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The official announcement isn't coming until Saturday, but word is starting to leak out about the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2026.
Amar'e Stoudemire, Doc Rivers, Candace Parker and Elena Delle Donne will be part of the class, reports Shams Charania of ESPN.
Those four are part of a much larger class of Hall of Fame finalists, a group that includes Blake Griffin, Gonzaga coach Mark Few, Chamique Holdsclaw and Marques Johnson, among others.
Parker and Delle Donne would not be a surprise — they were locks to make the Hall of Fame. Stoudemire was considered likely to make the cut.
Parker was a two-time NCAA national champion at Tennessee who was drafted No. 1 in 2008 and became the only player in WNBA history to be named Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same season. She went on to be a three-time WNBA champion and two-time league MVP (2008, '13). Parker also is a two-time Olympic gold medalist (2008, '12).
Delle Donne is a WNBA champion (Washington Mystics in 2019) and two-time MVP (2015 and 2019). She was the first player in NBA history to average 50/40/90 shooting percentages for a season. Delle Donne also won a Gold Medal as part of the USA team at the 2016 Olympics in Beijing.
Stoudemire was an integral part of the seven-seconds-or-less Suns with Steve Nash and coach Mike D'Antoni, who changed the way the game is played in the NBA. An incredibly athletic 6'10" forward who was a force in transition, and could play away from the basket and attack off the dribble (and was ahead of his time with that), he is a five-time All-NBA player, six-time All-Star and the 2003 Rookie of the Year who averaged 18.9 points and 7.8 rebounds a game during his 14-year NBA Career.
Rivers is the name raising eyebrows among some fans.
Rivers has won more games than all but five coaches in the NBA, and he is ahead of Hall of Famers like Phil Jackson, George Karl and Larry Brown. He has a championship ring as a coach. Rivers is in his 27th consecutive season as an NBA head coach, having started in Orlando then moved on to Boston (where he won a championship in 2008), the LA Clippers, Philadelphia and now Milwaukee. He has a career regular season record of 1,191-861 (58%) and has coached in 226 playoff games. Rivers played more than 10 seasons in the NBA before that and was an All-Star in 1988.
He's also had some spectacular playoff flameouts — his teams have blown 3-1 series leads three times — and had some rough exits from a couple of his stops. The voters for the Hall of Fame (an anonymous vote) looked past that and saw him as a Hall of Famer.
The formal announcement of the Class of 2026 for the Naismith Hall of Fame is set for Saturday.
