The adrenaline was still there. The joy was still there. And lo and behold, the shot was still there, arcing over and over from Elena Delle Donne’s fingertips to the bottom of the net. With the familiar butterflies running through her and her senses reengaged — the tacky grip of the basketball, the cacophony of the crowd, the sharp-edged geometry of the court — it was only natural that a voice in her head would cut through the chaos of WNBA’s All-Star Weekend and whisper: “You could still have this.”
It was July 24, and Delle Donne, who last played for the Washington Mystics in 2023 and officially retired in 2024, had just teamed with former Mystics teammate Shakira Austin and high school phenom Jezelle “GG” Banks at Chicago’s Wintrust Arena to win the WNBA Shooting Stars competition — a contest bringing together a retired legend, a current player and a prospect from each city in the league. All anybody wanted to know, including the voice in Delle Donne’s own head, was whether she might consider a comeback.
“There will always be a spot for her on the court in Washington if she wants it!” Mystics owner Ted Leonsis posted on X.
It was — and remains — a tantalizing thought. As the 2026 Mystics, those youthful, exuberant upstarts, prepare to open the WNBA playoffs against Atlanta, the centerpiece of their last great team, the 2019 league champions, has reemerged into the public spotlight after several years spent largely out of view. She had no choice: This summer alone, aside from the nationally televised Shooting Stars victory, Delle Donne was inducted into no fewer than three halls of fame.
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All other things being equal, Delle Donne would rather be getting ready for another deep playoff run than writing hall of fame speeches and being asked about her legacy. A few weeks past her 37th birthday, Delle Donne wouldn’t even be the oldest player in the WNBA this season — that would be 39-year-old Alysha Clark of the Dallas Wings — a reality that only dials up the pull the game still exerts on her.
“For the rest of my life, I’m going to consider playing,” she told The Washington Sun. “It’s such a part of you. To have the crowd behind you, to go out and win a championship — those things are so exciting and fun. Of course, you think about it: Do I still have it? Could I push through everything? So yeah, you question it. It’s only human.
“But the reality is, when the next day you wake up and it’s, ‘Ugh, my back,’ and I’ve got a kink in my neck from sleeping on it wrong – that’s when you get brought back to reality. I certainly wish I could still be playing. I feel like skills-wise, I still have it. It’s just that my body doesn’t have it.”
And so, when the Mystics take the floor for their playoff opener, Delle Donne, a special adviser to Monumental Basketball (the Mystics’ parent company), will remain behind the scenes. While her role, by design, is largely undefined, encompassing elements of scouting, coaching and executive strategizing, she thinks of herself mostly as a liaison between the coaching staff and the Mystics’ players, who collectively make up the youngest roster in the league. Two of those players are her former teammates: Austin, whose first two seasons with the Mystics, 2022 and 2023, were Delle Donne’s last two, and guard Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, with whom she played two seasons in Chicago.
“You get to see what the front office goes through. You get to work with the coaching staff,” Delle Donne said of her Monumental gig. “But my favorite part is going to practice and interacting with the players and staff — seeing that growth over the course of a season and trying to give each player a piece of something to help them in life or on the court, whatever that might be.”
There are few obvious parallels between the veteran-laden Mystics team that won the title in 2019 and the youthful upstarts of 2026, but Delle Donne has taken note of an important one:
“The love for each other,” she said. “That’s how we were [in 2019], and more than anything else, that’s what I see in this team: the selflessness and the caring about the person next to you. It means way more than any individual accolade anyone gets.”
‘There’s Other Life to Be Had’
The 2019 Mystics season was the high-water mark of Delle Donne’s dazzling career, culminating in not only her second MVP award but her one and only championship. She became the first WNBA player in history to shoot better than 50% on field goals, 40% on three-pointers and 90% on free throws. (Her career free-throw success rate of 93.7% remains the best in history by anyone in either the WNBA or NBA.)
But she also spent much of that season in excruciating pain from a back injury that required three surgeries to repair herniated discs after the season ended, while also dealing with lingering effects from Lyme disease, which has afflicted her since childhood, requiring a daily regimen of 50 pills and supplements to counteract it.
“Thank God we won a championship,” she said of those 2019 Mystics, “because I put my back on the line for that one.”
