Dawn Staley, Charles Barkley chosen as Lindsay Whalen’s HOF presenters

By KSTP

Monday, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame announced the list of Hall of Famers who will present the Class of 2022 next month.

Minnesota’s Lindsay Whalen will be among the inductees during the Sept. 10 enshrinement ceremony at Symphony Hall.

Inductees are asked to select previous inductees to accompany them and present them to their peers. Whalen has chosen Dawn Staley and Charles Barkley as her presenters.

Meanwhile, another former Gopher being inducted next month — Lou Hudson — will be presented by Spencer Haywood and Jamaal Wilkes.

Whalen will be the first Gophers women’s basketball player inducted into the hall and the seventh Gophers player overall.

The current University of Minnesota women’s basketball coach led the Gophers to the Final Four, then won four WNBA titles with the Minnesota Lynx, two gold medals at the World Championships and two Olympic gold medals. She was a six-time WNBA All-Star, three-time All-WNBA First-Team selection and the league’s career leader in games won (307).

Hudson, along with Archie Clark and Don Yates, were the first Black basketball players to get scholarship offers from the U of M. He finished his Gophers career with 1,329 points, ranking 17th all-time, and was an All-America selection and All-Big Ten First Team honoree in 1965. He then became the No. 4 overall pick in the 1966 NBA Draft and went on to a 13-year NBA career in which he was a six-time All-Star and amassed nearly 18,000 career points, the 12th most in league history when he retired.