Marina Mabrey ties WNBA scoring record with 53 points in Toronto win

Marina Mabrey scored 53 points to tie the WNBA single-game record and carried the Toronto Tempo to a 125-97 win over the Los Angeles Sparks on Thursday night. She finished 17-for-28 from the field, 9-for-18 from 3-point range and 10-for-12 at the line, adding six rebounds and two assists in 34 minutes as Toronto moved back to .500 at 9-9.

The outburst also tied the league record for 3-pointers in a game, with nine, and gave Toronto a margin that made the night look less like a close race than a full-scale scoring surge. Los Angeles fell to 8-9 and had no answer once Mabrey started stacking made threes and free throws into a scoring line that matched the WNBA’s highest single-game total.

Mabrey said she did not realize she was on record pace until her sister Michaela Mabrey, sitting on the sideline, told her she was three points away. “There’s no stat board in our gym,” Mabrey said. That detail fit the way the performance unfolded, with history arriving almost by surprise while Toronto kept feeding its hottest scorer.

Mabrey joined rare company. Liz Cambage first set the 53-point standard on July 17, 2018, in Dallas’s win over the New York Liberty, and A’ja Wilson matched it on Aug. 22, 2023, in Las Vegas’s victory over the Atlanta Dream. Wilson’s game came in a season when the Aces finished with the most wins in WNBA history to that point, and Cambage’s night included 10 rebounds and five blocks, underscoring how uncommon it is for one player to control every phase of a game at that level.

For Toronto, the timing matters. The Tempo are the WNBA’s first team outside the United States, the league’s 14th franchise, and they began play in 2026 with Sandy Brondello as their inaugural coach. A record-tying performance in Canada gives the new market an immediate star moment, and it comes after Mabrey had already posted a then career-high 37 points against Connecticut on June 19. The sequence suggests the 53-point eruption was not a fluke but the peak of a recent scoring climb, arriving in a league where elite shot-making is becoming a nightly draw instead of a one-off event.