Even before winning the 2019 WNBA MVP award and her first championship that year, Elena Delle Donne has had just about as bad a run of health problems as an athlete can have, one that was extended this week when Washington Mystics head coach Mike Thibault said he was unsure of her status for the rest of the year due to complications from two back surgeries last year.
Delle Donne missed most of the Mystics’ 2018 semifinal series with a knee injury before a miracle recovery fueled by shockwave therapy, a hyperbaric chamber, Alter G sessions, and more. She played in the Finals that year but was hardly herself as the Mystics were swept by the Storm.
During her MVP run on a revolutionary spread-out Mystics squad, Delle Donne made good on the promise she had long flashed, and it seemed a dynasty might be in the works centered on the preternatural scoring ability Delle Donne has at her size. Washington won the 2019 title and then traded for future Hall of Famer Tina Charles the following offseason.
Of course, the WNBA season went sideways in 2020, but Delle Donne’s luck was particularly bad. She initially requested out of the Bubble due to COVID concerns after a Lyme disease diagnosis that she has said forces her to take 20-plus pills on a daily basis, but the request was denied by the league’s medical panel. Later, the team was able to get a medical exemption by way of Delle Donne’s back injury, meaning she had two health scares bad enough to opt out of an entire season.
Those back injuries intensified in the months following, prompting two surgeries to repair multiple broken discs. Delle Donne’s recovery was expected to be complete in time for opening day of the 2021 season, but instead, her debut did not come until last month, when the WNBA returned from its Olympic break (Delle Donne was not on Team USA in Tokyo, either).
After a nearly two-year wait, Delle Donne looked like her usual self as a scorer but was pulled from an Aug. 26 game and has not played since. The return lasted just three games. Now, Thibault has said Delle Donne is not even practicing with the team and described her physical progression as “not great improvement.”
The fallout of Delle Donne’s ongoing misfortune and consequences of her increasingly brittle body are that one of the greatest basketball players ever may miss chunks of three out of four playoffs and effectively two straight full seasons.
