TenFrom Three
On August 9, Kayla McBride made ten threes in a game for the first time in league history. It happened in a season the whole W went deep: Kelsey Mitchell is hitting the highest share of her threes and Rhyne Howard has already tied the record for the most in a season.
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 266 three-point attempts, which is even more impressive when you consider 6 of the 8 names on that top list took fewer than 150 shots.
Kayla McBride sits at 41.7% on 278 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.
Of the 8 most accurate shooters this year, only two are nailing it on both accuracy and attempts
Now zoom out to every great shooting season on record. Each dot is one player's season, and the two things that make a shooter good are charted on the two axes: farther right means more threes made, higher means a higher proportion of them going in. The best seasons are the ones up and to the right and the dashed line shows the league average since 2003.
Doing both at once turns out to be pretty rare, and the chart shows why. Of the sixty-one seasons here, the most accurate ones mostly came in at 80 or 90 makes, so they sit over on the left, and the top right corner, where a season is both, is nearly empty. Sabrina Ionescu's record 128 in 2023 is up in that corner, and this season Kelsey Mitchell is right there beside her, with the best rate anywhere on the chart. No season since 2003 has both more makes and higher accuracy than Mitchell's. Kayla McBride, at 41.7% on 116 makes, is just below the two of them.
Rhyne Howard this season has more makes than Mitchell or McBride at 128, though, which ties Sabrina Ionescu's season record from 2023. Impressively, she already got there on the last night before the break against Minnesota with several games left. One more and the record is hers alone. Whereas Mitchell and McBride are making a lot of threes very accurately, Howard's season is more built on volume.
No season since 2003 has both more makes and higher accuracy than Kelsey Mitchell's this year
All of this is the backdrop for August 9. The single-game three-pointer record was nine, first set by Kelsey Mitchell in 2019. The record had been met another 7 times after that, until this summer when Kayla McBride made ten.
On August 9, 2026, McBride 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 her team hit eighteen threes, the most any Lynx team has managed in a game on record.
This is McBride's thirteenth season and I, for one, couldn't be happier she got that historic night.
When it's going down, it's going down. There is no better feeling.
Nine threes in a game had been done eight times, then McBride made ten
The whole league is in on this three-point shooting streak, though. In 2003, teams put up about fourteen threes a game. This season it's 25.4, the most on record and nearly twice what it was in 2003.
League-wide accuracy has stayed between 33% and 35% that entire time, too, so the shots still go in as often even with higher volume.
McBride has been at this longer than that trend. Her 838 career threes are the fourth-most in league history, behind Diana Taurasi's 1,447, Sue Bird's 1,001 and Katie Smith's 906.
We'll see how long it takes for someone to make 11!
The W has never taken this many threes
METHODOLOGYGAMES THRU AUG 30, 2026SHOW THE WORK +HIDE −
- THE RECORD WINDOW
- "on record" means the box-score record: season and career totals since 2003, single games since 2009, where whole game logs begin · totals for every completed season are official league figures via Basketball-Reference, credited in SOURCES.md; this season is ESPN box scores, checked against Basketball-Reference and pbpstats, and pipeline/AUDIT.md has the table · the career leaders are all-time league figures from outside reporting, because two of those careers begin before our record does · outside reporting (ESPN, the league) separately confirms the ten is a WNBA record full stop · 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 the rate before it is rounded for print, 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
- CREDITS
- Box scores: ESPN, via wehoop · Season totals: Basketball-Reference · Play-by-play patches: pbpstats · Reporting: ESPN · The quote: CBS Sports · Portraits and crests: the WNBA
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