Tempo vs. Sparks: Marina Mabrey Ties the WNBA Single-Game Scoring Record With 53 in 125-97 Rout

"There's no stat board in our gym," Marina Mabrey said afterward, which is a wild thing to hear from a person who had just scored 53 points in a professional basketball game.

Fifty-three. That ties the WNBA single-game scoring record, and it carried the Toronto Tempo past the Los Angeles Sparks 125-97 on Thursday night in front of 8,210 at Coca-Cola Coliseum. The record belongs to Liz Cambage, who set it on July 17, 2018, playing for Dallas against New York, and A'ja Wilson, who matched it on Aug. 22, 2023, for Las Vegas at Atlanta. Now the club has a third member, and she wasn't even sure she was applying.

Nineteen in the First, and It Only Got Stranger

Mabrey opened the scoring with a 16-foot fadeaway 18 seconds in, and by the time the first quarter ended she had 19 by herself. Dearica Hamby scored 12 of her own in the frame for Los Angeles, which was nice for her and irrelevant to the outcome. Toronto led 38-24 after 10 minutes and never trailed at any point.

A 9-0 run early in the second, with a 24-foot Mabrey pull-up in the middle of it, stretched the lead to 49-26. She had 27 by halftime, and the Tempo led 63-39. Most nights, that's the end of the story.

The third quarter was when people in the building started looking at each other. Mabrey hit a 25-foot step-back at 5:32, then a 24-footer and a 27-foot running pull-up 29 seconds apart, the last two capping an 8-0 run that made it 87-53. She went to the fourth with 39, and Toronto led 95-66. With a 29-point lead, a normal team starts thinking about resting its starters. Toronto kept its best scorer on the floor, and she kept going: a bank shot, two free throws, a putback, a 24-foot 3 and a layup, all before the clock hit four minutes.

Pocket Passes and a Perfect Sidekick

The final line reads like a typo: 17-of-28 from the field, 9-of-18 from 3, 10-of-12 at the line, six rebounds, two assists, plus-36, in 32 minutes. She got 27 from behind the arc, 16 on twos and 10 at the stripe, which is what it looks like when a defense has no good options left on the menu. Those nine 3s tied the WNBA single-game record too, and she had already matched that one six days earlier in a 37-point game at Connecticut. The previous Tempo scoring high was 38, done twice by Brittney Sykes. Mabrey passed that with more than 13 minutes left to play.

Julie Allemand's night deserves its own headline. She went 4-of-4 from the field and 3-of-3 from deep for 13 points, then added 14 assists, six rebounds, three steals and zero turnovers. "Julie literally throws the ball right to my pocket, it's actually wild," Mabrey said, and the film agrees.

Maria Conde added 13, Kia Nurse scored 12 off the bench, and Laura Juskaite had 10 points and 12 rebounds, six of them offensive.

Nneka Ogwumike and Hamby scored 21 apiece for the Sparks, and Rae Burrell chipped in 17. Ariel Atkins went scoreless on 0-of-3 shooting in 14 minutes, with four fouls. Los Angeles shot 43 percent, went 11-of-38 from deep and scored 31 in the fourth, its best quarter of the night, at a point when nobody in the building was watching the Sparks anyway.

Three Away, Then Absolutely Done

With the game long decided, the only suspense left was the record chase. Mabrey says she had no clue until word reached her from the sideline that she was three points short. She had 50 at that moment, after a layup at 4:14. With 2:49 left she took Allemand's 14th assist of the night and buried a running 3 for 53.

"After you get into a state like that, it's kind of hard to know what you're really doing," she said.

A 54th point would have made it hers alone, and Brondello knew it. "She wanted to come out," the coach said, and instead she kept her in. Mabrey missed from 29 feet at 1:37 and again at 1:08, and then she'd had enough. "She was done. She goes, 'I'm out,'" Brondello said. When she left with 1:04 to go, the crowd booed for a moment, then figured out what it had just watched and started roaring. The clock ran out to chants of "We Want Mabrey!"

"I've been doing this for quite some time," Brondello said. "I've never seen that."

The Numbers That Explain It

• The arc: Toronto shot 20-of-42 from 3. Mabrey made nine, and her teammates went 11-of-24.
• The glass: The Tempo won 52-30, with 15 offensive rebounds.
• The opening quarter: Toronto's 38 first-quarter points put the Sparks in a hole they never climbed out of.
• The team mark: The AP says 125 was the highest-scoring game in the Tempo's short history.
• The margin: Toronto's lead peaked at 35.

Back to .500

Toronto is 9-9 and 5-3 at home, back at .500 with eight games left on a homestand that will also make two stops at Montreal's Bell Centre. That's a real boost for a team that had dropped four of its previous five, including Monday's 94-87 loss at Atlanta. The Tempo also take the season series from Los Angeles 2-1. They host Phoenix on Saturday at Scotiabank Arena.

The Sparks fall to 8-9, 5-3 on the road, and this is their third loss in four games. They head to Indiana on Saturday night.

Maybe Leave the Wall Blank

"And then the fans, to end up chanting MVP, I don't know that I ever imagined that. But it was really a good feeling," Mabrey said. Somebody in Toronto should probably install a stat board so she can keep track of this stuff. Then again, considering what happened when she couldn't see one, maybe leave the wall blank.

Stats from the official box score via ESPN and league play-by-play. Postgame quotes as reported by the Associated Press.