A ballplayer’s style is illuminating. The way people hoop says a whole lot about their personality off the floor. Basketball is soul expression.

Shoot-first gunners might never stop talking about themselves. Pass-first floor generals might never talk about themselves. All-out defenders might only talk to themselves.

Now consider what Elena Delle Donne’s playing style might reveal about her personality. Delle Donne built a first-ballot Hall of Fame career on one of the most legendary jumpshots ever and one of the most efficient overall offense skillsets the game has ever seen.

So what does Delle Donne’s game speak of for those trying to listen?

Pick any stop along the way of her journey; the number one overall high school recruit in the nation, the nation’s leading scorer in college, the MVP in Chicago, the gold medal-winning Olympian or the champion in D.C. The footage relays the same motifs.

It screams discipline. It whispers focus. It cries obsession. It roars desire.

Delle Donne’s style of play makes her feel closer to a master artist of antiquity than to most of her contemporary peers; the painter with a stained apron, the sculptor chipping away 1,000 times at marble, the musician with calloused fingers, the woodworker with sawdust in their hair. Like Delle Donne the basketball player, artists of that ilk are equipped with unequaled concentration. Delle Donne’s approach to the game at large and the minuscule points of her jumpshot communicates individualism charged by an innermost fire. The sake of success for the fun of the chase—demanding excellence of herself just for herself, without any craving for exterior praise. A mental and emotional approach that rings out as unique today and when compared to the past’s great players.

Delle Donne definitely still would have been hooping had the cameras and the fans not been part of her life. Back when she was a 10-year-old kid in baggy shorts and a pair of Air Swoopes, back when it was just the love in her heart and the hoop in her sights… well… she’s still that kid, isn’t she? She’s still infatuated with the game, still around it as the USA Basketball 3×3 Women’s National Team Managing Director and as a Special Advisor to Monumental Basketball, the group that owns the Washington Mystics and Wizards.

Talent might be a myth. Genetics are uncontrollable. The only thing we really have is persistence. Determination knows Elena Delle Donne very, very well. Burnout tried to nip at her heels when she was going into college. Losing tried to take away her spirit when she was a young player in the W. Injuries tried to weigh down her whole body when she was an established superstar. Delle Donne didn’t quit. Ever. She has never lost her love of basketball and she has expressed that passion through every action we’ve seen her take since she first appeared in 2006’s SLAM 101.

“It’s completely shaped me into the person that I am,” Delle Donne tells SLAM about the role basketball has played in her life. “All the highs, I think the lows even more. All of it, the entire journey. When I think back on it, it’s never what we accomplished and checking off trophies or MVPs and all those things. It was the relationships that were created on the journey and are still there. And just all the things that I learned and remembering to just continue to be a sponge in whatever’s next for me, because we’re always learning. I’m just so grateful that this game took me to so many places and I met so many incredible people that have really changed my life.”

A life lived with the game by her side. Pain and heartbreak entangled with success and elation. There have been many versions of Delle Donne the basketball player throughout these many years. In addition to that 10-year-old in the baggy shorts and Air Swoopes, there’s the Ursuline Academy form. She was a five-year varsity starter, a four-time state champ and the only Ursuline Raider to ever score more than 2,000 points. The next iteration of Delle Donne that the public witnessed was as a Delaware Blue Hen. Her name is etched in stone alongside nearly every University of Delaware record. On top of authoring UD’s record book, Delle Donne helped her squad win more than they had in a generation. The Blue Hens had a ridiculous .764 win percentage during Delle Donne’s four seasons in Newark. She led the 2013 squad to a 32-4 record and a trip to the NCAA Sweet 16, as well as the 2012 group to a 31-2 mark and another NCAA Tournament run. Her college numbers soared, offering the first picture painted by her unwavering personality. Through 114 career games, she averaged 26.7 points and 8.9 rebounds on 48 percent from the field, 40.9 percent from distance and 91 percent from the foul line. The Chicago Sky variation of Delle Donne produced more of the same. The Sky selected her second overall in 2013. She won that summer’s Rookie of the Year trophy, beating out the other members of the Three to See, number one overall pick Brittney Griner and number three overall pick Skylar Diggins. Delle Donne’s four seasons in Chicago are highlighted by three All-Star nods, four trips to the playoffs, a scoring title, one trip to the 2014 Finals and the 2015 MVP award. The Team USA edition of Delle Donne also necessitates emphasis. She left the 2016 Olympics in Rio with a gold medal and a renewed sense of self. The most complete installment of Delle Donne’s playing career followed. As a member of the Washington Mystics from 2017-23, Delle Donne captured another MVP award, four more All-Star selections and the 2019 WNBA championship. Those are just the basketball versions of Delle Donne that the public got to watch. There are probably dozens more that we don’t know about.

And so the question becomes which basketball version flashed to Delle Donne’s mind first when the ultimate honor—being named to the Basketball Hall of Fame—was recently bestowed upon her?

“Oh, it’s hard to say,” Delle Donne reflects. “I don’t think I can even say it was one thing. It was almost like if you can think of a collage, it was all those things that you just said and it wasn’t even all basketball moments on-court. It was, like, driving to AAU practice on a Tuesday night, eating Wawa with my mom or my dad driving me an hour and a half away, because I played in Philly. Moments like that where you’re like… all those little things came into this.

“And I think that’s why a Hall of Fame honor just like feels so different than any other honor, way different than MVP because those things are just a season, where this feels like it’s my entire career,” Delle Donne goes on. “It’s not just pro and college. I feel like it’s everything from when I was a little girl shooting over a ladder, trying to work on my arc pattern, like, all those moments. Maybe I did reflect even a little bit more about the little girl who fell in love with the game, and I was just almost a little bit nuts about it, and loved watching Sheryl Swoopes or watching [Michael] Jordan on TV, and then immediately going outside and go to the backyard and trying to do what they were doing.”

