BestFrom Three
On August 9, Kayla McBride made ten threes in a game, and nobody on record had done that. It happened in the season the whole W went deep: three players are chasing the record for made threes at once.
Ask who the best shooter in the W is right now, and the place to start is the accuracy list. Kelsey Mitchell is hitting 45.5% of her threes, the best rate among the 78 shooters the league ranks, and she's doing it on 257 attempts: a real workload, on a list where six of the eight names at the top got there on fewer than 150.
The ranking has a floor, and it matters. The league doesn't rank a three-point percentage until a player has made 25, so nobody gets up this list on one hot week.
Kayla McBride sits at 41.9% on 272 attempts, the most of anyone in the top eight. Making a lot of threes and making a high share of them are different jobs, and Mitchell and McBride are the two names doing both at once.
Kelsey Mitchell hits 45.5% of her threes, the best rate of anyone qualified.
Now zoom out to every big shooting season the record holds. Each dot on the chart is one player's season: farther right is more attempts, higher is more makes, and a dot that sits high for its column is a shooter hitting a better share of them.
The top of the chart is where this year lives. Rhyne Howard has 120 makes, Mitchell has 117, McBride has 114, and all three sit inside the eight biggest three-point seasons on record, with games left to play. The season mark is Sabrina Ionescu's 128, set in 2023, and Howard needs nine more to pass it.
Nothing says any of them gets there, because a chase is still a chase. But only one other season on record put three names that high at once. It was 2023, and it ended with the record falling. That's the part worth watching.
3 of the 8 biggest three-point seasons on record are happening right now.
All of that is the backdrop for August 9. The single-game record was nine, done eight times on record and never once beaten: Kelsey Mitchell was the first to get there, in 2019, and by the end of this June it had happened eight times without anyone reaching ten.
Kayla McBride made ten. She took fourteen threes against Dallas and made ten of them, on her way to 43 points, a career high, and her tenth fell with 2:23 still on the clock. Minnesota clinched a playoff spot the same night, and the team around her hit eighteen threes, the most any Lynx team has managed in a game on record.
This is her thirteenth season. The night everything went in was new for her too.
When it's going down, it's going down. There is no better feeling.
McBride broke the record with 2:23 still to play.
And the whole league is in on it. In 2003, a team put up about ten threes a game. This season it's 25.4, the most on record and two and a half times what it was in 2003.
The shots still go in. League-wide accuracy has stayed between 33% and 35% that entire time, so more attempts haven't meant worse ones.
McBride has been at this longer than the trend. Her 836 career threes are the third-most since 2003, where our record starts, behind Diana Taurasi's 1,436 and Sue Bird's 924.
At the start of August the single-game record was still nine. Let's see where the season record lands!
The W has never taken this many threes.
METHODOLOGYDATA THRU AUG 24, 2026SHOW THE WORK +HIDE −
- THE RECORD WINDOW
- "on record" means since 2003, where the box-score record begins, and the site never claims past its own data · outside reporting (ESPN, the league) separately confirms the ten is a WNBA record full stop, and that attribution is listed in SOURCES.md · queries & code on request, free
- WHO QUALIFIES
- the league's own rule for the accuracy board: a three-point percentage needs 25 made threes before it ranks · ranks are computed on unrounded rates with an alphabetical tie-break, so a dead heat orders the same way every time
- ATTEMPTS PER TEAM, PER GAME
- every counted attempt in a season, divided by team-games (games played times two) · measured as a rate so expansion adds games without inflating the trend: more teams means more basketball, not more threes per game
- WHICH GAMES COUNT
- regular season only. The All-Star Game and the Commissioner's Cup final are dropped, the Cup's group games are kept because the league counts them, and the playoffs are excluded from every historical season · data frozen at press time
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