Phoenix, Diana Taurasi Added Years to WNBA Career

• Skylar Diggins-Smith left the Dallas Wings to join Diana Taurasi and the Phoenix Mercury in 2020.
• The WNBA superstar told Insider that the move paid off and helped her play her best basketball.
• “Phoenix probably put even a few more years that I care to play on my basketball life,” she said.

Skylar Diggins-Smith is playing the best basketball of her illustrious professional career.

And the five-time WNBA All-Star says she’s “just getting started.”

Diggins-Smith played her first six WNBA seasons with the Tulsa Shock, the franchise that later relocated and rebranded as the Dallas Wings. But after sitting out the 2019 season because she had just given birth to her son, the shifty point guard chose to take her talents to the Phoenix Mercury, where she’d team up with superstars like Diana Taurasi and Brittney Griner.

The move paid off. It’s even added years to her WNBA career, Diggins-Smith told Insider while discussing her partnership with Clorox and the recent commercials she and her family filmed for the brand.

“I really do feel like I’m just getting started in the prime of my career now,” Diggins-Smith said. “Phoenix probably put even a few more years that I cared to play on my basketball life.”

“I definitely will say that being here, in this place, really just allowed me to flourish,” she added.

Plenty of people had expressed doubt that Diggins-Smith, Taurasi, and Griner — three of the biggest personalities in women’s basketball — could successfully join forces for one team. Each of them could be the sole star for a WNBA franchise, as Diggins-Smith had for years with the Shock-turned-Wings.

How would they all fit into one system?

“[There were] a lot of questions of, could we balance these personalities?” Diggins-Smith admitted. “Could we play together? Could we work together?”

But Diggins-Smith saw past the noise.

“I really do think it is an iron sharpens iron mentality,” she said. “We’re all cut from that same cloth.”

The Mercury’s 2021 campaign — which Diggins-Smith described as her best season yet “from an individual and team standpoint put together” — proved her instinct correct.

In just their second year taking the court together, Phoenix’s “Big Three” led the Mercury to the WNBA Finals, where they lost to Candace Parker and the Chicago Sky in four games.

“We were all really disappointed [with] how it ended because we felt like we had more to give,” Diggins-Smith said. “I think that just lights a fire underneath us all. It was no question immediately. We were like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna try to go after that again.’ And so that’s definitely our mindset now.”

Unlike most WNBA players, Diggins-Smith doesn’t travel overseas to play in another league once the WNBA season comes to a close. And after years of extending her dominance to another continent, Taurasi has stopped competing in Russia and instead remains in the Valley for the winter and spring.

Now, Diggins-Smith and Taurasi spend their offseasons training together. In working alongside the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer, Diggins-Smith says she’s gotten to “take a lot of gems from her.”

“I really think you got to see how that benefitted me on the court this year,” she added. “And how my game was and how it’s developing.”