For 22 months, Elena Delle Donne rehabbed and visualized and mediated … and rehabbed some more. She kept her circle tight and her mindset focused, but that doesn’t mean it was easy. For 22 months, her basketball career hung in the balance as she dealt with two back surgeries and an ongoing struggle with Lyme disease as she fought to return to the game.
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She went on walks with her wife and her dogs, with her wife taking over dog duties because the 2019 WNBA MVP wasn’t strong enough to handle their two Great Danes, Wrigley and Rasta, on leashes. On Delle Donne’s better days, she was able to get into the gym and shoot around. Her friend Russell Westbrook would show up early to rebound for her, and she for him. And on the not-so-great days, she would lay on the floor with Wrigley and Rasta. She was told over and over that she needed to be flexible, that everything was day by day, that there are no black-and-white answers when it comes to back injuries. She needed to get comfortable in the “gray.”
After 22 months of gray, she returned to the floor with her team this fall, playing one-on-none, one-on-one, two-on-two, slowly inching her way back up to full contact and full court after her last game on Oct. 10, 2019.
“I don’t think you realize how much you miss it until you’re actually back in it,” she said in early August.
And 682 days after the Mystics won the 2019 WNBA Championship — when teammate Natasha Cloud announced Delle Donne had been playing through not one, but three herniated discs in her back — Delle Donne stepped onto a game floor.
Game day kind of felt like the first day of school, Delle Donne admitted. She had couched the expectations of her family — and likely herself, too — for her return Sunday. It had been a long time and a long road, and she and her medical team set an approximate time restriction of 20 minutes just to see how things went.
When her name was announced during the starting lineup, the crowd in D.C. — already on its feet — welcomed her home.
Elena Delle Donne introduced last to a huge ovation. Lotta folks been waiting for this day. #wnba pic.twitter.com/6jwV58gzrg
— Kareem Copeland (@kareemcopeland) August 22, 2021
“I was already nervous and experiencing enough butterflies and emotions in that way that then I felt like tears welling up, and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I cannot cry right now and add more to this emotional plate,’” Delle Donne said. “I had been competing for a championship the last time I was on that court.”
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The last basket she had scored was during Game 5 of the WNBA Finals, when she backed up Alyssa Thomas, turned into the paint and got a friendly bounce from the heel of the basket. On Sunday in Washington, D.C., she hit her first shot attempt of the game — a turnaround on Katie Lou Samuelson from just outside the block — to get things started in the Mystics’ 75-68 loss to the Storm.
It wasn’t her best shooting performance, finishing 5-for-11, but she scored 16 points while making all five of her free throws in 22 minutes. Sunday was about getting her footing and returning to the game, and also about being honest with herself. “It was going to be ugly at times and still will be ugly at times,” Delle Donne said candidly.
Part of that honesty was listening to her body, something she has had a lot of practice doing. In the fourth quarter, with her minutes around 20 — her rough time restriction cap — she stayed in because her body told her it felt OK.
And that might be the best sign for Delle Donne — that with 10 games until the close of the regular season, she can start ramping up. For the Mystics, a team that spent nearly a month playing with only six or seven healthy players, they now have a pressure-filled opportunity to make a run to the playoffs.
Tina Charles came to D.C. with the expectation she and Delle Donne would be tandem stars, playing off each other, making one another more potent. Last year, both had medical exemptions from the WNBA bubble, and this year, Charles has been the sole scoring option at times. For two years, the Mystics have been materializing in different ways — two steps forward, one step back. But now, with a playoff spot within striking distance, they are finally at full health, and Delle Donne is back on the floor where she won a WNBA title.
“Her presence alone on the court is huge for us,” Cloud said Sunday. “People have to commit to her, they have to play her honest, which opens up the floor a lot for us offensively. And just her poise and her leadership has been phenomenal.”
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Following her postgame interviews, Delle Donne was headed to a lengthy rehab session, but there was a bit more joy to it — because for the first time in 22 months she’d be rehabbing after a game, instead of visualizing a time when she might be able to return to the floor.
She’ll still exist in the day-to-day gray area that comes with a significant back injury, but Sunday’s game, even in a loss, made one thing very clear: Delle Donne’s return can make this team relevant in the final stretches of the season. If she holds up, perhaps she and the Mystics can get back to exactly where they were (sans three herniated discs) 22 months ago.
(Photo: Stephen Gosling / Getty Images)
Chantel Jennings is The Athletic's senior writer for the WNBA and women's college basketball. She covered college sports for the past decade at ESPN.com and The Athletic and spent the 2019-20 academic year in residence at the University of Michigan's Knight-Wallace Fellowship for Journalists. Follow Chantel on Twitter @chanteljennings
