MINNEAPOLIS -- Seimone Augustus has that southern storyteller's way about her. She can mimic voices and act out the parts in whatever tale she is sharing.
"When she starts with the stories, I listen," Lynx teammate Maya Moore said. "Because they're so funny. She impersonates people and adds her own little touches to it. She's quite a character."
However, the stories from Augustus' beloved hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, haven't been amusing this year. The massive rain and subsequent flooding that hit the area in August wrought horrific damage that will take a long time to clean up and rebuild. Many people were also left devastated emotionally.
"I'll show you a picture of my grandmother's house," Augustus said while getting out her phone to display a gigantic pile of debris. "That's how the entire street looked. So many people lost all their belongings."
Augustus' parents had damage but not total destruction. They also had flood insurance, which was a big help. The animals Augustus keeps back home all made it through the flooding safely; that was among her worries while she was at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
Augustus was moved to tears while talking about her hometown after the United States won the gold medal, and she has been back to visit a couple times since. When the WNBA Finals are over, she'll have more time there because she doesn't plan to play overseas this winter.
Her heart is always between these two places: Minneapolis, where she has played professionally since she was drafted No. 1 in 2006, and Baton Rouge, where she was born, grew up and played collegiately at LSU. Through her play and her life off the court, she looks to honor both places.
Now in her 11th WNBA season, Augustus is trying to win a fourth league title. But she has already cemented her legacy as a champion. "What do you want your legacy to be?" was the question Cheryl Reeve asked Augustus when she took over as Minnesota's coach in 2010.
"When she kind of challenged me, I had never really thought about it," Augustus said. "Then I realized, in order for us to be successful, I've got to be a complete player. I have to play defense.
"It can't be like, 'Well, Mone is guarding this player today, so we'll have to give extra help.' Because that puts pressure on everyone else to not only do their job but to help me do my job too."
Augustus averaged 21.3 points over her first three seasons before a knee injury limited her to six games in 2009. From 2010 to '14, Augustus averaged 16.5 points, with her offensive production as consistent as a metronome.
As the Lynx improved in other ways offensively the past two seasons, her scoring average dropped: 13.8 points per game in 2015 and 11.2 this year. Yet guarding her remains a difficult task.
"She's incredibly crafty with the ball," Sparks forward Nneka Ogwumike said. "She's a spectacular ball handler. But she can also score in many different situations. She can post up, pull up, take you off the dribble."
Sparks coach Brian Agler added, "Seimone knows the game so much more than she did when she was younger. And that's not to discredit her younger days. It's just to say that she's worked at her craft and thinks the game now at a different level, which all the great ones do."
Ultimately, as Augustus said, her commitment to defense helped turn the Lynx into champions.
In 2011, when Minnesota began its current run of success, the Lynx had another young scoring sensation: then-rookie Moore.
"Cheryl didn't want to throw me into the fire defensively then, as I was adjusting from being a 4 to a 3," Moore said of her move from power forward at UConn to small forward in the WNBA. "She had Seimone guard the more dominant scorers every night, and she stepped up and did it. That was a big reason why we were able to win in 2011.
"I have appreciated how she doesn't necessarily get a lot of praise for it outside of our team. But it's so important to why we win. She's just dependable. And we know if there's a game where she struggles, she's going to bounce back."
Augustus didn't have her best showing Sunday in Game 1 of the WNBA Finals, shooting 2-of-5 from the field for six points with four turnovers. But Moore is right that Augustus has always been resilient, and her personality has been the perfect counter for Reeve's seriousness.
"She is incredibly humble and hilarious to be around," Reeve said. "I always say she's great for me because she brings levity to a lot of situations. Seimone is a big reason why this team has fun in what they do.
"At this point, she's saying, 'I'm going to play as long as I can and as hard as I can.' She's a great veteran and a great teacher, and I think she's grown into those things."
Augustus is outspoken without being strident. She has never shied away from talking about social issues and things that matter beyond basketball. She was out and an advocate of marriage equality before a lot of other athletes were willing to talk about it. Earlier this year, she took a stand with her Lynx teammates in regard to the Black Lives Matter movement. The shooting deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, in July hit especially close to home for Augustus because those two communities are home for her.
"She doesn't necessarily get a lot of praise for it outside of our team. But it's so important to why we win. She's just dependable." Maya Moore on Seimone Augustus' defense
"There are always those boundaries that you can and can't always cross in your professional career," Augustus said. "Some people speak up, no matter what. And some people tend to take the back seat and wait it out.
"The great thing about Coach Reeve is she said, 'There's no better time to do it than now. It's happening now.' We got some backlash from it, but for the most part, we got a lot of positive feedback. We were talking about the maturity and growth of this team, to be able to do that and play basketball. That says a lot about the women we have on the team."
Maturity is a key word and one that means so much to Augustus' development. She was a prolific scorer in high school, college and the early part of her WNBA career. She could have been offended by Reeve's suggestion that she needed to be better at everything else. She could have been resentful when asked to do more of the so-called dirty work.
"She just said, 'OK,' and did it," Reeve said. "I think it's leadership and being a great teammate. She's like the pied piper. Everyone loves being around Mone. But we needed her to not just be that fun person but also a leader on the floor, to sometimes have to say something difficult to a teammate.
"Now you look at her years later. What is her legacy? That's something she took very personally and applied it."