What others might call “nuts” can also be classified as “enchantment.” For whatever reason, the game spoke to young Elena. Her dad, Ernie, heard it.

“When I was little, my dad would bring out a ladder and he put a broom on top of the ladder and he actually named it Oscar. He would measure it out and then measure where it needed to be and I would shoot from behind Oscar and it would get me a really good high-arcing pattern. So it kind of just grooved my arc.”

That wasn’t the only work her pops did to help her journey with the game. Elena’s entire skillset is hand-crafted by a family’s devotion. In addition to transportation from her mom and competition from her brother and support from her sister, Ernie studied Jordan’s jumpshot and noticed his right shoulder was individually aligned with the rim. So he suggested to Elena that she work on being a “turned shooter.” They also developed her base together. That deadly 1-2 step with the right foot was the product of years working on her shot.

“Luckily he likes physics and he’s kind of a nerd,” Delle Donne says lovingly about her pops. “He was my shooting coach my entire career, even to the last game with the Mystics. He would come in and shoot with me and we’d have these very mechanical drills, kind of just getting me back aligned, getting my arc pattern correct. I have to credit a ton to him.”

And what does he say about Elena being the best free throw shooter in recorded history?

“He loves that,” she says with a bit of a laugh. “I also had a high school coach who actually helped even simplify it that much more. [He] took the form that my dad and I, you know, grooved, but then made it, like, the most efficient free throw where hardly anything can go wrong because we got rid of so much motion. I do have to credit him as well. His name is Steve Johnson. I get to 90 degrees, and from there, it’s literally just lift and flick. Those were my keys.”

Delle Donne thought about it all and that’s why she succeeded on the floor. As a soloist, her triumphs—a library of swishes from everywhere—were firmly grounded in history early on. Like she mentioned, there was more to learn, though.

She still had to win.

The move from Chicago to D.C. announced her awareness. She knew it was time to join a collective and grow as an individual. She concentrated on passing the ball, both out of double teams and as the initiator from the high post. She had averaged 1.6 assists per game and an assist percentage of 9.2 during her time with the Sky. She finished her career with the Mystics at 2.1 assists per game and an assist percentage of 13.7. She was always a team player, even as the leading scorer. There are no high-fives-per-game stats for her career, but she would have been a leader at being a leader. Some things, though, don’t need to quantified, especially chemistry. That’s just a feeling that can go unspoken because a ballplayer’s style is illuminating and when a bunch of the flashlights with the same lumens count get together, they shine brighter than the sun.

Delle Donne joined with Kristi Toliver, Natasha Cloud, Aerial Atkins, Emma Meesseman, LaToya Sanders and the rest of the 2019 Mystics to win it all. A magical group. D.C.’s true union station (67 percent of the team’s baskets were assisted on in 2019). Their togetherness was bound by a sisterhood of like-minded competitors. Camaraderie doesn’t get stumbled upon. This championship was no accident. It was the result of trust in their leaders, Toliver and Delle Donne.

“There’d be games where Kristi and I would be in a two-man game, and it would just be like, ‘Give us the ball, clear out and let us have clear side and literally we can do anything with it,’” Delle Donne says. “And it would just be so fun coming down to the court, Kristi and I would give each other a smile and it’s like, ‘Here we go.’”

Go, they most definitely did. Soundless communication, a dialogue exchanged through movement. Maximum synergy between two basketball players that really saw each other glow, a microcosm of that entire team moving as one monumental light.

“I think the shocking part of it was this relief because, you know, other years when you’re in the Finals, of course, you believe you can win for sure. But that year, we were so good. It was like, we have to win this. Like, our team is so phenomenal, and you don’t get that every year, and you just knew the feeling that year was just so right.

“So when the moment finally happened, it was like, ‘Whoo, we can all breathe,’” Delle Donne says. “We felt we were a championship team, but when it happened, it was such a moment, like a weight lifted off all of our shoulders, and then just such joy for the person next to us. It wasn’t like we were celebrating it for ourselves. We were just so happy for each person in that locker room, which made the celebrating that much greater. So, to have a team that was so good and then a team of such selfless, incredible teammates, like, you don’t always win and have it that way. It made it that much more special.”

Unlike those artists she shares so many traits with, Delle Donne is part of a results-oriented world. Prior to that chip, she had already molded her craft around the canvas of timelessness. The follow-through to her automatic jumpshot will forever more be a portrait of basketball beauty. She had already helped to revolutionize the boundaries previously placed on taller players by running off pin-downs and creating her own shots. She had already been an outspoken supporter of multiple health conditions, both mental and physical. She had already done nearly everything there was to do, and in 2019, she accomplished her final all-time feat as a player.

Delle Donne stopped playing in 2023, officially retired in 2025 and was named to the Hall in 2026. The accelerated acceptance timeline to the Hall is a compliment to her contributions to basketball. The Hall noticed the glimmer of her game, its extraordinary discipline, focus, obsession and desire, thundering louder than any words ever could.

Marianne Stanley, a pivotal assistant coach on the champion 2019 Mystics, will be enshrining Delle Donne in the Hall a few months from now. She won’t be the only one.

“My niece is gonna be the one who’s my escort,” Delle Donne tells SLAM. “And she has that same passion and love that I can recognize that I had at her age. She’s only 12, so hopefully it’ll be a memorable moment for her and also inspiring.”

The hand-crafted Delle Donne family game will continue to be passed down, echoes of Elena’s persistence and passion still illuminating the path to hearing her soul expression long after No. 11’s many swishes have stopped.

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Photos via Getty Images.