NEW YORK —There was no red carpet for UConn women’s basketball legend Diana Taurasi to walk at the entrance to her documentary premiere at the Whitby Hotel in Manhattan on Monday night.

Instead, in true Taurasi fashion, they rolled out her resume.

More than 15 feet of white carpet stretched through the doorway, striped with line after line of Taurasi’s accomplishments spanning her iconic college career at UConn and 20 seasons as a professional. There were the obvious headliners — three NCAA championships, six Olympic gold medals, three WNBA titles, the 2009 league MVP award — but it’s easy to forget more than a decade later exactly how dominant Taurasi was in her prime.

The carpet also highlighted her seven Russian League titles, three EuroLeague championships, her five seasons leading the WNBA in scoring and her never-ending list of league records including all-time 3-pointers, all-time field goals made, and of course, her all-time best 10,646 career points.

The story of Taurasi’s impact on the game is easy to tell with a laundry list of victories and awards, but when director Katie Bender Wynn began working on the documentary in 2021, her goal was to give viewers a complete picture of the character hidden behind the wall of trophies. The three-part series, simply titled ‘Taurasi,” does just that, beginning with Taurasi’s upbringing as the daughter of Argentinian immigrants and delving into topics the superstar has rarely discussed publicly including her 2009 DUI arrest in Phoenix and her 2010 doping scandal after testing positive for a banned substance while playing in Turkey.

The docuseries is available to stream beginning Thursday on Prime Video, but an early screening of the second episode was held Monday for a collection of friends, family, business associates and media. The episode begins in 2005 and covers the early years of Taurasi’s pro career both in the WNBA and overseas, centering on her tenure in Russia with the club Spartak, where she played from 2006-10 alongside former UConn teammate and longtime friend Sue Bird.

“It felt like it was portrayed on the screen, which according to Katie, that’s what you want when you watch something,” Taurasi said during a Q&A session after the screening. “You want to feel like it’s real, like it’s authentic. I’m still shivering a little bit, because some of those scenes take me back to a place that was difficult.”

The WNBA was in an unstable place when Taurasi entered the league, and as franchise after franchise folded ahead of the 2008 recession, she said players lived in a constant state of anxiety that the league could cease to exist at any moment. Taurasi also revealed in the episode that her rookie salary as the No. 1 overall draft pick in 2004 was just $42,000 a year — before taxes. Playing in the Russian League during the offseason, her agent Lindsay Kagawa-Colas claims in the doc that Taurasi was making 16 to 18 times more than she could in the WNBA.

“We had so many conversations of, will the league be around in two or three years? Should we plan on doing something else? Should we go back to school?” Taurasi said. “There was that security blanket going overseas, like no matter what happened to the WNBA, you could find a job in Europe that paid well, and you could do the thing that you loved the most.

“The goal (was always) to play in the U.S. year-round, to get valued as the best basketball players and the best league in the world. When you’re not feeling that, you have some harsher feelings toward the league, and sometimes I was a little bit more outspoken than people liked.”

The documentary dives deep into Taurasi’s close relationship with Spartak owner Shabtai Kalmanovich, who describes her like a daughter in archival footage. Kalmanovich poured money into his women’s basketball team, not just in player salaries and facilities but also in everyday luxuries like expensive meals, the best hotels and private planes. Taurasi details a vacation she took with Kalmanovich’s family to Israel after the 2009 WNBA season when he could tell she needed a break, and she tells a story of the owner handing her thousands of Euros without question to go shopping during a road trip to Paris.

Kalmanovich was murdered midway through the Russian League season in 2009, and Taurasi speaks candidly on camera about how impactful that loss was both on and off the court. She never played for Spartak again after that year, but when the club fell into financial difficulties following Kalmanovich’s death, Taurasi volunteered to finish the season without pay and led the team to its third consecutive EuroLeague title.

“She wasn’t feeling self-worth as a female athlete in her own country, and yet she’s in Moscow and some ex-KGB spy, Shabtai, is making her feel more self-worth than her own country. That’s pretty powerful,” Bender Wynn said Monday. “(Her) friendship with Shabtai was obviously such an important component to (her) story, and what Diana did and sacrificed in Russia, she’s a game-changer for the whole league, for every athlete that’s come after her. ”

In 2025, the WNBA is thriving like never before. The league added its first expansion team since 2008 this season with the Golden State Valkyries, and new franchises in Toronto and Portland are set to join in 2026. Three more teams in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia will bring the WNBA to 18 teams by 2030, and those cities each paid a record expansion fee of $250 million.

The Connecticut Sun are on the precipice of the largest sale in the history of women’s professional sports with a valuation of approximately $325 million. Viewership is up 21% across the board through the first three months of the season, and WNBA teams are averaging a combined attendance of 10,857 — the highest since the league’s second year in 1998.

There’s a bittersweetness for Taurasi in seeing how far the league has come, in knowing that her experiences as a young player have become almost entirely alien to the biggest names in today’s game. Notre Dame star Hannah Hidalgo was in attendance for the premiere, and Taurasi joked that the 20-year-old wouldn’t know how to watch film that wasn’t in high definition.

“I think it’ll open their eyes into making sure that they take care of this thing,” Taurasi said. “I think for the future generation, you have to put just as much work into the game. That’s the most important thing, is the game of basketball. That’s the thing I always valued the most. When they watch this film, it’s probably going to feel very foreign to them — ‘What do you mean you have to go overseas and play?’ That was the life that my generation; that’s what we had to do. That was probably a bigger part of our basketball career than the WNBA, and that sometimes hurts to say.”

Taurasi is finding peace in retirement, in taking space away from basketball for the first time after dedicating herself to the pursuit of greatness for so long. It took her until mid-January of this year to decide that the 2024 WNBA season was her last, but Taurasi said she hasn’t looked back since. She still watches games, still talks trash with current players from her couch, but when asked what’s next for her, Taurasi responded with an easy grin.

“Nothing,” she said. “I have nothing on the books but to be home with my family and hang out and travel and reconnect with people I haven’t seen in a long time. Admire a cup of coffee and a cactus. For as driven as I was playing basketball, I am very good where I’m at right now in my life with doing nothing.”

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