Saturday morning it became official. Former Gophers and Lynx great Lindsay Whalen was named a member of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2022. She will be enshrined during a ceremony Sept. 10 in Springfield, Mass.
South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, getting ready for Sunday's NCAA championship game at Target Center, called Whalen "my favorite point guard." Staley was an assistant coach on the 2016 U.S. team that won Olympic gold in Rio de Janeiro.
"I like how she's wired,'' Staley said of Whalen, now the Gophers coach. "I like the fact that she's so inquisitive. She's a hall of famer, but the questions she asks. … She needed to have a true understanding of what our coaching staff needed. She was unafraid to ask the questions."
Recently, when reminiscing about her time working with Staley, Whalen recalled that 2016 team, how she, Staley and Lynx coach and Team USA assistant Cheryl Reeve — three point guards — used to sit around at night and talk basketball.
"A lot of times people think they're just that good, they can figure things out,'' Staley said. "But she actually wanted to know and didn't have an issue voicing, asking the questions to make sure. That's why she's going to be inducted into the Hall of Fame."
Whalen is part of a 13-person class that also includes the late Lou Hudson; they will join Kevin McHale as former Gophers players to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
As a player, there was very little Whalen didn't accomplish. She helped lead the 2003-04 Gophers into the Final Four; she was the Gophers' all-time leader in both scoring and assists. The fourth-overall pick in the 2004 draft, she was a six-time WNBA All-Star, three-time first-team all-WNBA player and a four-time WNBA champion with the Lynx.
When she retired after the 2018 season she was the league's all-time winningest player, with 307.
International play? Whalen won two Olympic gold medals. UConn coach Geno Auriemma, who coached both those Olympic teams, said, "I've always loved her competitive spirit. She has a personality that's infectious to everybody else. She's a great leader because of that.
"She's an All-Star, and she's a WNBA champion. And I asked her to come off the bench and be a role player for the Olympic team, she did it about as well as it could ever be done by anybody and did it twice without ever batting an eye. To me, that's what champions do."
