The Seattle Storm is well-stocked with excellent players. They have many seasoned players who have led the team to sheer excellence. One of their best players is Lauren Jackson.
She has been instrumental in leading the Seattle Storm to many victories, and has been a true team leader.
International Career
Jackson was born in 1981 in Albury, South Wales. She began playing basketball at the age of four, and both of her parents played professionally. At the young age of 16, she became the youngest Australian woman to be selected to the Australian Women’s National Basketball League and played several seasons for the Opals.
At 17, she became the first Australian woman to play for the team in a major international competition. She helped them win a bronze medal at the World Championship that year with an average of 10.9 points in the series.
Also, over the course of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, she scored 127 points, made 12 steals and 67 rebounds, and blocked 23 shots. Thus, she led the Australian Olympic team to a silver medal. She has also made appearances with the Opals in the 2004 Athens Olympics, 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2006 FIBA World Championship.
Coming to the WNBA
Jackson was selected by the Seattle Storm in the first round of the WNBA draft in 2001. Since then, she has been selected to the All-Star team eight times.
In 2003, 2007 and 2010 she was named the WNBA Most Valuable Player, so she clearly has had an impact on the league as a whole. Her impact on her team, however, is even more pronounced. During her rookie season, Jackson scored an average of 15.2 points 6.7 rebounds, 34.5 minutes, 2.21 blocks and 1.86 steals per game.
She led all the league rookies in minutes played, rebounds, steals, rebounds and points. She made a great impact on the team that year, in spite of missing three games due to injury.Since then, Jackson has continued to have a great influence on the Seattle Storm.
Every season, she has averaged in the high teens and twenties for points per game, and has consistently finished in the top ten in the WNBA for statistics like free throw percentage, field goal percentage and points per game.
2009 was a particularly big season for Jackson. She was nominated by Seattle Storm fans to be part of the All-Decade team, to celebrate the Storm’s tenth anniversary. For the week of June 15-21, she was named the WNBA Western Conference Player of the Week.
Further, on August 15th of that year, she reached the career milestone of 5000 total points scored, becoming the youngest WNBA player to reach that mark. Plus, she did it in the shortest amount of time, and she did all of this in spite of missing six games due to a stress fracture in her back.
Clearly Lauren Jackson is an amazing player, and certainly a force to be reckoned with on the basketball court. She has been, and certainly will continue to be, a leader for the Seattle Storm.