Lindsay Whalen didn’t want to come to Connecticut. Her parents didn’t want her to come to Connecticut.
Whalen had grown up in Hutchinson, Minnesota. She was a star at the University of Minnesota, an hour from her hometown.
She would have preferred to stay there, in her comfort zone, playing for the Minnesota Lynx. But when her name was called at No. 4 in the 2004 WNBA draft, she was – as expected – headed to play for the Connecticut Sun.
“Once I was drafted out there, maybe the night of the draft, I was like, ‘Oh, it would have been nice to be in Minnesota,’” Whalen said. “But I was like, ‘I just have to change my focus that this is who drafted me and this is who’s going to pay me.’”
The move – from Midwest to East Coast – made her grow up, she said. Sun coach Mike Thibault taught her the nuances of being a professional basketball player. His family embraced her. So did the Sun fans, who remembered her hard-nosed point guard play from the Final Four, when Minnesota lost to UConn.
On Saturday, Whalen – an All-American at Minnesota, an All-Star with the Sun, a four-time WNBA champion with the Lynx and an Olympic gold medalist, will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
She coaches at the University of Minnesota now, retired from playing. But she can look back and appreciate her formative years in a state far away from her home.
“I think those years really helped me grow up,” Whalen said. “It was the first time I lived away from Minnesota. Going to college at the U, I was an hour away from my parents. Now I’m in Connecticut and figuring things out somewhat on my own. It was really good for me.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better head coach coming out of college in Coach Thibault. He taught me how to be a pro. He taught me how to use my time. In college, everything is scheduled, and now you have a lot of time in your day outside of practice and how should you spend that time and what you should be doing. How to prepare for games and what you should be eating. How much film to watch. I learned a ton from Coach T.”
Whalen is still close to the Thibaults. Mike and Nanci Thibault’s daughter Carly was an assistant for Whalen at Minnesota before taking the Fairfield job earlier this year. Whalen and Mike, now the Washington Mystics coach, text regularly.
In the spring of 2004, Thibault, who had coached the Sun for one season, knew he needed a young point guard to build the franchise around – and he wanted Whalen.
Diana Taurasi would go No. 1 in the draft. Duke’s Alana Beard, No. 2. Thibault wasn’t sure what Charlotte would do with the third pick, and he was nervous.
“All college season, the Lynx hadn’t shown interest in her until [the University of Minnesota] made their tournament run and went to the Final Four,” Thibault said. “All of a sudden, they’re calling us to see about doing trades and we were like, ‘Absolutely not.’ But we worried that Charlotte with the third pick, that they would do a deal with Minnesota and [the Lynx] would jump in front of us on draft day.
“They took Nicole Powell.”
Thibault knew Whalen didn’t want to come to Connecticut initially.
“Her family was worried about her, that she was far from home,” he said. “The coaches at the University of Minnesota tried to dissuade us from taking her so she could stay home.
“But I was adamant that A) she needed to do this for herself, and it was absolutely who we wanted, and I wasn’t going to let somebody talk me out of it. The other part of it was, after we drafted her, we brought her mom and dad out here and put them up in Mohegan for a couple days and had a press conference and told them what we were all about and their daughter was going to be in good hands.
“She’ll tell you that even though she wasn’t sure she should come here, that she was a Minnesota kid, it was the best thing that happened to her because it forced her to grow up as an adult away from home and live life on her own.”
Once here, Whalen fit right in and took charge of a squad of veterans that included Nykesha Sales, Katie Douglas and Taj McWilliams-Franklin. She had replaced a four-time WNBA All-Star point guard, Shannon Johnson, who was friends with the veterans. Thibault remembered a practice where the veterans were squabbling about who should get the ball and Whalen finally spoke up.
“One’s going, ‘You need to throw it to me,’ and another one’s going, ‘We need to do this,’ and another one’s saying, ‘We need to do this,’ and she stopped practice,” he said.
“These were not her exact words, but it went something like: ‘You SOBs will get the ball when I say you get it.’ That kind of set the tone for the rest of the year.’”
The Sun went to the WNBA Finals in 2004, losing to Seattle, and again in 2005, falling to Sacramento.
“We played Detroit in the [2005] playoffs and they were really good,” Thibault said. “[Detroit coach] Bill Laimbeer was like, ‘We’ll guard Nykesha Sales, we’ll guard Katie Douglas, yeah, Lindsay Whalen’s pretty good,’ and she basically torched them.”
Whalen scored 27 points in a 75-67 win in Game 2, to sweep the series.
“She scored or made a play happen like 7-8 possessions in a row and she stared down their bench as she was running back,” Thibault said.
She was also a great practical joker, mostly targeting Bill Tavares, the Sun’s public relations director. Once she called him and told him there were reporters surrounding her house and TV trucks with floodlights and what should she do?
“She got him all worked up,” Thibault said. “She was sitting on the couch watching TV.”
Whalen was traded to the Lynx in 2010. Her jersey has since been retired by the Sun and the Lynx. She won Olympic gold medals in 2012 and 2016 and ended her WNBA career as the winningest player in the league, playing on the winning team in 325 regular season games. When she retired in 2018, she was third in assists (2,348) and 14th in points (5,523) and had 1,459 rebounds.
She took away a lot from her days in Connecticut and uses it now as the coach at University of Minnesota.
“One of the biggest things that Mike always preached was that he wanted us to play a little bit like a jazz quartet, teach us to play and not just know plays,” she said. “He wanted us to play and read and react and move off each other, not necessarily have to run a ton of plays.
“He has a lot of life balance. He was big on team dinners, staff dinners, hanging out and telling stories - just the aspects of being on a team together, enjoying the all-encompassing parts of being on a journey with people together. I really learned a lot from Coach.”
