Lauren Jackson Totally Explained

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Lauren Elizabeth Jackson (born 11 May 1981 in Albury, New South Wales, Australia) is an Australian professional basketball player. She is often called LJ, Loz, or Lozza. She is a forward/centre with the Seattle Storm of the WNBA, the Australian national team The Opals and, until 2006, the Canberra Capitals of the Australian WNBL. She has won national championships in the U.S., Australia, and Russia, and a world championship as well. She is widely considered to be the best Australian female basketball player of all time and one of the best players in the world.

Australian career

Both Lauren Jackson's parents, Gary and Maree, represented Australia at basketball and she took up the game at age four. A teenage prodigy at Murray High School, Albury, she moved to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra as a teenager. She played for the Australian women's team, the Opals, in 1997 as a 16-year-old. She led the Australian Institute of Sport team, made up of the country's best 16 to 18 year-old players, to a premiership in the WNBL Women's National Basketball League, the Australian women's professional league, in 1998-1999 - an unprecedented achievement for a youth team. Ineligible to continue with the AIS team, she joined the other Canberra-based team, the Canberra Capitals, and led them to four titles in 1999-2000, 2001-02, 2002-03 and 2005-2006.
   In the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, Jackson registered 20 points and 13 rebounds in a loss to the United States in the gold medal game. The silver medal was Australian basketball's first in international competition.
   In the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, The Opals were again silver medallists, losing to the United States in the Olympic final.
   In the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia, the Opals defeated New Zealand's Tall Ferns in the final, earning the gold medal.
   In the 2006 FIBA World Championship for Women in Brazil, the Opals defeated Russia to win the gold medal. Jackson captained the team.

American career

When Jackson declared for the WNBA Draft in 2001, she was an automatic first selection to the Seattle Storm, where she's played ever since.
   The 196 centimetre (6'5") Jackson is very effective in offence, combining her height with a good shooting percentage - even from three-point range (she led the WNBA in three-point percentage in 2004) - athletic ability and, not least, a little bit of "mongrel" (mental toughness and aggressiveness) to deal with the highly physical defensive tactics usually laid on to stop her. Earlier in her career, her defence was perhaps the weaker aspect of her game, but that area has also improved, as Jackson received the WNBA Defensive Player of the Year Award in 2007.She is a leading defensive rebounder and shot-blocker in the WNBA.
   In 2003, despite the fact that the Seattle Storm didn't make the playoffs, she was voted as the WNBA's Most Valuable Player that season.
   In 2004, her Seattle Storm team won the WNBA Championship by defeating the Connecticut Sun, two games to one. She was runner-up for the MVP award in that year and again in 2005.
   In April 2006, she signed a three-year contract to stay with the Storm.
   On 24 July 2007, Lauren scored a WNBA record 47 points in a 97-96 overtime loss to the Washington Mystics at the Verizon Center in Washington D.C.
   On 6 September 2007, Lauren won her second MVP award. She led the league in both scoring (23.8 points per game) and rebounding (9.7) and was second in the league in blocked shots (2.0) as well as leading the WNBA in double doubles with 17. She was also named Player of the Week 5 times capping off a stellar season.

Other international play

Jackson was reportedly paid over $100,000 to play a few games with a Russian club before the 2005 WNBA season.
She decided to leave Australia after the 2005-06 season. While she'd huge offers from clubs in Russia, she opted instead to sign a three-year deal with a Seoul-based club Samsung Bichumi in South Korea's national league. Although she wouldn't earn as much money in Korea as she could in Russia, her salary was higher than what she could earn in Australia. More importantly, Korea's season runs only from mid-December to early March, about half the length of the European season, and clubs in the league only play two matches a week. She indicated that Korea's shorter season was the main reason she decided to sign there, noting that it would likely prolong her career. She won the Korean league's MVP award in 2007.
Also in 2007, Jackson played alongside Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird for Spartak Moscow in the Women's Russian A Superleague helping them win the championship over CSKA Samara in five games.

Off the court

Jackson posed nude in an Australian magazine, Black+White, that featured Olympic athletes who were set to compete in Athens in the 2004 Summer Olympics. The expensively printed magazine/book has been produced for the last three Olympic Games and, by the 2004 edition, was considered relatively uncontroversial in Australia with its "artistic" approach to nude photography and its equal coverage of male and female athletes. Jackson also posed for the 2005 edition of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. After her pro basketball career she hopes to be involved with a women's refuge and help victims of rape and domestic violence.

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