Satou Sabally is finding her stride off the bench, and the Sixth Player of the Year race is no longer looking like a simple two-player fight. What began with Chennedy Carter and Janelle Salaün at the front has widened fast, and Sabally is now part of the conversation as bench scoring keeps reshaping the field.
That shift matters now because the race has been turned by who is producing lately, not who owned the first weeks. Salaün leads the league in bench points with 220, which is 76 more than Carter’s 144, but the gap has not been enough to keep the debate from moving as other reserve scorers push into view.
Sophie Cunningham is one reason the picture looks different. She has entered the award talk after scoring between 11 and 24 points in each of her last four games, and she has made 19 of her 30 3-point attempts over that stretch. Her recent form stands out even more because she shot 29.4% from three in May, a mark that looks far less important than the burst that followed.
Cunningham also said she got a PRP shot in her elbow to help with pain she had been playing through, a detail that helps explain how her season turned. Early in the season, Carter scored 20 or more points in four of her first six games in an Aces jersey, while Salaün opened with two twenty-point games on 45.5 and 80% shooting from three, and the award race quickly became a contest between them before the field opened up again.
Carter’s hold on the race loosened when she missed a few games with an illness, and that interruption gave the other bench scorers room to catch up. Now Sabally’s steady climb off the bench sits alongside Cunningham’s hot shooting and Salaün’s lead, leaving the award less about one early burst than about who keeps producing as the season moves on.
