Marina Mabrey scored 53 points on Thursday night, tying the WNBA’s all-time single-game scoring record, and by Friday morning it was already competing for space with a golf leaderboard and an NBA trade rumor that may or may not be real.
That’s not a coincidence. The window for WNBA excellence in mainstream sports media has always been narrow — narrow by construction, narrow by habit, narrow by the economics of who gets to decide what matters. When a woman puts up a performance for the ages, the clock on its cultural shelf life starts ticking the moment it happens. The burden isn’t just to be extraordinary. It’s to be extraordinary with no other men’s sports distractions running in the same news cycle, on the same day, inside the same 24-hour attention economy. Mabrey didn’t get that luxury.
What she got was a 125-97 demolition of the Los Angeles Sparks that stands as the highest team total in WNBA regulation game history. She went 17-of-28 from the field, 9-of-18 from three (that three-point total also ties a WNBA single-game record) and 10-of-12 from the free throw line. She had 27 at halftime. She had 39 after three quarters. Then she hit three threes in two minutes and the Coca-Cola Coliseum crowd started chanting her name, briefly booed when the Tempo pulled her out, and erupted when they understood what they had witnessed.
Her coach Sandy Brondello, who has been around Diana Taurasi, said: “I’ve never seen that. Not even from Diana Taurasi, and she could shoot it really well. To witness that was amazing.”
Let that comparison land. Taurasi is the greatest scorer in WNBA history. Brondello coached her. And she reached for Taurasi’s name to establish scale, only to say Mabrey cleared it.
Mabrey herself didn’t even know she was closing in on the record. Her sister Michaela, also a Notre Dame alum, was in the crowd and leaned over from the sideline to tell her she was three points away. Marina went out and hit another three. The record had been shared by Liz Cambage and A’ja Wilson, two of the most dominant players of their respective eras. Mabrey joined them in her first season with the expansion Toronto Tempo, a franchise whose previous single-game scoring record was 38 points.
I spent two years freelancing after Northwestern, pitching WNBA stories to editors who would acknowledge they were good ideas and then ask what the SEO looked like. The answer was never good enough. The question was never really about SEO.
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The Marina Mabrey WNBA scoring record of 53 points ties performances by Cambage in 2018 and Wilson in 2023. Both of those games received coverage in a narrower media landscape than the one that exists now, and still felt like footnotes within a week. Mabrey scored hers for an expansion franchise in Canada, which adds another layer of invisibility to a performance that would have dominated sports conversation for a week if it happened in a men’s league. The Toronto Tempo improved to 9-9. The Sparks fell to 8-9. Two box-score lines sitting in a database, waiting for WNBA coverage to catch up to what actually happens on the court.
There is a version of this piece where I argue that things are getting better, that viewership is up, that Caitlin Clark changed the discourse. Maybe. But Mabrey shot 9-of-18 from three on a Thursday night, Brondello had to invoke the greatest player in league history just to give people a reference point, and the sports world still mostly moved on by morning. “I think tonight was just my night from the 3-point line — and from honestly everywhere,” Mabrey told reporters afterward, understated in a way that felt almost protective, like she’d already accepted what would follow.
The 53 points are a fact. The forgetting is a choice.
