Think of an imaginary basketball team — good, but not good enough to make serious noise in the postseason. Not bad enough to have a realistic shot at a top draft pick. A few stars on the roster, but most of them on the wrong side of 30 and headed quickly into the twilight of their careers.
There’s a good chance the Philadelphia 76ers just crossed your mind. They fit the bill — talented but inconsistent, never quite reliable enough for a deep postseason run, with Joel Embiid and Paul George aging out of their primes. But the team I’m describing isn’t the 76ers. It’s not even an NBA team. It’s the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, from 2022 to 2024.
Fresh off a Finals appearance, the Mercury lost in the first round in 2022, missed the postseason entirely in 2023, and flamed out in the first round again in 2024. The aging stars in question were Brittney Griner, Skylar Diggins-Smith and Diana Taurasi.
The decline was swift. After the 2022-23 season, Diggins-Smith departed entirely following a maternity leave dispute that ended with her being cut off from team facilities and services. Griner and Taurasi remained, but Griner was 32 and coming off an enormously difficult year after being detained in Russia. Taurasi had hit 40 and wasn’t getting any younger. Change was needed, and it came.
The Mercury parted ways with head coach Vanessa Nygaard. Long-time GM Jim Pitman announced his resignation. In came new head coach Nate Tibbetts, and on the front office side, Nick U’Ren — a name most people outside of the Golden State Warriors organization had never heard.
On the contrary, if you were around the Warriors organization, U’Ren was hard to miss. He rapidly rose through the ranks, starting his pro basketball career in Phoenix, where he grew up, spending five years with the Suns and Mercury beginning in 2009. He held roles as Suns Director of Video Operations and Mercury Head Video Coordinator before joining the Warriors in 2014 as a special assistant to head coach Steve Kerr.
He later transitioned into the front office, serving as Director of Basketball Operations from 2018 before being promoted to Executive Director of Basketball Operations in 2021. He held that role until leaving for the Mercury in 2023, having been part of four championship teams.
One of U’Ren’s more publicly memorable moments came early in his Warriors tenure, during the 2015 NBA Finals. To set the stage: the Warriors were down 2-1 to Cleveland, and LeBron James had essentially turned the series into a game of 1-on-1. The Cavs were walking the ball up the court and swarming Curry every time he touched it, grinding Golden State’s offense to a halt.
So U’Ren got to work. According to Sports Illustrated, the night after Game 3 he pulled up footage of the previous year’s Finals between the Spurs and Heat, where Gregg Popovich had benched his starting center in favor of a smaller lineup and flipped a deadlocked series into a rout. U’Ren saw the parallel, called assistant coach Luke Walton, and proposed pulling center Andrew Bogut — who had started 65 games that season — for Andre Iguodala, who had started none. Walton was sold. At 3 a.m. he texted Kerr. Kerr liked it enough that he lied to reporters in his pregame press conference, telling them nothing was changing so Cleveland couldn’t prepare.
The Warriors blew out the Cavaliers 103-82 in Game 4. Kerr was asked about the lineup change after the win and publicly named U’Ren on the spot. Per Yahoo Sports, Kerr said, “He’s behind the bench, he’s 28 years old, he’s a kid. We have a staff that is very cooperative. Whoever has the idea, it doesn’t matter. And he brought me the idea.” U’Ren, characteristically, deflected the credit right back. “Steve deserves all of the credit because he has to live and die with the consequences,” he said. “It’s easy to make a suggestion, but he has to make a decision.”
Golden State won the next two games and took the championship. Iguodala won Finals MVP.
The Warriors, under Bob Myers and alongside U’Ren, would go on to win four championships. Two of them came with Kevin Durant in the fold. The fourth and final one came in 2022, with Golden State defeating the Boston Celtics on the back of an aging but battle-tested core of Curry, Thompson and Green.
The Warriors were the gold standard. And U’Ren was about to inherit something very different in Phoenix. A franchise that didn’t need a tune-up. It needed a full rebuild.
His first order of business was hiring Tibbetts, the highest-paid coach in WNBA history at the time of his signing. From there, U’Ren got to work rebuilding the roster. He traded for 2021 WNBA Finals MVP Kahleah Copper, giving up the third overall pick to pry her from the Chicago Sky, and signed point guard Natasha Cloud in free agency. Taurasi played her final season in 2024 before retiring.
Then came his signature move. In February 2025, U’Ren orchestrated what is considered the largest trade in WNBA history by number of assets moved. A four-team, 13-player deal that landed him five-time All-Star Alyssa Thomas and two-time All-Star Satou Sabally.
