WNBA star Candance Parker is the first WNBA player and female athlete to be on the cover of the NBA 2K franchise.
The Chicago Sky star will appear on the NBA 2K22 cover for the WNBA’s 25th-anniversary special edition. “Extremely proud and humbled to be the first female cover athlete in the history of NBA2K,” said Parker on Twitter. “I’m honored to work with a company that’s investing in women and betting on us to succeed. I’m hopeful there will be many more badass females to follow.”
Parker’s NBA 2K cover is being celebrated alongside the NBA’s 75th anniversary. Parker will join fellow stars Luka Doncic, Kevin Durant, Dirk Nowitzki and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the cover.
“I think it’s a benchmark of women’s basketball for sure. I think most importantly it speaks to visibility and how important it is and how important the WNBA is,” Parker said about being featured on the cover. “Everyone is looking at it that it’s impacting little girls, but it’s also impacting little boys and young men and young women and men and women. I think our game is different than the NBA; now it’s embracing that fact. Now more than ever, fans want to follow the athlete. Through social media, through video games, it’s adding and benefiting the WNBA.”
“It means a lot to me,” Parker added. “I’m a fan of basketball. I eat, sleep and breathe basketball. I’m a historian within basketball. I am a fan of basketball. I commentate basketball. I play video games. It was really the perfect storm because there are a lot of other people well-deserving of this, and I know that.”
The two-time WNBA MVP joins a select group of female athletes to adorn covers of sports games. She joins Shawn Johnson, who was on the cover of her own video game, Shawn Johnson’s Gymnastics for the Wii in 2010, and Jelena Dokic was on a tennis game in the early 2000s.
