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This Day In Sports…February 24, 2020, five years ago today:
A day like no other for Oregon basketball star Sabrina Ionescu. Earlier in the day, Ionescu had been a speaker at the riveting memorial service for the late Kobe and Gigi Bryant before a capacity crowd at Staples Center in Los Angeles. Then, battling the flu, she joined her teammates for the Ducks’ game at Stanford. Ionescu recorded the 26th triple-double of her career in Oregon’s 74-66 victory, and in the process became the first player in women’s college basketball to amass 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 1,000 assists in a career. Ionescu needed nine rebounds to get there and hit that number in the third quarter.
Ionescu would go on to be the consensus Women’s Player of the Year that season and was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 WNBA Draft, selected by the New York Liberty. She quickly established herself as a pro, scoring 33 points in her second WNBA appearance. But in the next game, Ionescu injured her ankle and didn’t play again during her rookie season. Since then, though, she has been named a WNBA All-Star three times and led the Liberty to their first-ever WNBA championship last October. Ionescu also helped the U.S. win the women’s basketball gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Ionescu met Bryant and his family in 2019 while playing for Oregon, when they surprised her by attending a game at USC. She appreciated Bryant’s dedication to women’s basketball, and he became a mentor. Bryant taught her his famous “Mamba Mentality, helping her up her basketball IQ and work ethic (not to mention her skill set). Ionescu became close with Kobe’s daughter Gigi and helped coach her girls team. So it was only natural that Ionescu was asked to speak at Kobe’s and Gigi’s Celebration of Life four weeks after the tragic helicopter accident that claimed their lives.
“‘You have too much to give to stay silent.’ That’s what he said. That’s what he believed. That’s what he lived,” Ionescu told the crowd at Staples Center. “Through Gigi, through me, through his investment in women’s basketball. That was his next great act, a girl dad. Today may feel like darkness. He was, in so many ways, a sun beaming, radiating, fixed in the sky. I ask each of you, every girl dad, every human here with a voice, a platform and a heart to not let this sun set.” Ionescu still has a photo of the three of them as her cover photo on her Twitter account.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
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