The same day the trade was announced, Griner made it official — she was leaving for the Atlanta Dream. One era ended and another began on the same afternoon. U’Ren had seen it coming from day one: “When I took the job and canvassed the landscape of the league in terms of talent that might be available, [Sabally] was a name we focused on for obvious reasons.”
Thomas was coming off her 10th season with the Connecticut Sun, bringing with her five All-Star selections, three All-WNBA nods, six All-Defensive team selections, and the all-time WNBA record for triple-doubles. She was in the MVP race in five consecutive seasons. The two-way star was heading West, and U’Ren had built a quality roster around her.
Copper, already in place from the 2024 season, went on to have an All-Star campaign. Sabally arrived alongside Thomas in the trade and immediately became a cornerstone of the offense. The work on the margins was just as sharp. U’Ren had brought Natasha Mack back to the league in 2024 after she hadn’t played a WNBA game since 2021. Playing alongside Thomas in 2025, Mack had the best season of her career, averaging 4.7 points, 5.8 rebounds, 1.5 blocks and 0.9 steals while shooting 57.3 percent from the floor in just 18.3 minutes per game. Then midseason, U’Ren landed DeWanna Bonner, a two-time WNBA champion and six-time All-Star, after she parted ways with the Indiana Fever.
The Mercury finished the 2025 regular season 27-17, good for second in the Western Conference and the fourth seed overall heading into the playoffs. It was their best regular season since 2014, when they won a franchise-best 29 games.
Their reward for that finish was a first-round matchup against the fifth-seeded New York Liberty, the defending champions. They dropped Game 1 at home in overtime, then responded with back-to-back wins to take the series 2-1 and send the defending champions home.
The semifinals brought a stiffer test. Phoenix drew the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx, who had tied the WNBA record with 34 regular-season wins. The Mercury lost Game 1 by 13. What followed was one of the more remarkable stretches of the playoffs. They came back from 20 down on the road in Game 2 to tie the record for the largest road comeback in WNBA playoff history. They won a controversial Game 3 at home. Then in Game 4, trailing by 14 in the first quarter and 13 entering the fourth, the Mercury closed out the series 86-81 to advance.
The WNBA Finals awaited. For the first time in league history, it would be a best-of-seven series. Standing in their way were the second-seeded Las Vegas Aces, who had gone 16-0 to close the regular season and were chasing their third championship in four years. The Mercury’s run ended there. The Aces swept them in four games, including a gut-punch Game 3 where A’ja Wilson hit a game-winner with 0.3 seconds left.
While the Mercury didn’t win a championship, they accomplished one of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent league history. They went from a franchise with little direction to a Finals appearance within the span of a few seasons. Building that kind of team isn’t easy in any league.
Mercury president Vince Kozar put it plainly: “Nick and Nate have rebuilt this team from the ground up. There are no players on this roster from the last time we made the finals in 2021, or even from 2023. So everyone who is here has been hand-picked to be here and has hand-picked us.”
That forward thinking hasn’t stopped. This season saw U’Ren make another creative move, signing Jovana Nogić, a 28-year-old Serbian guard who built one of the stronger international resumes in European basketball playing across the globe. Her most recent stop came with UMMC Ekaterinburg in Russia’s Premier Basketball League, where she posted a three-point rate of over 60 percent on 42 percent shooting from beyond the arc, drew fouls at a steady rate, and averaged 2.5 steals per 40 possessions.
The WNBA rookie label didn’t tell the full story. In her debut she scored 19 points on 62.5 percent shooting, going 4-of-5 from three and a perfect 5-of-5 from the free throw line, adding four assists and two steals in 21 minutes. Days later she scored a career-best 27 points, 11 of which came from the free throw line. Sabally has since moved on, signing with the New York Liberty after the Finals run. But it’s moves like Nogić that have kept the Mercury in the conversation and given the roster genuine upside heading forward.
It’s reminiscent of the organization U’Ren came from. A semi-recent example would be when Bob Myers used the 55th pick on Brazilian forward Gui Santos — an international talent few had heard of — and watched him grow into a legitimate starter earning a $15 million extension.
After digging into his history, it makes sense that U’Ren has emerged as a candidate for the Sixers’ president of basketball operations position. The history with Myers is there, but he’s also built a track record entirely on his own.
Bob Myers told The Athletic what made U’Ren stand out: “He’s seen a lot of winning. He cares. He was very, very studious. How many people worked on a bench and in the front office? I think it’s kind of a rare combo. So it gives them a great understanding of an organization, how it operates. There’s an authenticity to him that makes him someone people want to follow. And he’s very humble. It’s really been an awesome kind of validation of his process.”
Time will tell if U’Ren gets the job with the Sixers, or if he’s the right candidate at all. But one thing is for certain: he’s earned a look.
Kurt Helin
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