The one name Candace Parker carries into the Hall of Fame with her
The résumé was read out at Mohegan Sun on Friday night the way these things always are, in a rising sequence of superlatives. Candace Parker won three WNBA championships with three different franchises, took home two MVP awards, a Finals MVP and a Defensive Player of the Year trophy, made seven All-Star teams and 10 All-WNBA teams, and remains the only player in league history to win Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same season, with two Olympic gold medals stacked on top. Then came the part that explained the rest of it, which was the list of people walking up to hand her the orange jacket.
Her parents, Sara and Larry, made the walk, along with her brothers Marcus and Anthony, her sons Airr and Hartt, and her daughter Lailaa, who has been visible at courtside for most of her mother’s professional life. The younger son’s full name is Hartt Summitt Petrakov Parker.
Pat Summitt died in June 2016. Ten years later, two of the players she built at Tennessee are entering the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in the same nine-member class, with Parker and Chamique Holdsclaw both walking through the door in Springfield this weekend.
Why the Tennessee thread is the story of this class
Parker addressed it directly in June, when she was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville. “I know Pat’s smiling down that we’re going to walk in together,” she said of Holdsclaw. The two never played together and are separated by nine years, but between them they carried the Lady Vols to five national titles across 1996, 1997, 1998, 2007 and 2008.
Each of them went No. 1 overall in the WNBA draft, won Rookie of the Year and later won Olympic gold, and they will now become the second and third Lady Vols enshrined in Springfield as individual honorees, following Tamika Catchings.
Holdsclaw introduced Parker at the Knoxville ceremony in June, and Parker used part of her own speech to redirect the attention back. She told Holdsclaw that watching her stop on a dime and pull up, and the New York style she brought with her, was the reason Parker wanted to play basketball and wear orange in the first place.
What Parker built after Tennessee has no clean comparison in the sport. She won her three titles in Los Angeles in 2016, Chicago in 2021 and Las Vegas in 2023, and both Los Angeles and Chicago have since retired her number. Very few players in any league win championships with three franchises, and fewer still arrive as the reason each of those franchises became capable of winning one.
The class going in with her: Amar’e Stoudemire, Doc Rivers, Mike D’Antoni, Elena Delle Donne and the 1996 United States Olympic women’s team are all part of the group, and that Olympic team includes two more Tennessee products in Carla McGhee and the late Nikki McCray-Penson.
Four people with Lady Vols on their record are being honored in a single weekend, a decade after the coach who brought all of them to Knoxville died.
The formal enshrinement is today at 7 p.m. ET at Symphony Hall in Springfield, following a red carpet at 6.
Parker will speak, and somewhere in the building will be a two-year-old carrying Summitt’s surname in the middle of his own, which says about as much about what that coach built as anything that gets said from the podium.
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