DiJonai Carrington just did something only one guard in WNBA history has ever done, and she can’t get anyone to talk about it. Monday night in Seattle, two days after an ejection turned her into the league’s most discussed player for reasons that had nothing to do with basketball, the Chicago Sky guard quietly put together one of the best individual box scores of the season. The discourse machine had no bandwidth left for it.
Two days earlier, Carrington was ejected for a Flagrant 2 during a loss to the Indiana Fever, the play at the center of the flagrant foul that got her ejected against Sophie Cunningham. The fallout escalated into days of national commentary, including a state attorney general threatening assault charges. None of that is what this article is about. It’s the reason the box score two days later barely registered.
What Was DiJonai Carrington’s Stat Line Against Seattle?
Carrington posted a career-high 26 points, 6 rebounds, 1 assist and 5 steals in 27 minutes off the bench, going 10-for-10 at the line, as Chicago fell 97-88 at Seattle on August 10. It’s the first 25/5/5 game by a bench player in WNBA history, and the first guard to do it at all since 2022.
The shooting itself was rough, 7-for-20 from the field per the box score, but the efficiency number is the least interesting part of the night. Carrington got to the line and kept getting there, and that same box score shows Dominique Malonga (26 points, 10 rebounds, 3 blocks) and Natisha Hiedeman (18 points, 9 assists) doing just enough to hold on for Seattle. Translate the steals into plain terms: five of them means five separate possessions where Seattle’s offense never got a shot up, in a game Chicago still lost by nine.
How Rare Is a 25-Point, 5-Rebound, 5-Steal Game Off the Bench?
The 25/5/5 line is rare regardless of role. Per Yardbarker’s breakdown of the stat, Carrington is only the second player in the league to reach it this season, after A’ja Wilson, and just the second guard to ever reach it, period.
Wilson doing it fits her job description. She’s a two-way anchor who rebounds and defends the paint on every possession. A guard doing it, in 27 minutes, coming off the bench, means picking up defensive boards that are normally boxed out by bigger players and still having enough left over to generate five live-ball turnovers on the other end. Guards accumulate assists and points. They don’t typically accumulate rebounds and steals at that volume in the same night, which is exactly why only one other guard in league history has managed it.
There’s also the role attached to it. Wilson’s version came from the best player on her team playing starter’s minutes. Carrington’s came from a reserve who checked in cold, off the bench, and still outproduced most of the players who started the game. That’s the part of the stat that data people tend to fixate on and everyone else tends to skip: the box score doesn’t care whether the tip-off found you in the starting five or on the bench next to the water bottles.
What Did Sophie Cunningham Do in 2022?
That guard was Cunningham, with the Phoenix Mercury in 2022, a coincidence Yahoo Sports flagged almost as soon as the final buzzer sounded in Seattle. It’s the same Sophie Cunningham now playing for the Fever, the same player Carrington fouled Saturday and has spent the days since fielding questions about it. Their names have been linked all week for a play that lasted about two seconds. As of Monday night, they’re linked for something else: a stat line neither of their peers can claim.
A stat-tracking account had the numbers up within minutes of the final horn:
https://twitter.com/statmuse/status/2087029835579248982
That’s the game most of the league never saw, because most of the league was still working through the foul.
Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About It?
My sister has never once conceded a sports argument to me, and she’s spent this week insisting that what people talk about and what actually happened are two different categories. Box score included, she’s not wrong.
The mechanics of it aren’t complicated. A flagrant foul, a deleted social post, and a state attorney general threatening charges generate more clicks, more clips, and more arguments than a career night from a reserve, even a historic one. Coverage of the aftermath split along predictable lines, and that split soaked up the attention a genuinely rare statistical achievement would ordinarily get on its own merits.
Even Emmanuel Acho, who had spent the week publicly going after Carrington over the post, paused to credit the performance on its own terms: “Credit where it’s due — DiJonai Carrington dropped a career-high 26 points tonight and went 10/10 from the stripe.” That matters not because Acho was neutral about anything else that week, he wasn’t, but because it shows the two stories can be separated. Almost nobody else has bothered.
Give the discourse cycle a few more days and this stat line either gets rediscovered as a footnote in Carrington’s season or it disappears into a week nobody particularly wants to relive. My money’s on the former. A 25/5/5 game off the bench is too rare to stay buried once the current news cycle exhausts itself, and when this WNBA season gets written up in December, the box score from Seattle outlasts the reason almost nobody watched it live.
That’s usually how it works with numbers this specific. The controversy that’s dominating the timeline this week will get replaced by whatever dominates it next week, the way these cycles always do. The stat line doesn’t expire the same way. Cunningham’s 2022 line was still worth citing four years later, on the night a completely different guard matched it under completely different circumstances, and that’s the whole case for taking the box score seriously now instead of waiting for the news cycle’s permission.
