This WNBA Tuesday piece is a hard one to write, as we always were big fans of guard Diana Taurasi, both in her college career and in her professional career. But the emotional attachment we develop as fans often does not jibe with the objective analysis of sports history and sports journalism. And that is where we find ourselves today, much like we have often in this corner of the interwebs (like with Don Mattingly, right?).

And this is where we find ourselves today, viewing Taurasi’s career as a whole now that it is over. ESPN definitely highlighted the fact she is the league’s “all-time leading scorer”—and we know how counting stats like that lack true context. First, she played in 565 regular-season games, the second most in league history. So, of course, she has a high point total. But per game? She falls to seventh in league history, at 18.84 ppg.

There’s a big difference between those placings, and it isn’t as fun for the ESPN mediots to shout, “Seventh-highest scorer ever!” Instead, they mislead the reader with this “all-time best” stuff. Taking it further, her are some other realities about Taurasi’s WNBA career to chew on when reading hyperbole:

That’s some raw data, showing her counting stats to be her “best” ones, which is simply based on the reality that she played a lot of games. This is the “quantity over quality” fallacy that the media uses so often to overhype players without any context or factual basis. Again, we love Taurasi, but she clearly has been overrated based on longevity in the league—not on actual quality of play. And this has been demonstrated.

She won four major award votes in his WNBA career, which is a low total in contrast to the elite players we previously have examined here. In addition, we ourselves in our objective, retrospective analysis confirmed none of those vote wins: 2004 ROTY, 2009 MVP, 2009 Finals MVP, and 2014 Finals MVP. You can argue with us if you want, but again, keep in mind, we loved watching her play—and we still re-assigned hardware.

Her team didn’t even make the postseason in her rookie season, so we didn’t give her that nod. She clearly didn’t deserve the MVP in 2009, either, in context. And she was outplayed by the same underrated teammate for both Finals MVP nods. This isn’t something “controversial” … these are just facts. And facts are hard to rectify with our emotions, but we managed somehow: Taurasi never won a major award here.

That seemed crazy to us at the time, but data is data. Now, she was an 11-time All Star, so that says something. But then, the fan vote is 50 percent of the All-Star selection process, so … it’s a flawed system, just like MLB’s Midsummer Classic nonsense. She did play on three different WNBA championship teams (2007 was the first one), but she clearly was never the best player on any of those teams in the playoffs. Huh.

She did win five scoring titles, though: her PER and TSP marks above show she’s been a great player throughout her career, in total, too. But she is nowhere near being “the best ever” at anything … except scoring the most points ever, thanks to playing in the second-most games ever. The difference between the merely great like Taurasi and the actual GOAT candidates we covered here previously? Is tremendous.

And those are just facts. They don’t change our “feelings” that Taurasi always will be one of our favorite players. The facts just remind us that she’s not even close to being anything resembling a WNBA GOAT—and that’s okay.