LOS ANGELES — Sue Bird is still not used to being described as a former basketball player.

It's not that the longtime Seattle Storm point guard, who called a wrap on her WNBA career in 2022 after more than two decades in the league, was worried about finding something to fill her time. Instead, she says, "the scariest part" of retiring was the question it raised: "Who am I without this?"

In a sense, the new documentary "Sue Bird: In the Clutch" is her answer. Or at least an answer. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is available on VOD Friday in advance of its Netflix debut, follows Bird during her final WNBA seasons while looking back on her time as a student athlete, her international career and her achievements off the court. In other words, a portrait of someone who was never "just" a basketball player.

"As I started to really research her life, the WNBA, her history, I really felt like this is a coming-of-age story. [The] coming-of-age of Sue as a player, of Sue as a person, of the WNBA, but also of our culture and how we treat women and women's sports," said the film's director, Sarah Dowland, who marveled at the fact that Bird — a two-time NCAA, four-time WNBA and five-time Olympic champion, among other accolades — "wasn't a bigger household name."

For Bird, with only one post-retirement season under her belt, basketball continues to loom large. Over a mid-morning coffee earlier this month, she acknowledged that the 2023 WNBA playoffs reminded her of what she'd stepped away from.

"I went to a couple of games and I realized I miss it," Bird says over the thrum of a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant. "I'm always going to miss that part of it. That was why you played: the chance to win, the energy of it with your team and the fans, the whole thing. I'll probably just miss that forever."

What she doesn't miss is the work and the time and the sacrifice it takes for professional basketball players to make it to that stage. Though the popularity of women's basketball has been surging in recent years — exemplified by excitement around the women's NCAA Tournament, fueled in part by the record-breaking run of Iowa senior Caitlin Clark and impactful freshmen like USC's JuJu Watkins — the life of a WNBA player is not as glamorous as that of their NBA counterparts. It often involves playing year-round, in many cases in overseas leagues where athletes can earn supplemental income during the WNBA offseason. During the first half of her career, Bird herself split her time between the Storm and teams in Russia.

In fact, though Bird can recall receiving questions about how much longer she intended to play and what her post-WNBA plans were as soon as she turned 30, it wasn't until she stopped playing overseas that she started considering her future pursuits. ("I don't know what it is about women athletes … but it was something about the number 30," says Bird, who played in the WNBA until she was 41, in a way that reveals she knows exactly why women athletes get that treatment.)

"That's really when I first started thinking about what's next," she says of those first free offseasons. "And I started to try different things. I tried some commentating. I worked in the front office with the Denver Nuggets. I got into some other business things. I just started to feel things out."

Even before retiring, she co-founded Togethxr (pronounced "together"), a media and commerce company launched in 2021, with fellow Olympians soccer star Alex Morgan, snowboarding phenom Chloe Kim and groundbreaking swimmer Simone Manuel.

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