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WNBA legends Candace Parker (left) and Elena Delle Donne (right) enter the Hall of Fame in the Class of 2026.<\/p>\n
UNCASVILLE, Conn. (AP) \u2014 Dawn Staley and the 1996 Olympic women\u2019s basketball team paved the way for the WNBA and players such as Candace Parker, Elena Delle Donne and Chamique Holdsclaw.<\/p>\n
The team that started the Americans\u2019 30-year Olympic dominance will be enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday along with Parker, Delle Donne and Holdsclaw They will be joined by NBA player Amar\u2019e Stoudemire<\/a>, longtime\u00a0NBA official Joey Crawford<\/a>, NBA coaches\u00a0Doc Rivers<\/a>\u00a0and Mike D\u2019Antoni<\/a> and Gonzaga coach Mark Few<\/a> in the Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s taken a long time for that particular team that set the stage for everything that\u2019s happened since,\u201d Staley said. \u201cThere were players that came before us that didn\u2019t strike while the iron was hot. I thought we struck when the iron was hot and provided a way for us to see professional basketball come into existence after. Then for the last 30 years we\u2019ve had it. \u201d<\/p>\n Parker and Delle Donne were young, but remembered that Olympic team and its importance.<\/p>\n \u201cThe \u201996 (team) inspired an entire generation of women,\u201d Parker said. \u201cThey were the catalyst for all of women\u2019s sports to me and professional leagues to go around for an entire year, commit and understand that it\u2019s like gold or nothing and for them to come away with the gold in the fashion they did with the great amount of eyeballs.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s the second consecutive year that a stellar class of women will be enshrined in the Hall of Fame as Sue Bird, Maya Moore and Sylvia Fowles were inducted in 2025. Parker won three titles in the WNBA with three different teams: Los Angeles, Chicago and Las Vegas. She is the only player in league history to win both the MVP and Rookie of the Year in the same season.<\/p>\n She also won two titles while playing in college for Tennessee under Hall of Fame coach Pat Summitt, plus two Olympic gold medals and two WNBA MVP awards.<\/p>\n Delle Donne won two league MVP awards in 2015 and 2019, the second of which came when she led the Washington Mystics to their lone WNBA championship. Delle Donne became the first player in league history to shoot more than 50% from the field, 40% from behind the 3-point line and 90% from the free-throw line.<\/p>\n Holdsclaw won three straight titles at Tennessee from 1996-98, the first team to accomplish that. The 1998 championship was Tennessee\u2019s first undefeated season at 39\u20130 and the Vols also set an NCAA record for the most wins in a season. Holdsclaw went on to have an 11-year WNBA career.<\/p>\n Crawford\u2019s numbers were incredible: He officiated more than 2,500 regular-season games, nearly 400 more in the postseason and 50 of those were in the NBA Finals during his 39-year career.<\/p>\n Rivers won 1,194 regular-season games as an NBA coach, which is the sixth most in league history. He also led the Celtics to a championship in 2008.<\/p>\n Stoudemire, who was the only NBA player in this year\u2019s class, was the NBA Rookie of the Year in 2003 and six-time All-Star. He spent the first eight years of his career with the Phoenix Suns, where he teamed with D\u2019Antoni.<\/p>\n Few has won more than 770 games at Gonzaga in his career at the school. He set the NCAA Division I men\u2019s coaching record by winning 81 games in his first three years with the Zags.<\/p>\n Missing Pat<\/p>\n Holdsclaw and Parker both know that their Hall of Fame coach from Tennessee is smiling down on them as the pair of Lady Vols greats will get inducted together. Summitt passed away in 2016 following a battle with Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n \u201cI think Coach definitely wrote this in the stars for us to go in, in the same class,\u201d Parker said. \u201cSo I think she definitely will be around. I know she would be on stage.\u201d<\/p>\n Holdsclaw agreed with Parker on her former mentor.<\/p>\n \u201cShe would be so proud of us,\u201d Holdsclaw said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WNBA legends Candace Parker (left) and Elena Delle Donne (right) enter the Hall of Fame in the Class…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":859380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,27022,215186,75739,459,82,299083],"class_list":["post-859379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-candace-parker","tag-chamique-holdsclaw","tag-elena-delle-donne","tag-nba","tag-sports","tag-wnba-basketball-hall-of-fame"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/859380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}