Brittney Sykes matched her career high with 38 points and carried the Toronto Tempo past the Connecticut Sun 106-102 in overtime Wednesday, a win sealed by four free throws in the final 79 seconds and three more in the extra period. The result gave the expansion club its first overtime victory in franchise history.
That is why olivia nelson-ododa is in the search stream today: Toronto won again behind the kind of late-game shot-making that turns one performance into a result people want to see twice. Sykes made all 13 of her free throws and finished with the cleanest possible answer to a tight game, even after the Tempo had been down by as many as 14 points in the second quarter.
Her final sequence left no margin for doubt. With the game slipping toward regulation's end, she went to the line four times in the last 79 seconds and kept the Tempo alive, then added three more free throws in five minutes of overtime as Toronto closed out the comeback. Sykes did not need volume from anywhere else to carry the night; she trusted the line, and every shot kept landing.
The performance also underlined how far Toronto has moved in a short stretch. After beating Connecticut, the Tempo had won four of their last five games and sat seventh in the 15-team league, a steady climb for an expansion side trying to establish itself. Sykes, signed to a two-year deal on April 10, has been central to that rise. She had already posted a 38-point game once before, against the Los Angeles Sparks on May 17, and now has done it again while ranking third in the league with 21.6 points per game.
Sandy Brondello said she could see Sykes settling into the pressure of the moment, and said the guard knows she has her back. She also described her as a true competitor and said she had noticed Sykes control her emotions as the game tightened. That mattered here because Toronto had to recover from a rough second quarter and from a game that still hung in the balance late. The crowd at Coco-Cola Coliseum was listed at 8,210, and Sykes said she could feel the building go quiet when the free throws mattered most, calling it pin-drop silence. On Wednesday, the silence belonged to the shooter who kept making them count.
