Kelsey Plum and Kahleah Copper turned Saturday night into a scoring race no one in the WNBA had seen before. Plum finished with 43 points, and after tying the game at 98-98 with 1.6 seconds left on a contested layup, she helped the Sparks beat the Mercury in overtime.
The matchup became the first opposing 40-point duel in WNBA history, a rare line that was still being rewritten when regulation ended. Plum broke her own career high along the way, and the late sequence set up the kind of finish that leaves one team stunned and the other still running on adrenaline as the clock reaches zero.
The game mattered because the scoring came with stakes attached. The Sparks improved to 7-6, won their third straight game and moved to 3-2 in Commissioner’s Cup play, while the Mercury fell to 4-11 and lost for the ninth time in eleven games. Nneka Ogwumike added 15 points and 15 rebounds, giving Los Angeles the balance it needed after the stars put on the show.
What followed in overtime was less complicated than the final minute of regulation. The Sparks opened with an 8-0 run and never let the Mercury back into it, a stretch that showed how much energy Phoenix had already spent trying to survive the end of the fourth quarter. The Mercury had been in position to win in regulation, but once the game went beyond that point, they ran out of answers quickly.
The night also belonged to a second game with a different kind of finish. Las Vegas defeated Minnesota, took the Western Conference lead in the Commissioner’s Cup and improved to 10-3 while winning its sixth consecutive game. A’ja Wilson scored 24 points and grabbed 10 rebounds, Chelsea Gray added 23 points and 7 assists, and Olivia Miles answered with a career-high 29 points for Minnesota, including 12 in the fourth quarter.
Miles gave Minnesota a 94-93 lead with 48 seconds left on a three-point play and pushed it to 97-96 with a 3-pointer with 24.5 seconds remaining. She then had a game-tying 3-point attempt with seven seconds left that missed, closing a night in which Las Vegas had just enough to hold on. For Plum, though, the story was bigger than one win: a historic 40-point duel, a late tie, and a finish that turned a regular-season game into a marker the league has never had before.
