Marina Mabrey Got 53 The Fun Way

“I score in bunches, and then sometimes kinda just level out,” Toronto Tempo guard Marina Mabrey said near the end of her press conference after the Tempo’s 125-97 win over the L.A. Sparks on Thursday. It was an accurate description of her own game, which is built on constant movement and a scalding but occasionally evanescent shooting touch. On Thursday night, however, we finally got to see what would happen if Mabrey never reached the “kinda just level out” phase. What if a whole game was just one big scoring bunch? Well, in that case, Mabrey would walk away with 53 points and a share of the WNBA single-game scoring record.

Save your tsking about stat-padding for the next gunner who goes for the record, because this is as pure as 53-point nights come. Mabrey went 17-of-28 from the floor, 9-of-18 from three-point range, and 10-of-12 from the free-throw line. And thanks to the quirks of the Tempo’s home arena, she wasn’t even aware that the record was in reach until she had 50 points.

“I wasn’t really sure, because there’s no stat board in our gym. After you get into a state like that, it’s kind of hard to know what you’re really doing,” said Mabrey postgame. “Honestly, I was guarding the sideline and [Michaela Mabrey] was like, ‘You need three more points.’ I was like, ‘Oh, OK.'”

Perhaps it’s for the best that Mabrey didn’t have more insight into her own pursuit of the record, because a flow state like the one she was in can be delicate and easy to disrupt. Mabrey has always been a player who is at her best when she can give herself over to the momentum of the game. She shot 5-of-6 and scored 19 points in the first quarter, and from there she was off. Every deep three that splashed encouraged the next one; each quick-trigger release offered a challenge to shoot the next one faster. “Sometimes when those really deep ones go in, it’s a little bit wild, and the fans go crazy, and my teammates, too,” said Mabrey, when asked how she judges her shooting touch in the moment. As for what was in her head all night? “Not much.”

It’s nice to see Mabrey playing so liberated. After trudging through a few down seasons in the organizational black holes of Chicago and Connecticut, Mabrey has found a comfortable home for herself in Toronto. She’s averaging a career high 21 points per game and shooting 40 percent on over eight three-point attempts per game. Sandy Brondello has designed the Tempo’s offense around Mabrey’s movement shooting, and it’s a choice that’s paying dividends. In the three games the Tempo have played since Brittney Sykes’s plantar fascia injury, Mabrey has scored 37, 23, and now 53 points, with the Tempo going 2-1 in those games.

On Thursday night, nobody was more bought into the “get the ball to Marina” plan than Julie Allemand, who finished the game with 14 assists and zero turnovers, and was looking for Mabrey at every opportunity. “I think Maria [Conde] got mad at me three times during the game because she had an open layup,” said Allemand after the game. “But I was like, ‘no, sorry, it’s not for you tonight,’ because Marina was feeling it.”