Diana Taurasi and the power of invincibility

Jasmine Thomas clapped too close to the greatest clutch basketball player anyone has ever seen. This plus a Courtney Williams Instagram picture posted a few hours before gametime from a recent regular season game, are the reasons many will point to for Diana Taurasi and the Phoenix Mercury moving onto the semifinals Thursday night in Connecticut, 96-86 winners. Taurasi is now 13-0 in do-or-die playoff games, a majority of those on the road.

The defining image of the game will be Thomas, after a foul, clapping, Taurasi clapping right back at her, first literally, then with another performance almost indistiguishable from what’s come before in her remarkable career.

This is what the Connecticut Sun feared, what the Phoenix Mercury counted on, what the basketball world expected with a mixture of awe and resignation.

Read More: Storm vs. Mercury is the WNBA’s past and future

“You can post Instagram pictures, you can clap in people’s faces, that’s not going to get you a win, though,” Taurasi, in that mixture of smirk and fully-justified confidence, told Holly Rowe following the game.

But there’s every reason to believe if not for Instagram, if not for some applause from Thomas toward an official, that Diana Taurasi had already found her reason to win, as she always does, to silence another road crowd, to continue what may be her best season yet, at age 36, into the semifinals against the Storm.

“It’s just, at the end of the day: do you want to keep playing?” Taurasi said after shootaround, hours before the game. “Do you want to keep playing? As a team, do you want to come out here tonight, try to win the game, so you can get on a plane and go to wherever it is, and keep the season going, and keep playing. You know, I want to keep playing. I worked hard this offseason, I think as a group we’ve worked really hard. And so we’ll see if we can do that tonight.”

Diana Taurasi treats elimination games as something to be savored, not struggled through or endured, and it shows every single minute she spends on the floor before and during them.

It should not surprise you that Taurasi was the first member of the Mercury out on the court, more than 90 minutes before the game, taking carefully-chosen shots from mid-range, then working out beyond the arc, sinking the 3s she’s made more than anyone in the history of the game, dressed in her purple Mercury zip-up and black pants, as assistant coach Todd Troxel followed her, putting up a hand each time she shoots. By the time her teammates were out shooting, Taurasi was a constantly-moving presence, even on the bench, going over notes with Troxel, her knees bouncing, before she popped up off the bench, so she could check in briefly with each of her teammates before pulling them into a huddle.

“I think it’s huge,” Taurasi said of the way she connects with her teammates — when DeWanna Bonner was knocked to the ground, Taurasi stayed just inches away, helping her up at the lonely end of the court late in the first half, physically grabbing her head to make eye contact and be certain she was okay. It happened again at the start of the fourth quarter, Taurasi up off the bench to physically check in with each teammate, even those who hadn’t played, to be sure a Taurasi group was a unit. “I learned growing up to be a good teammate. You can’t always control if you’re playing great, if you’re making shots. But if you can be a good teammate, you can stay connected.”

Hands in,the  group shouted “Merc!” and then Taurasi was gone, stalking away in that familiar stride, off the floor into the tunnel as if she owns the court, as if she owns every basketball court, before coming back out in precisely the same way in time for the national anthem.

The key to a Diana Taurasi Elimination Game energy is movement — even during the national anthem, she’s bouncing, side to side, one foot to the other, and this energy is contagious, Bonner is next to her doing the same, echoing her movements — and this connectivity carried over into the game, the first offensive set with Bonner, Taurasi and Brittney Griner, longtime teammates, moving the ball between them on a string. First a Bonner 3, then Taurasi, off a Griner screen, sounding the shofar to let the Connecticut crowd that seemed to love her (from UConn days) and fear her in equal measure know that the Diana Taurasi Elimination Game had begun. It was sundown.

Taurasi’s shooting has never been better — the best scorer in the history of the WNBA has parlayed her first offseason staying stateside and raising her son Leo with wife Penny Taylor rather than going overseas to play, into what her coach, Sandy Brondello believes is the finest of her career.

“She amazes me really every single day, to be able to do what she continues to do at such a high level at her age is amazing,” Brondello said, beaming from the postgame podium, a season-long refrain from her coach. “When we need her to score, she scores, when we need her to get us into our sets and make the appropriate play, she does it.”

It was a less-celebrated change earlier this season that Taurasi took in stride, Brondello moving Briann January, a lifelong point guard, into primarily an off-ball shooting threat, and making Taurasi her point guard once again. The elevated responsibilities haven’t slowed her down, and instead emphasized the connection of the big three, something clear in the passes Taurasi delivers not to her teammates, but to where she knows her teammates will be, as with a full-court, bullet pass to the spot where Bonner materialized for a layup late in the first quarter.

And always, always, Taurasi with the talking, to her teammates, to Thomas defending her, to the refs, always circling back like a hyperfit Columbo — there’s always just one more thing to discuss. But at the same time, hyper-conscious of the game, never allowing an opponent to build momentum, making a play at every inflection point. A Sun swarm puts a loose ball on the floor, and there’s Taurasi, diving for it, pushing it impossibly perfectly into Griner’s hands for a layup. A Sun score, and Taurasi is back down the floor to respond with a top-of-the-key 3 before her defender can get set.

