Two-time WNBA champion Kara Braxton, who played for four teams from 2005-14, died at 43. The league announced her death Sunday night. No cause of death has been released.
“It is with profound sadness that we mourn the passing of 2x WNBA Champion Kara Braxton,” the WNBA said on social media. “A 10-season veteran, Kara played with the Detroit Shock, Tulsa Shock, Phoenix Mercury, and New York Liberty. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, and former teammates at this time.”
Braxton was the No. 7 overall pick in the 2005 WNBA Draft and spent the first five and a half years of her professional career with the Detroit/Tulsa Shock. She earned a spot on the WNBA’s All-Rookie team after she averaged 6.9 points and 3.0 rebounds per game off the bench. Braxton won both of her WNBA championships with the Shock, the first in 2006 and the second in 2008. She started nine playoff games during the latter campaign to make the greatest postseason contributions of her career.
The most productive stint of Braxton’s career came across the 2010 and 2011 seasons when she spent half of both campaigns with the Mercury. She averaged 11.1 points across 13 games in Phoenix the first year and 10.6 points across 18 starts the following season.
A three-and-a-half-year run with the Liberty brought Braxton’s career to a close. She took on her largest role to date in 2013 — her penultimate year in the league — as a 33-game starter. The 6.6 rebounds she logged that year were a personal best. The Liberty waived her early in the 2014 season.
Braxton and her twin sister, Kim, moved from Michigan to Oregon in 1997. They attended Westview High School in Portland, where Kara won the Oregon Gatorade Player of the Year award as a senior. The twins signed with Georgia to play college basketball, and Kara won the SEC Freshman of the Year award in 2002 after posting 16.3 points per game as a first-year standout. She was dismissed from the team in February 2004.
Braxton is survived by her husband, Jarvis Jackson, and sons Jelani Thurman and Jream Jackson. Thurman is a college football tight end who transferred this winter from Ohio State to North Carolina and who won the 2024 national championship with the Buckeyes.
