spent a decade playing professionally in Russia.

Bird posted a 367-273, which is the most wins in WNBA history.

Since retiring in 2022, she’s been feted with a jersey retirement, street dedication and a bronze statue that sits outside Climate Pledge Arena.

Now, Bird has soared into the Hall of Fame leaving behind an incomparable legacy as one of the greatest to have ever played the sport.

At the end, Bird paid one last tribute to the Storm.

“At every step, it all came down to this, I couldn’t have found my place if I wasn’t lucky enough to find my people,” she said. “Thanks for being the people who decided that in a when-to game it was always the right time to make me feel like I belonged.

“This Hall of Fame induction isn’t just about individual achievement. It’s about joining a community where I’ll always belong, a belonging that can never be taken away. In other words, I’ll close with something point guards don’t often get to say, thank you for the assist.”

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