Courtside Classics: History Got Used to Saying Tina Thompson’s Name Too Late

Oct 22

10 min read

The first player ever selected in a WNBA Draft helped build the league's first dynasty, stretched the floor before that was common for forwards, and retired as the leading scorer in league history.

WNBA history has a way of simplifying great teams. One star becomes the face. Another becomes the closer. Someone becomes the defender. Someone else becomes the player people mention after they have already named everybody they remember first.

The Houston Comets make that kind of shorthand especially dangerous. Cynthia Cooper. Sheryl Swoopes. Tina Thompson. Three Hall of Famers. Four straight championships. The first dynasty in WNBA history.

But somewhere along the way, Thompson’s place in that story became easier to summarize than it should have been. She wasn’t simply the third star on a great team. She was the first player ever selected in a WNBA Draft. She won four straight championships. She became a nine-time All-Star, an eight-time All-WNBA selection, an Olympic gold medalist and, by the time she retired, the leading scorer in league history.

Supporting characters do not build résumés like that.

USC Came Before the League Had Somewhere for Her to Go

Before Tina Thompson became the first player selected in WNBA history, she was already building the kind of résumé that made the choice make sense. At USC, Thompson started for four seasons and averaged 19.7 points and 10.2 rebounds for her career. She scored 2,248 points, pulled down 1,168 rebounds and helped the Women of Troy reach three NCAA Tournaments, including an Elite Eight appearance during her freshman season.

The honors followed the production. Thompson was the Pac-10 Freshman of the Year in 1994, earned First Team All-Pac-10 recognition three times and became a First Team All-American as a senior in 1997. She also produced one of the biggest scoring performances in USC history, a 49-point game that still sits among the program’s best.

There is something important about the timing of that college career. Thompson was becoming one of the best players in the country before the WNBA existed. Players from her generation didn't grow up with a domestic women’s professional league waiting at the end of college. The path that now feels familiar had not been built yet.

That puts her career in an interesting place historically. The talent was there. The college game was producing stars. Women’s basketball had already shown there was an audience for high-level play, but there still wasn’t a stable professional destination in the United States for players graduating from college.

Thompson was becoming the kind of player the WNBA would eventually need before anybody knew exactly what the league itself would become. She could score from multiple levels, rebound, use her size inside and step away from the basket. Her game was already broader than one position or one role.

Then the WNBA arrived. And when the league held its first draft, Thompson’s name was the first one called.

The First Pick

Before there was a long list of No. 1 picks to compare, there was Tina Thompson.

Tina Thompson #1 Pick in 1997 Inaugural WNBA Drraft

On April 28, 1997, the Houston Comets selected her first overall in the inaugural WNBA Draft, making her the first No. 1 draft pick in league history. That detail deserves more weight than it usually gets. The league was brand new. There was no established draft tradition, no history of franchise-changing first picks and no decades of expectations attached to that spot.

The WNBA was still deciding what its future would look like, and Houston had the first opportunity to choose a player who could help shape it.

They chose Tina Thompson.

The pick was not simply a reward for what she had already done at USC. It was also a bet on what her game could become once there was finally somewhere for it to go.

Then the professional part started. Almost immediately, so did the winning.

Houston Put Three Hall of Famers in the Same Room

The Comets are remembered through their stars, and rightly so. Cooper became one of the league’s first dominant scorers. Swoopes brought two-way brilliance and defensive pressure. Thompson gave Houston something different: she stretched the floor.

At 6-foot-2, Thompson could score inside, face up, put the ball on the floor and step beyond the arc in a way that forced defenses to make uncomfortable decisions. From 1997 through 2000, Thompson made 168 three-pointers on 446 attempts, shooting 37.7 percent from beyond the arc. She was taking nearly four threes per game at a time when that kind of perimeter involvement was unusual for a forward.

It is easy to look backward at a team with three Hall of Famers and assume the basketball solved itself. It didn’t. Talent can overlap. Stars can occupy the same spaces. Great players can make one another less effective if the pieces around them do not fit. Thompson helped keep that from happening.

Cooper needed room to attack and create. Swoopes could pressure defenses in transition, slash, defend and score from different areas of the floor. Thompson’s ability to pull away from the basket created another problem entirely. She didn’t have to occupy the same spaces as everybody else to remain dangerous.

Cynthia Cooper (14), Tina Thompson (7), and Sheryl Swoopes (22)

That mattered because great teams don’t only need talent. They need talent that fits together.

