“Sue Bird Taught Me How to Play Basketball”: Gabby Williams on Storm Legend’s Impact on Her Career

Seattle Storm guard Gabby Williams has just had the best year of her career. With just one game to go in the WNBA regular season, she’s averaging career highs in points, assists and free throw percentage, and she’s just three steals away from breaking Teresa Witherspoon’s single-season steals record, a mark that has stood for 27 years.

Williams is a leading candidate for Defensive Player of the Year, and she’s a big reason why the Storm are on the verge of the playoffs. Their magic number is 1 with just one game to go, meaning if they beat the Valkyries tonight or the Sparks lose to the Mercury, they’ll be in.

This is Williams’ seventh season in the WNBA and her fourth in Seattle, and when she first joined the Storm she had the good fortune to overlap with the very end of Sue Bird’s career. Bird retired at the end of the 2022 season, and just this past weekend she was enshrined into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Williams played for UConn in college, and when she joined ESPN’s NBA Today show yesterday, she gave her fellow Husky credit for making her the player she is today.

“I feel like Sue taught me how to play basketball, for real,” she laughed. “I just learned so much from Sue Bird in one year, in just one year. She was the type of captain and point guard that would just send you clips to your phone, just like, ‘Hey Gab, I’m watching film and I think this is what we can do.'”

“She’d sit down with me and figure out what I like to do, and yeah, obviously she’s just the smartest player to ever play basketball, so I would just go home and take notes from everything she would tell me every day in practice,” Williams added, further crediting Bird’s influence on her career.

Williams obviously benefited from Bird’s tutelage, as she made her first All-Star Game appearance this year. She also nearly took down Team USA in last year’s Olympic gold medal game, as she led France with 19 points to a narrow one-point loss.

The Storm won four titles while Bird was on the roster, but if they do clinch that final playoff spot this year, they’ll have a tough matchup against the Minnesota Lynx, the No. 1 seed. Williams and her fellow All-Stars, Nneka Ogwumike and Skylar Diggins will need to be at their best to take down Napheesa Collier and company.

In the meantime, Bird is still dispensing wisdom, both at her Hall of Fame induction speech and on her Bird’s Eye View podcast, where she talks to some of the game’s best players and breaks down the most important things happening in the WNBA.