Candace Parker carried a basketball to the podium at the Basketball Hall of Fame ceremony Saturday night in Springfield, Massachusetts, and spoke to it as the reason she was there. The gesture was both playful and sincere, a reflection of how she and her fellow inductees framed their speeches as love letters to the game itself.
Parker, who won three WNBA titles, two MVP awards, two NCAA championships at Tennessee, two Olympic gold medals and became a first-ballot Hall of Famer, broke down at the close of her speech while describing her relationship with basketball as something that began 27 years ago and was always meant to be a love story. She cited dunking at UConn, a signature shoe and becoming the first woman to appear on the cover of NBA 2K among the moments that stood on the podium with her.
Elena Delle Donne, also a Hall of Fame inductee on Saturday, framed her speech as a tribute to basketball and to the people who helped her stay connected to it. But the emotional center of her remarks was her older sister Lizzie, who is blind and deaf and never experienced a standing ovation or an interview after a win. Delle Donne said she has never met anyone stronger. She told the audience that Lizzie kept her going.
Delle Donne won MVP awards in 2015 and 2019, the second when she led the Washington Mystics to their only WNBA championship. She became the first player in league history to shoot better than 50 percent from the field, 40 percent from three-point range and 90 percent from the free throw line in a single season. She opened her remarks by nodding to actor Larry David, who was in the audience, borrowing one of his signature phrases and saying she hoped her speech would be pretty, pretty, pretty good.
The other inductees
Chamique Holdsclaw, another Hall of Fame inductee on Saturday, thanked former teammates and coaches before expressing that one person she wished could have presented her was the late Pat Summitt, who died in 2016 after a battle with Alzheimer’s and who coached Holdsclaw at Tennessee. She described Summitt as demanding and wonderfully supportive and said she misses her dearly.
Holdsclaw helped Tennessee win three straight national titles from 1996 through 1998, the first program to accomplish that under Summitt’s guidance. The 1997-98 team finished 39-0, setting the NCAA record for wins in a season. She had an 11-year WNBA career following her time in Knoxville.
The 1996 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a group. Members including Dawn Staley, Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, Tara VanDerveer and Teresa Edwards attended the ceremony. Holdsclaw noted that she had posters of those players on her wall when she was in high school, and the team was acknowledged as the starting point for a run of American dominance that produced eight consecutive Olympic gold medals.
Rivers, D’Antoni and Few
Doc Rivers, entering the Hall of Fame as a coach, was emotional while talking about his brother Grady, who he said inspired him to be a better player. Rivers compiled 1,194 regular-season coaching wins, sixth most in league history across five franchises.
Mark Few accepted Hall of Fame induction with characteristic disbelief about the distance he had traveled from a town of 1,500 people with one stoplight. Few has coached Gonzaga since 1999, who led the Zags to the NCAA tournament every year, multiple West Coast Conference titles and two appearances in the national championship game.
Mike D’Antoni, who developed his coaching philosophy in Italy before returning to the NBA, joined the Hall of Fame alongside point forward Amar’e Stoudemire, and their partnership in Phoenix produced some of the most entertaining basketball of that era. Hall of Famer Joey Crawford, who officiated more than 2,500 regular-season games and nearly 400 playoff games including 50 NBA Finals games across 39 years, said officiating in the NBA had been his dream since he was a teenager.