Thompson’s face-up game punished slower defenders. Her shooting forced opposing forwards farther away from the paint than they wanted to be. Her size still allowed Houston to use her inside, and she could attack mismatches without needing every possession designed specifically for her.

That is part of why her value can disappear in simplified retellings of those teams. The things that make a roster function are not always the same things that dominate a highlight reel.

Houston didn’t win four championships simply because it had three famous names. It won because those names made basketball sense together.

Four Straight Was Not an Accident

Houston won the WNBA championship in 1997. Then again in 1998, 1999 and 2000.

Four championships in the league’s first four seasons, a streak that remains the longest consecutive championship run in WNBA history. Thompson started at forward through all of it.

Those titles established Houston as the league’s first dynasty. But Thompson’s importance to the Comets was only one part of what made her career remarkable.

Her Game Looks Even More Familiar Now

A forward who can space the floor, attack off the dribble and contribute inside is familiar in today’s WNBA. In Thompson’s era, that combination was much less common.

That is part of why her game deserves to be revisited instead of simply remembered. She wasn’t only productive. She was adaptable.

A defender could not treat her strictly like a post player because Thompson was comfortable stepping away from the paint. Smaller defenders couldn’t simply crowd her on the perimeter because she still had size. Her shooting forced opposing forwards to leave spaces they were usually more comfortable protecting.

The value of that skill set has become easier to explain over time because basketball itself has moved closer to it. Modern frontcourts are expected to space, make decisions away from the basket and create matchup problems instead of remaining attached to traditional positional boundaries.

Thompson was already doing versions of that. In a league that now values positionless skill more than ever, her game makes a lot of sense. Maybe more sense now than people gave it credit for then.

Her Individual Peak Deserves Its Own Space

The championships came early enough that it can be easy to let them swallow everything Thompson accomplished individually. Her career didn’t stop developing when Houston’s four-title run ended.

In 2000, Thompson was named WNBA All-Star Game MVP, another reminder that even on a roster crowded with stars, her own standing around the league was never small.

Four years later, she produced the highest-scoring season of her WNBA career. Thompson averaged 20.0 points per game in 2004 and finished tied for third in MVP voting.

That season deserves more attention because it arrived after the dynasty had ended and after Cynthia Cooper’s original retirement had changed the shape of Houston’s offense.

Houston's championship years could no longer serve as the easiest explanation for her success. Her responsibilities had changed, and her production showed she could remain elite in a different version of the Comets.

That is important because it removes one of the easiest shortcuts people use when talking about stars on loaded teams. Thompson didn’t suddenly stop looking elite when the structure around her changed. She could fit beside greatness when the roster demanded it, and she could carry more of the offense when the circumstances demanded that too.

There is a difference between benefiting from greatness and being one of the people creating it. Thompson’s career kept supplying evidence for the second.

Versatility wasn’t a supporting skill in her career. It was one of the reasons the career lasted so long.

She Was Never a Sidekick

This is the part of Tina Thompson’s career that deserves to be said plainly.

She was not a passenger on the Houston dynasty.

Over 17 WNBA seasons, Thompson became a nine-time All-Star and an eight-time All-WNBA selection, including three First Team honors. She scored 7,488 points and grabbed 3,070 rebounds. When she retired, nobody in WNBA history had scored more points; Diana Taurasi passed her in 2017. Thompson’s final All-Star appearance in 2013 also made her the first player in league history to earn an All-Star selection across three different decades.

There Was Basketball After Houston

Thompson’s legacy also didn’t end when the Comets did.

She spent her first 12 seasons in Houston, then returned home to Los Angeles and played three seasons with the Sparks before finishing her WNBA career in Seattle.

That longevity matters because it proves something the dynasty years alone couldn’t. Thompson’s career wasn’t dependent on one roster, one system or one era.

She played through the WNBA’s first 17 seasons and remained productive as the league changed around her. USC notes that she was the only player to appear in all of the league’s first 17 seasons.

Think about how much basketball changed during that span. The league expanded. Franchises disappeared. Others relocated. The style of play evolved. A new generation of stars arrived, followed by another one behind them. Thompson was still there.

The league she entered in 1997 was not the same league she left in 2013. She adapted anyway, and that may be one of the quieter forms of greatness: not simply being excellent at your peak, but remaining relevant while the game keeps moving.