And then, the Thomas clapping incident, but also, the Taurasi response, which extended well beyond the clap back itself. A 3, which Taurasi followed with a run back up the floor, palms down, as if to show that the clapping had been silenced. A Griner block, pushed into Taurasi’s hands, and a full-court sprint to the hoop for a reverse layup to give the Mercury the lead.

The Sun countered — keep in mind, Taurasi wins Diana Taurasi Elimination Games against very good teams, and the Sun are no different, the league’s most efficient offense and winners of 21 games this year — but in a foreshadowing of the precise way Taurasi would bury them in the fourth, she came off a Griner screen and instead of forcing things, found a cutting Stephanie Talbot, who was fouled going to the hoop, the ball in her hands at the precise moment required. The half ended with the Sun up, 44-40, and Taurasi was seeing everything at once, the cheering crowd, the buzzer hail mary from Jonquel Jones falling short of the hoop, Taurasi running to catch it and flip it in one fluid motion to an impressed ref, Billy Smith, and then checking the scoreboard once, twice, before stalking into the tunnel, having taken mental inventory of precisely what would be required of her to win.

She breaks her opponents in stages. The Sun are a third-quarter team, using their depth and pace as if catapulted as a group out of the halftime locker room break. But it was Taurasi dictating the pace as the second half began, passing to seemingly nowhere, but where Griner then materialized for a layup, slinking around a Griner screen and knocking down another 3, then feeding Griner for three points the old-fashioned way, then curling around another Griner screen for another 3, and suddenly the Mercury led, and an irate Curt Miller called timeout, and the Mohegan Sun Arena crowd slipped into quiet contemplation as the Solar Power Dance Team strutted onto the floor. Taurasi gave a finger wag to the crowd, reproving them for thinking this Diana Taurasi Elimination Game would turn out any different than the rest.

Nobody had explained this to Courtney Williams, she of the offending Instagram post, and Williams and her teammates did their best to change the unchangeable, alter what cannot be altered. Taurasi found January for an open 3 — Williams countered with four, bringing the Mohegan Sun crowd to its feet with a made 3 through contact by Talbot, and the Sun led. Talbot airballed an answer, and Williams raced down the court and scored again, her vertical leap keeping her in the air longer than should  be physically possible, and it was 84-81, Sun, with 3:55 left, and it was Taurasi’s team calling timeout.

“We find a way to stay together in those hard moments,” Taurasi said. She spent much of that timeout instructing her teammates, hands on hips, before taking a long look across the court at the Sun, staring them down. “You know, when Courtney hit that and-1, I think there was a moment where we looked at each other and thought, ‘This is over.’ And then we got back to one possession at a time. I think it’s something that’s rubbed off on everyone.”

Taurasi is a scorer, a passer, but again, it was that inflection point where she pulled out precisely the right play to win the game, and it turned out to be a rebound. It was the confidence she’d instilled in Talbot, who did not hesitate followng her airballed 3, and hit the next one to tie the game. And then at the other end, after Williams missed, Taurasi did not scurry back on the rebound, instead challenging the massively larger 6-foot-6 Jonquel Jones and somehow ending up with the board, drawing the foul on Jones, an implicit message to everyone in the building: no one is taking this game away from me. This ball, this game, it is mine.

“In that fourth quarter, I’m not even sure that she took a shot,” Brondello marveled afterwards. “It shows a lot about her and her competitiveness. She will do whatever it takes to win and I don’t know if I have seen anyone with the will to win bigger that what hers is and she is so critical for our success. I have no words for Diana and it just shows too, locked in defensively and she gets the rebound over Jonquel (Jones) in a key moment of the game, she wanted to win.”

And that was it, really: the Sun scored two points, total, in the final 3:55. Taurasi found Griner, Taurasi whipped the ball to Bonner, Taurasi orchestrated and the Mercury responded with beautiful melodies, and with under a minute left, Taurasi checked the same scoreboard she’d evaluated as she headed into the locker room at halftime, and this time she nodded, a smile on her face, registering another Diana Taurasi Elimination Game win. Sun fans followed their predecessors in Tulsa and Seattle and Los Angeles and Indianapolis and New York up the steps and out of the arena to try and process what happened.

She dribbled out the final seconds and then shouted in the general direction of the Sun right after the final buzzer sounded: “Who’s clapping now? Who’s clapping now? F**k you!”

And then it was over to Holly Rowe, an arm around the ESPN icon, to make sure that message was delivered to a national audience.

Those who loved Diana Taurasi more than fearing her stuck around for one final glimpse, and she obliged as she walked toward the tunnel she owns — she owns any tunnel adjacent to a basketball court, these are all Diana Taurasi’s courts, particularly when there are do-or-die games played — with that same walk, for Taurasi knows it. She’s marching toward the semifinals now against the Storm. She gathered her teammates, Bonner and Griner, into a quick hug — always touching base, always connected — before letting out a scream, pointing down to the floor and yelling, “My house!”, and disappearing into the tunnel as those who bore witness applauded some more.