Cheryl Reeve Explains Diana Taurasi Benching in Team USA Olympics Gold Medal Game
The USA 5x5 women's basketball team won its eighth consecutive Olympic gold medal at the Paris 2024 Games almost exactly one year ago. This marked the sixth gold medal that women's basketball icon Diana Taurasi secured in her incredible career.
However, Taurasi didn't play a single minute in Team USA's gold medal game against Team France. And Taurasi got honest about her not playing in this game in a three-part docu-series about her that's titled "Taurasi," which premiered on Amazon Prime Video on August 7.
"I'm confused by what happened," Taurasi said. "I never got, 'Hey, you're not going to play because we're going this direction.' Sounds good, I can live with that."
Taurasi went on to note that she didn't feel like she deserved this gold medal (at least when compared to the other four she has) because of her lack of playing time.
Cheryl Reeve Speaks on Diana Taurasi Benching in Olympic Gold Medal Game
Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve (who was also Team USA's head coach at the Olympics) was the guest on an August 14 episode of In Case You Missed It with Khristina Williams. And at one point in the discussion, she addressed Taurasi's comments about not playing.
"We went into the game as we did with all the other games, that you don't have a mindset of not playing someone, or a group of people," Reeve said. "It is the hardest coaching job that there is... You're gonna piss a lot of people off because there's a lot of great players that aren't playing like they want to play. They're great players for their team, they're great players in the league. But not everybody can be the great player on the national team.
"You have to make a choice. And that's unpopular. And I get that," Reeve added. "But you know it when you sign up for it. And I can honestly tell you that going into that game, there was every intention of playing Diana Taurasi... It's what you do as a coach, you go in survival mode. And those are the decisions that we made that we felt like were the best decisions to get us to the place to win the game."
Cheryl Reeve opens up on the real reason Diana Taurasi didn’t play in the Olympic gold medal game and why the decision came down to the heat of the moment.
— In Case You Missed It with Khristina Williams (@ICYMIwithKW) August 15, 2025
Full episode out now: https://t.co/8mTyxegLxP pic.twitter.com/TRfg8V07Uk
Reeve concluded by saying, "What you do is what you know at that time, what you feel like is best. That's the space I live in."
One certainly doesn't envy Reeve having to allocate playing time among the world's best female basketball players.
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Grant Young covers Women’s Basketball, the New York Yankees, and the New York Mets for Sports Illustrated’s ‘On SI’ sites. He holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of San Francisco (USF), where he also graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and played on USF’s Division I baseball team for five years. However, he now prefers Angel Reese to Angels in the Outfield.
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