Paris, France (SportsNetwork.com) – Diana Taurasi and Candice Dupree of the WNBA champion Phoenix Mercury were added to the list of finalists for the United States’ women’s world championship team.<\/p>\n
The duo will join 13 other players competing for 12 spots on the squad that will play for Team USA at the 2014 World Championship in Turkey.<\/p>\n
“Obviously you’ve got two players coming in that have a tremendous amount of confidence right now after the kind of season that they had and winning the WNBA Championship,” said Team USA head coach Geno Auriemma in a statement Thursday. “You’ve got two of the best offensive players in the WNBA. Diana’s had so much international experience at world championships and Olympics, Candice was with us in the 2010 World Championship and played great. So, I think we have a great group and our group just got a lot better.”<\/p>\n
The other finalists for the team include Seimone Augustus, Lindsay Whalen and WNBA MVP Maya Moore of Minnesota, Seattle’s Sue Bird, New York’s Tina Charles, Tulsa’s Skylar Diggins and Odyssey Sims, Washington’s Stefanie Dolson, Jantel Lavender and Nnemkadi Ogwumike of Los Angeles, San Antonio’s Kayla McBride, Atlanta’s Angel McCoughtry and the University of Connecticut’s Breanna Stewart.<\/p>\n
Brittney Griner of the Mercury is also under consideration for the team, but must first be cleared by her physician. The WNBA’s top defensive player underwent a procedure to correct a retinal issue earlier this month and missed the final game of the WNBA Finals against the Chicago Sky.<\/p>\n
Chicago stars Elena Delle Donne and Sylvia Fowles are unable to compete because of injuries.<\/p>\n
The FIBA World Championship will take place from Sept. 27-Oct. 5 in Ankara and Istanbul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paris, France (SportsNetwork.com) – Diana Taurasi and Candice Dupree of the WNBA champion Phoenix Mercury were added to the list of finalists for the United States’ women’s world championship team. The duo will join 13 other players competing for 12 spots on the squad that will play for Team USA at the 2014 World Championship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[233],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}