The Red Lipstick Was Part of the Picture Too

The red lipstick became one of Thompson's most recognizable signatures. What began as a college-game ritual eventually became part of how fans recognized her, and I think there's something worth appreciating about that. She could be physical, competitive and dominant while maintaining a personal style that was entirely her own.

That may seem small compared with championships and scoring records, but presentation matters in sports, especially for women athletes who have historically been asked to fit into narrow ideas of what strength is supposed to look like.

Women in sports have spent generations being asked to negotiate femininity in public. Too feminine for some people. Not feminine enough for others. Expected to prove toughness while still being judged by standards that had little to do with the game itself.

Thompson didn’t seem interested in letting that contradiction choose for her.

The lipstick became recognizable because it was consistent. It existed beside the physical play, the rebounding, the championships and the jumpers. It didn't soften her competitiveness. It existed with it.

Thompson didn't shrink any part of herself to make the basketball easier for people to understand. In a career that resists easy categories, that feels appropriate too.

She Won Everywhere

Thompson's impact extended beyond the WNBA. Her international career gave her more opportunities to compete at the highest level, and her production showed that her game could thrive well beyond Houston.

With Team USA, she won Olympic gold in 2004 and again in 2008. Two Olympic gold medals would be a remarkable achievement on their own, but Thompson's international résumé extended well beyond Team USA. Her overseas career made the point even louder.

Thompson played in Italy, South Korea, Russia and Romania, and some of the strongest basketball of her career happened there.

During the 2007 EuroLeague season with Spartak Moscow Region, Thompson averaged 21.1 points and 9.9 rebounds per game. She led the competition in scoring and ranked third in rebounding.

Thompson was not only successful because she landed on the right WNBA team at the right moment.

Her game traveled.

Different leagues. Different countries. Different teammates. Different styles. The production followed. So did the winning.

The League Kept Putting Her Name Among Its Best

As the WNBA has grown, Thompson’s place in its history has been reinforced by the league’s continued recognition of her accomplishments.

The nine All-Star selections matter. The eight All-WNBA teams matter. The 7,488 points matter. But so does the fact that those accomplishments were being built while the WNBA itself was still teaching people how to understand its stars.

The league kept returning to Thompson when it recognized the greatest players in its history. She made the WNBA All-Decade Team in 2006, the Top 15 Players list in 2011, the Top 20 list in 2016 and The W25 in 2021. She is one of only nine players selected to all four of those milestone groups.

As new generations of stars arrived and the pool of great players continued growing, Thompson's place among the league's best never disappeared.

Her name kept surviving the cut.

The Hall of Fame eventually made that recognition permanent. In 2018, Thompson was inducted into both the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. USC retired her No. 14 jersey the following year.

Those honors came long after Houston’s final championship, which is exactly why they belong in this story.

Thompson’s place in basketball history wasn’t preserved only by nostalgia for the Comets.

The sport kept looking back at its history and deciding she belonged near the front of it.

Basketball Didn't End When the Playing Did

Thompson’s playing career ended in 2013, but her relationship with the game didn't.

She moved into coaching, first joining Texas as an assistant before becoming the head coach at Virginia in 2018. Her four seasons leading the Cavaliers added another perspective to a basketball life that had already stretched from college star to WNBA pioneer, international champion and Olympian.

It is a quieter chapter than four straight championships or becoming the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer, but it adds something important to the picture. Thompson spent her playing career understanding how basketball was changing around her. Coaching and scouting gave her different ways to remain part of that process, helping evaluate and shape what came next.

Her role changed. Her understanding of the game still had somewhere to go.

Put Her Back in the First Sentence

There is no reason to diminish Cynthia Cooper or Sheryl Swoopes to make more room for Tina Thompson. That’s not the point. There was always enough room for all three.

Houston’s dynasty worked because all three mattered differently. Cooper’s scoring mattered. Swoopes’ two-way dominance mattered. Thompson’s shooting, versatility, size and consistency mattered.

And Thompson’s own career eventually grew far beyond whatever hierarchy people wanted to assign inside that trio.

Four WNBA championships. Nine All-Star selections. Eight All-WNBA teams. Two Olympic gold medals. 7,488 career points. A Hall of Fame career. Seventeen seasons spanning the league’s entire opening era. International success that proved her game belonged anywhere.

And the distinction of being the first player ever selected in a WNBA Draft.

Maybe there is something fitting about returning to that first pick.

Before the championships, before the scoring record and before anyone knew what a WNBA dynasty would look like, the league held its first draft and Houston had the first choice.