Welcome to Basketball Insider, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. Tina Charles called it a career on Tuesday morning, leaving the WNBA absolutely on her own terms, and with her skills utterly undiminished.
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Her true shooting percentage of 51.5% sat above her career mark of 50.5%. Her presence on the court — a stretch big capable of finding her teammates, limiting turnovers and defending anyone position 3-5 — is as stellar in 2026 as it was when she made her WNBA debut in 2010. The list of 6’4 and taller players with her assist percentage or better is primarily filled with successors to Charles.
It is worth noting, however, that this was not the shape of her game when she debuted. A true back-to-the-basket center in her early years for Mike Thibault and Connecticut, I remember watching her after she was traded to the New York Liberty, long before games would begin on late afternoons at Madison Square Garden, studiously noting her position on the court around the perimeter before starting to shoot threes, one after another. Many of us wondered: why was a big doing that?
She made her first three in a game against the Los Angeles Sparks on May 21, 2016, and the limitations of her circumstances can be distilled from that box score. Candace Parker, Nneka Ogwumike, Kristi Toliver and Alana Beard all started for the Sparks. That day, Charles’ starting lineup included Sugar Rodgers, Lindsey Harding, Tanisha Wright and Carolyn Swords.
Even so, her 2016 Liberty finished with a record of 21-13, behind only Los Angeles and the Minnesota Lynx. In 2015, Charles and the Liberty fell to an Indiana Fever team led by multiple All-Stars Tamika Catchings and Marissa Coleman, then lost first round playoff games at home in both 2016 and 2017. The system by which a third overall seed could face a do-or-die single-game playoff opener quickly disappeared, but not before a pair of Charles’ most promising seasons were ended by a vintage Diana Taurasi 30-point effort and nine threes by Toliver, then with the Washington Mystics.
Despite those postseason results, I had multiple current or former WNBA talent evaluators tell me she was the best player in the WNBA — a debatable point, for sure, during Elena Delle Donne, Nneka Ogwumike and Maya Moore‘s prime, but a fascinating debate all the same.
It is hard not to draw the parallels between the supporting cast for Charles and those for Patrick Ewing in his prime, another player whose greatness cannot, and should not, be diminished by the lack of a championship. Like Ewing, Charles won gold with USA Basketball and captured NCAA glory. Ewing was similarly underappreciated in his time, but Charles’ career arc takes it further — her hometown team itself was sent into exile.
I asked 15 current or former WNBA talent evaluators where they’d place Charles amid the all-time list of league players, and the most popular answers placed her either firmly in the top ten or between 10 and 20. The former group, disproportionately, were people who had employed her at one point or another in her career. Familiarity, in other words, did not breed contempt.
But to me, the biggest part of Charles’ legacy came not from her epic on-court performances, but instead the degree to which she could see around the next corner. Her offensive evolution is only one such example.
During one exit interview, I remember asking her about what she planned to work on, and she responded in her typical, no-BS way: she couldn’t work on what she wanted to because she needed to go earn a living in China, a problem the WNBA needed to solve. That was during the mid-2010s.
Similarly, Charles’ actions have encouraged the groundswell of on-court activism the league has become known for. In 2016, following the Miami police shooting of Charles Kinsey, Charles eschewed the league’s uniform guidelines and donned an inside-out warm-up in protest. She even did so while receiving a pregame award, which drew the ire of the league office and then-commissioner Lisa Borders. Though the protests brought along fines that constituted a not-insignificant portion of player salaries at the time, Charles helped organize her teammates and opponents to continue wearing the black t-shirts.
“After seeing the African American male shot three times after helping an autistic person out this morning in Florida, I knew I couldn’t be silent,” Charles said during a post-game press conference on July 21, 2016. “Knowing the player I am representing this organization, if anybody was going to wear it, it had to be me. I have no problem wearing this shirt inside out for the rest of the season until we are able to have the WNBA support us.”
Sufficiently cowed, the league backed down. The 2020 Atlanta Dream, ongoing collaborations with the Everytown for Gun Safety, even the multi-year effort to garner public support during labor negotiations, all have ties to Charles’ willingness to leverage the players’ cultural weight in support of causes that matter.
And if you cannot imagine the New York Liberty playing anywhere but Barclays Center, Charles was ahead of the curve there too. She told us moving the Liberty from Westchester County to Brooklyn was “the big thing” back before it happened or Joe Tsai had committed to it, helping to move the conversation toward that outcome.
Charles’ refusal to fit into a neat box, and to speak up when she felt pushed to do so, made her some enemies along the way. It also enabled her to play at a generational level for 15 years, fully define her position on the floor and set the stage for massive growth in her profession, all while altering the trajectory of her hometown team. She capped her career with a pair of seasons in Atlanta and Connecticut, mentoring young players who will take those lessons deep into the 2030s and beyond.
If Tina Charles’ dreams as a young girl in Queens were ambitious, well, she certainly exceeded them.
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