Maya Moore and Sue Bird to be inducted into Basketball Hall of Fame

Two UConn women’s basketball legends will forever be enshrined as greats of the game.

The Basketball Capital of the World will have two more representatives in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

The Hall of Fame announced Saturday that both Maya Moore and Sue Bird would be inducted to the Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2025. The duo join head coach Geno Auriemma (2006), Rebecca Lobo (2017), and Swin Cash (2022) as members of the UConn women’s basketball team in the Hall of Fame. UConn has seven total members of the Basketball Hall of Fame, with Jim Calhoun and Ray Allen representing the men’s side.

Both Moore and Bird achieved incredible success at every level of basketball, ranging from college to international to professional. Given their massive impact on UConn, the WNBA and basketball as a whole, it’s fitting that the two stars are first-ballot Hall of Famers and take their rightful seats amongst the game’s greatest legends.

Bird played at UConn from 1998-2002 and was a three-time Nancy Lieberman Award winner, given annually to the nation’s best point guard. She earned First Team All-American honors and was the 2002 National Player of the Year in her senior season and played a crucial role in the 2000 and 2002 national title teams.

Following her time at UConn, she spent 21 years in the WNBA, all with the Seattle Storm, appearing in a league-record 550 games. Bird won four WNBA titles (2004, 2010, 2018, 2022) with the Storm and was an eight-time All-WNBA selection. She retired in 2022 as the league’s all-time assist leader with 3,234, a record that stands today.

Internationally, Bird was a mainstay on dominant United States Olympic squads from 2004-2020, winning five gold medals in five tries. Bird and Moore joined forces to bring home the gold for Team USA in both 2012 and 2016.

Moore came to UConn in 2007 and quickly established herself as one of the most talented players the program had ever seen. After her four years, Moore became the program’s all-time leading scorer with 3,036 points — the only Husky to ever score more than 3,000. She was a four-time All-American, three-time National Player of the Year, and helped UConn to national titles in both 2009 and 2010.

Moore was the No. 1 overall pick by the Minnesota Lynx in the 2011 WNBA Draft, where she spent the entirety of her somewhat brief seven-year professional career. In that time, Moore also won four WNBA titles (2011, 2013, 2015, 2017), was named MVP in 2014, and was a five-time All-WNBA First Team selection. Moore and Bird were also both members of the WNBA’s 20th and 25th Anniversary teams.

Following the 2018 season, Moore retired from basketball to fight for the release of Jonathan Irons, a family friend who was wrongly incarcerated for over two decades. Irons’ sentence was overturned in 2020, and the two eventually married and started a family.