On Saturday (April 5), Maya Moore was voted into the Naismith Basketball Memorial Hall of Fame her first time on the ballot. The direction that her basketball career was headed in 2018, that honor was expected to be a part of her future. What was not expected was that she’d be receiving that honor at only 35 years old.

Moore is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Per ESPN, she was the top girls high school basketball recruit in 2007. She was a four-time First-Team All American star who helped power UConn to a 90-game winning streak that included undefeated 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons.

As a professional with the Minnesota Lynx, Moore was a six-time all-star, WNBA MVP in 2014, and led her team to four championships in only eight seasons. 

Then, in February of 2019 at 29 years old, Moore announced that she was pressing pause on her WNBA career. In an article for The Player's Tribune, Moore stated that she wanted to focus more on her family and her Christian faith. She officially retired in 2023.

Moore first met Jonathan Irons through her godparents shortly before she began her freshman year at UConn in 2007.

Roughly 10 years before that, in January of 1997, Stanley Stotler was shot in his O’Fallon, Missouri home. In 1998, a 16-year-old Irons was wrongly convicted of attempted murder, sentenced to 50 years for first-degree assault and first-degree burglary. No recording or notes exist from the police interrogation of Irons. He was without an adult or legal representation. The case against Irons was filled with holes.

Moore kept in touch with Irons throughout her basketball career. In 2017, while still with the Lynx, she spoke about Irons and prosecutorial misconduct in a Player’s Tribune interview with Jerry Stackhouse.

Her godparents had been working for years to get him out of prison. During her 2019 basketball sabbatical, she put on a full court press in concert with them. She financially contributed to his defense, attended all of Irons’ hearings, and wrote a letter to current United States senator and then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, requesting that his office stop fighting to keep Irons behind bars.

In March 2020, a Cole County judge overturned Irons’ conviction. Four months later following an appeal from AG Schmitt, Irons walked out of prison. After 23 years of incarceration for a crime that he did not commit—and after some help from a future basketball Hall of Famer—Jonathan Irons was able to hug his loved ones on the outside.

There are nearly two million people behind bars in the United States of America. No independent democracy locks up people at as high a rate. From 1989 to 2022, 3,300 people have been exonerated according to the Innocence Project. More than half of them were Black. Since 2017, Moore’s Win with Justice organization has worked to solve systemic injustices such as these. 

No one person can fix mass incarnation in America, especially when much of the population does not believe it to be a problem. Crime was down in Los Angeles in 2024. George Gascón was the district attorney at the time and has received an award from Moore’s organization. 

Maya Moore uses a platform she earned through her excellence as a basketball player to go beyond speaking out against injustice—actively fighting it with real actions. By leaving behind a Hall of Fame career to free an innocent man and advocate for systemic change, Moore has redefined what it means to be a champion—on and off the court.