She would play three more seasons — opting out of the 2020 “bubble” season during the pandemic — then went more or less off the grid, disappearing into family life (she married her partner, Amanda Clifton, in 2017) and eventually finding behind-the-scenes roles within the game, both with Monumental and with USA Basketball as the managing director of the women’s 3x3 National Team.
“I didn’t want to be a player who hung around until the wheels literally fell off,” she said. “I know there’s other life to be had. Who knows? Hopefully there are kids down the road. I want to be able to play with them and not be in constant pain. I had done all I could [as a player] in the sport.”
She might have stayed out of the public eye forever if it weren’t for the various halls of fame lining up to bestow a measure of immortality upon her this summer. It started on June 27 with the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she was inducted as part of a class that also included fellow WNBA legend Candace Parker, broadcaster Doris Burke and longtime Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve.
Next up, on Aug. 15, was the big one: the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, where her induction class included Parker, fellow Mystics standout Chamique Holdsclaw and longtime NBA player and championship-winning coach Doc Rivers.
By the time the D.C. Sports Hall of Fame called and told Delle Donne she would be inducted on Aug. 30 — along with NFL linebacker London Fletcher and basketball standout turned coach Tommy Amaker, among others — it was starting to feel a little ridiculous.
“I’d call my family and be like, ‘Hey, we have another hall of fame,’” she said. “They’re like, ‘Wait, what’s this one?’ And I’m like, ‘I didn’t realize there were this many either. But hey, we’re doing it.’... I’ve never been one to talk much about myself. But you kind of have to when you’re going into the Hall of Fame. I definitely tried to make my speeches about the bigger lessons I learned by playing sports.”
‘They’re Getting What They Deserve’
Those honors, however overwhelming when taken together, seemed like well-deserved milestones in the post-playing life of a sports legend.
But in the middle of all that legacy-burnishing, Delle Donne got the call asking her to participate in the Shooting Stars competition during All-Star Weekend. At the time, she had barely picked up a basketball in three years, her on-court activity limited to occasionally guarding and rebounding for her 13-year-old niece Gia during the teen’s workouts. Had that remained the full extent of her on-court participation in basketball, she would have been perfectly content.
Being back on the court in Chicago, however, and back in the public spotlight, was a revelation in several ways for Delle Donne, with none more powerful than the mixture of awe and pride she felt at how huge the WNBA’s All-Star extravaganza had become: a full weekend of events featuring first-class treatment for participants and massive crowds everywhere — capped by the All-Star Game itself, with nearly 20,000 spectators jammed into the arena.
It was a far cry from the way she remembers All-Star Games from early in her career, which, she said, felt like “a scrimmage that was just thrown together, and hopefully people will show up.”
In 2013, Delle Donne’s rookie year with the Chicago Sky, the league averaged about 7,500 fans per game, with none of the league’s 12 teams averaging more than 10,000. But this year, with the WNBA having expanded to 15 teams (and with three more on the way), average attendance is 11,482, with 10 teams averaging more than 10,000, led by the Golden State Valkyries at 18,064 per game.
“The level of play has always been there, and it was just so hard to understand the lag of getting the media attention, getting businesses to buy in, getting eyes on our game,” Delle Donne said. “I knew it was the greatest product, and when people watched it, they loved it. But when I was playing, most of the time you couldn’t find it on TV … It was so frustrating that it didn’t have that ‘cool’ factor.
“We got the message all the time from [league] leadership: ‘You need to do all these things or we’re folding. You have to save the game.’ And it was always so frustrating to be like: ‘Why can’t our greatness on the court be enough?’ And I’m so glad it is enough now.”
Everything — the All-Star experience, the Mystics’ summer surge to the playoffs, the realization that her shot was as beautiful and effective as ever — conspired to raise the volume of that voice in her head, the one telling her she could still mount a comeback.
In the end, though, it was not only the back pain that kept Delle Donne from heeding that call. It was also the constant reflection on her legacy, necessitated by all those hall of fame speeches, plus her firsthand look in Chicago at what that legacy had helped achieve: a league that is exploding with growth; record attendance and television ratings; a new collective-bargaining agreement that has seen player salaries increase exponentially.
“I’m so proud of the people who came before me, the people of my era who played and are still playing, and the younger generation,” she said. “They’re getting what they deserve.”
Maybe Delle Donne also deserved a taste of it. But that’s what she got in Chicago. And she did it without sacrificing her health. Her balky back is quiet for the moment. Maybe someday soon, the voice in her head will be, too.
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