Commentary: As Sue Bird prepares for jersey retirement, coaches say ‘there won’t be anybody else like her’

SEATTLE – The Storm actually contemplated selecting someone other than Sue Bird with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2002 WNBA draft, such as Swin Cash or Stacey Dales-Schulman (the latter is who The Seattle Times had them taking in a mock draft). And they explored trading the pick when other teams began to make increasingly aggressive overtures.

But it was the passion of those rival teams, who made no secret of viewing Bird as a franchise savior, that made the Storm realize they couldn’t in good conscious punt away that opportunity for themselves.

“You’ve got to think, why do all these teams want this player so bad?” Wally Walker, then-president and CEO of the Storm and NBA’s Sonics, told The Times on the eve of the draft. “Then you understand just how special she is.”

Or as then-Storm coach and GM Lin Dunn said on draft day, “Our team got better when we started thinking about selecting Sue Bird.”

Even Dunn might not have realized more than two decades ago how prescient those words were. In the ensuing 21 years, Bird not only came to embody (and elevate) the Storm, she became the most enduring face of the fledgling league – just five seasons old at the time – and a beloved figure in what would become her adopted hometown.

Bird led the Storm to four championships, spanning 2004 to 2020 – with four coaches, and an ever-changing cast of teammates.

“She was the common denominator in all of those,” said Brian Agler, the coach of the 2010 Storm title team.

Bird’s retirement announcement last year, revealed early in the season, led to an outpouring of poignant tributes, capped by the “Thank you, Sue” chant after her final game, a playoff loss to the Las Vegas Aces.

And now her legacy is being formalized Sunday when the Storm will retire Bird’s No. 10 jersey and raise it to the rafters at Climate Pledge Arena after their game against the Washington Mystics.

Never has an honor been more deserved, and more obvious. For starters, it’s sacrilege to even think of another Storm player wearing 10. For another, few players have meant more to their organization, town and league than Bird.

I talked this week to two of the coaches who were gifted with Bird’s presence on Storm title teams, Agler in ’10 and Dan Hughes in 2018 (the other two being the late Anne Donovan in 2004, and Gary Kloppenburg in the COVID-19 “Wubble” in 2020). The affection, respect and, yes, awe, jumps out over the phone lines.

“Trustworthy. Just a trusted individual,” said Agler, who coached Bird for seven seasons, longer than any of the seven coaches she had in Seattle. “I don’t know if I’ve ever trusted anybody more in my life that I’ve been around, outside of my immediate family, than when I was associated with Sue and working with Sue. I could really count on her. I could ask her pointed questions about our team. She’s the type of person that never would ever throw any of her teammates under the bus. But she communicated in a way that would message to me the information I needed to know.”

“I had never seen anybody put in the day-to-day work to play the game like I saw her do,” Hughes said. “There was not a single day of the year – we’re talking in the preseason, we’re talking in the winter before the season, that she is not preparing to play the game at the highest level. I’m talking about rest and sleep and diet and training and mentality and everything. I have never seen anything like it.”

Both coaches had remarkably similar outlooks on Bird’s basketball legacy as the consummate prototype of a point guard.

Hughes: “If you look at the women point guards that I’ve coached – and I coached 20 years on the men’s side, too, and I had some relative great point guards – but nobody on this earth has coached better (women’s) point guards than me. Nobody. Dawn Staley was my first. Becky Hammon. Jen Rizzotti, Helen Darling, Moriah Jefferson and so on.

“But you have to start with Sue Bird at the point guard position. You just have to start with her. I love the NBA. I really study the NBA – always have, always will. But when you say ‘point guard’ to me, and you say what comes in your mind, Sue Bird does.”

Agler: “I don’t know if there’s ever been a better point guard that’s played the game, men or women, than Sue. I mean, she’s won every place she’s been. … That’s the most impressive thing about Sue – she’s the ultimate competitor. Her best friend is Diana Taurasi. But there was no one she would rather beat than Diana Taurasi. That’s the competitor she was.”

Bird’s work ethic, her competitiveness, her hustle, her underrated athleticism – those will all be rightly celebrated Sunday.

When asked to pick out a favorite memory from coaching Bird, both Agler and Hughes went “inside basketball” for moments that highlighted all of those qualities in a way only a coach could fully appreciate.

For Agler, it was the time Bird ran down the New York Liberty’s Essence Carson after she had stolen the ball and had a free path to a winning basket.

“Essence had a head start on her, and Sue chased her down, deflected the ball from behind off Essence’s leg out of bounds at the buzzer, and we win the game by one. … That’s almost impossible to do.”

For Hughes, it was Bird’s defensive switch on a pick-and-roll in a key moment late in a playoff game against the Mystics – mundane, yet transcendent.

“It was like she was shot out of a canyon at a speed that just was unbelievable, in anticipation and knowledge of what was going on. She got over there, stopped the ball, we got back into play, and she went all the way back to the other side of the block-out. That play, I’ll never forget it – and probably nobody else would point to that play but me.”

As Agler said, “It was like she had an advantage over everybody because she was athletic, she was skilled, and then she’s smarter than everybody else, too.”

As the positions in modern basketball become more hybrid, the day of the traditional “bring it up the court and distribute the ball” point guard – “the Sue Bird-type point guard,” in Agler’s words – are waning.

“I don’t see many of those coming along,” he said, “and if there are, there won’t be anybody else like her.

“So it’s easy for me to say that there will never be another player like Sue Bird.”