Diana Taurasi likely is the best player in the history of women’s basketball. And what does it say about U.S. women’s basketball when that best player, an American, will not play in the States this year?

Taurasi is playing in Russia, at the moment, and when the season there is over, she will take time off — right through the WNBA’s spring/summer season.

The New York Times did a big piece on Taurasi, and about her living in Russia, and her decision to spurn the WNBA — which was a completely rational, I-gotta-take-care-of-me decision. Any U.S. expat making significantly more money abroad than they would at home understands.

Taurasi playing only in Russia is not really a surprise — because she told me almost a decade ago she was considering it.

In a previous life, a colleague and I drove over to Phoenix, where Taurasi’s WNBA team, the Mercury, is located.

Our intent was to produce a package on how she was the best player in the world, our interest being heightened by the fact that Taurasi was from our neck of the woods, the San Bernardino County city of Chino, to be exact.

I had seen her play at Don Lugo High School, where she was so good that by the time she was a senior she didn’t bother trying to score anymore; she was more interested in making the perfect pass to one of her teammates.

She and the University of Connecticut won three national championships during her four years there, and she was the Naismith Award player of the year winner her final two years.

She was the No. 1 pick in the 2004 WNBA draft and played 11 seasons with the Mercury, winning three championships and  being named MVP once — which is about three fewer than she should have had.

By 2007, she already was spending her winters in Russia, with Spartak Moscow, where she made 10 times her $49,000 WNBA salary. She told me: “We have to do the job to pay the bills, to live, basically. And our bills mostly get paid overseas, by overseas teams and companies.”

Even then, it was clear she came back to the WNBA out of a sense of responsibility to the U.S. women’s game. Even though it made for her playing more than 100 games a season and increasingly concerned about breaking down, physically.

She said: “Sometimes you have to make decisions that have to be selfish. Because at the end of the day no one is going to worry about you but yourself. That’s just the bottom line.”

And she is telling the New York Times pretty much the same thing, now that she finally has done it.

NYT doesn’t bring this up, but if Taurasi is going to spend a season not playing in the WNBA, giving her full attention to her Russian team, UMMC Yekaterinburg, this is the year to do it.

She just had a grueling 2014, starting it with UMMC, winning a WNBA championship with Phoenix and winning a gold medal with the U.S. national team at the 2014 Fiba World Championship before returning to Russia.

Spending this summer off might well be what she needs to gear up for 2016, when she presumably will be part of the U.S. Olympic team at Rio de Janeiro, intent on her fourth gold medal — after having played in Russia.

She apparently is making $1.5 million in Russia this winter, compared to the $109,000 she could make in the NBA.

At age 32, choosing one over the other should not have been hard for Diana Taurasi. And I hope the WNBA understands and accepts what she is doing.