Kelsey Mitchell just built the best scoring season in WNBA history while playing next to the most famous rookie the league has ever produced, and the fact that people are still shocked about it says more about them than it does about her jump shot.
Mitchell got to 1,034 points with a third-quarter three in the Indiana Fever’s 103-85 win over the Toronto Tempo on Friday, per CBS Sports. The single-season scoring record now belongs to her outright, ahead of the 1,021 points A’ja Wilson scored for Las Vegas in 2024, even though it took her three more games to get there than it took Wilson. For two years, the operating theory around this roster was that Caitlin Clark’s gravity would either inflate her teammates’ scoring or shrink them into scenery. Nobody drew up a third option where somebody just builds a historically great season standing right next to her.
She finished the night with 33 points on 12-of-17 shooting and 7-of-11 from three, per NBC Sports, and she got there on a shot nobody assisted. She was standing alone on the wing when the record fell, which is the opposite of the story the league spent two years bracing for.
That’s her 25th straight game with 20 or more points, which is its own WNBA record, and she set it while sharing a backcourt with a supernova.
https://twitter.com/IndianaFever/status/2101132910656995443
Clark had a monster game of her own the same night. She finished with 28 points and 14 assists in her first game back since winning gold with Team USA at the FIBA World Cup, and neither performance came at the other’s expense.
That’s now 10 games this season with 25 points and 10 assists for Clark, more than any player has ever posted in a full career, per the Boston Globe.
Fever coach Stephanie White called it “some unprecedented stuff,” which might be underselling it. Clark isn’t hiding from the moment either. She said, “It’s probably not talked about enough, especially in my opinion,” about her own teammate’s record, which is a strange thing for the most famous player in the sport to have to say out loud.
This is the same duo breaking scoring records together all season, not a one-off. A few weeks ago they scored 34 apiece in the same game and it barely registered as more than a fun box score, which tells you people needed this many words of context before they’d believe Mitchell just put together the best scoring season the league has ever seen.
None of this happens in a vacuum, though. The attention Clark brings is exactly why a Friday night regular-season game in Toronto got covered by three national outlets instead of getting buried in a box score nobody reads. The record is still all Mitchell’s.
Nobody needed Clark’s spacing to hand Mitchell a scoring record, and nobody needed Mitchell to shrink for Clark’s monster season to happen either. Clark’s own career-high scoring night already happened in the middle of this same stretch. Two stars, one box score, zero shrinking required.
