Sparks to retire two-time WNBA champ DeLisha | College News
The Sparks will retire former participant DeLisha Milton-Jones’ No. 8 jersey on July 28 when the staff hosts the New York Liberty as a half of the league’s thirtieth anniversary celebration.
Milton-Jones performed 11 years for the Sparks, serving to lead them to back-to-back titles in 2001 and 2002.
“It’s like one of those moments where it’s Christmas, and you’re anticipating getting a gift and and when the day finally is here, that feeling you can’t even describe is rather euphoric and nostalgic all at the same time, and it brings a peace about you in a way that you can’t explain,” Milton-Jones told The Times. “Because you put so much time, energy and effort into everything that you did in that moment in your life, and now to be rewarded in this manner is just pretty big.”
Milton-Jones would be the fourth Sparks participant to have her quantity retired after Lisa Leslie (No. 9), Penny Toler (No. 11) and Candace Parker (No. 3).
“I’m going to be cheesing from ear-to-ear,” she said about the upcoming ceremony. “I’m probably going to be fighting back tears, because when I think about my time spent in the purple and gold man, it was riddled with so many hard days, but it taught me so much about being a winner, and that turned into being a champion two times over.”
Now the pinnacle coach at Old Dominion, the 51-year-old Milton-Jones was inducted into the ladies’s basketball Hall of Fame in 2022. She is also a two-time gold medalist and previously coached at Pepperdine before taking over at Old Dominion.
She performed 17 years in the WNBA after being drafted fourth general by the Sparks in 1999 and set the document for most video games performed in league historical past before that was damaged by Sue Bird. In addition to the Sparks, she performed for Atlanta, New York, Washington and San Antonio. She performed the first six seasons of her profession with the Sparks and returned for a second stint from 2008-2012.
Her 5,571 profession factors also rank sixteenth in WNBA historical past.
Milton-Jones averaged 17.0 factors, eight rebounds and 4 assists in the Sparks’ 2001 championship run, the franchise’s first. She performed all 40 minutes of Game 1 of the 2002 WNBA finals and scored 17 factors with three blocks and two steals.
She was also a WNBA All-Star in 2000 and holds the franchise document for first-half factors with 27 and 18 in a single quarter.
The Sparks and Liberty confronted each other in the first-ever WNBA recreation in 1997, and the Sparks needed to discover a manner to honor some of their franchise greats during the thirtieth anniversary season.
Milton-Jones said that they had been speaking about a quantity retirement ceremony for a few years, but the timing felt proper to do it this 12 months.
“I found out [officially] a month ago,” she said. “And I cried like a baby. I was just elated that it was finally going to happen.”
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