Tina Charles of the Atlanta Dream moved up in the record books at a fitting time on Wednesday.
She scored 12 points to move into second place on the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer list. Charles, 35, did against the league’s all-time points leader, Diana Taurasi of the Phoenix Mercury.
Atlanta beat the Mercury 72–63 in the process at College Park, Georgia. Charles, who had been away from basketball for a year, credited Dream head coach Tanisha Wright and gave a nod to Taurasi afterward.
“I’m thankful to be on the court with Diana, to be in behind Diana and be in the same sentence. It’s unimaginable. I thought I was done playing last year. For me to be here right now, it’s just really special,” Charles added.
Taurasi has 10,500 career points atop the all-time scoring list, and Charles sits second at 7,491 points. Charles passed former WNBA greats Tina Thompson (7,488) and Tamika Catchings (7,380) in Wednesday’s game. The moment Charles scored the record basket, she said, it took her by surprise.
“I had a heads up of a stop play but I didn’t know about the celebration,” Charles said. “It was great.”
A No. 1 draft pick by the Connecticut Sun in 2010, Charles emerged as one of the league’s top players in her 14-year career thus far. The New York native and former UConn star has averaged 17.9 points per game and 45.1 percent shooting for her career.
With the Sun, she won Rookie of the Year in 2010 and MVP in 2012 before the team traded her to the New York Liberty in 2014. Charles continued her stellar play and became the franchise’s all-time scoring leader in six seasons with 3,739 points.
After another trade in 2020 to the Washington Mystics, Charles sat out the season with a medical exemption during the COVID-19 health crisis. Charles came back better than ever in 2021 when she averaged a career-high 23.4 points per game for the Mystics, but she left the Mystics in hopes to win an WNBA title with the Mercury in 2022.
That didn’t pan out as the Mercury struggled, and Charles took a buyout in June that year to join the Seattle Storm, which lost in the WNBA semifinals that year. She didn’t return to Storm.
Charles rejoined Wright with a return to basketball in Atlanta. The two played together with the Liberty from 2015 to 2016. Wright has been coaching the Dream since 2021.
“Most of my favorite memories [with Charles] are practices,” Wright told reporters. “We went in and practiced hard every single day. We competed hard in practice every single day. We were super-competitive to where if we didn’t win drills we wanted to do it again.”
The Dream improved to 10-17 with the victory, the team’s third-straight win since the Olympic break. Charles is seeing the improvement and credits her coach’s leadership.
“Every time we go into the locker room before a game Tanisha has three things. It’s accountability, respect, and toughness,” Charles said. “Toughness for us today was consistency. Really good teams are very consistent in who they are. The identity, we’re growing and showing the league. We were just consistent defensively, offensively, sharing the ball, celebrating one another.”
