Without a proper stat board at Coca-Cola Coliseum in Toronto, Marina Mabrey didn’t realize that she was on the verge of making WNBA history on what ended up being a historic performance on June 25.
All she was aware of was that she had a lot of space to play her game as the Los Angeles Sparks’ sluggish defense gave her a lot of room to get her feel, and her feet, properly set up.
She knew that this game she was playing on a Thursday night in late June felt different when she was able to walk into a 27-foot three-pointer, something that she doesn’t often do. It felt strange to her. The shot was off her right hand, something she, again, doesn’t often do.
She described it as weird and thought to herself, “Oh shit, I can use my right hand now.”
It was a moment akin to when a comic book hero or heroine is simultaneously amused and stunned by the height of their powers toward the beginning of their journey. Think of when Peter Parker realizes what he can do as Spiderman, Buffy Summers internalizes that she’s “the slayer” or when Storm learns she can control the weather for the first time in X-Men.
But the difference here is that Mabrey had manifested being in the situation she’s currently in. She wanted to be one of the franchise players on a WNBA team. She wanted to be one of the leaders and top options.
“When you’re younger, you dream of moments like this,” she told Canadian Sports network TSN. “And when it happens, it can feel like, oh, this is a lot of responsibility. But at the end of the day, I manifested this. I created this in my mind when I was younger, and I think that if I wasn’t capable of it, I wouldn’t have been able to see it.”
Mabrey and her Toronto Tempo, sans head coach Sandy Brondello, will take on the Las Vegas Aces on Monday night at 8 p.m. eastern on Peacock and NBCSN. Both Mabrey and Aces star A’ja Wilson have something in common - they both are tied for the record of most points scored in WNBA history. Mabrey tied Wilson on that Thursday night in June, scoring 53 points on 17-of-28 shooting. She also tied the WNBA record for three-pointers in a game with nine.
After seven years, three trades four different teams prior to landing in Toronto, Mabrey will be a first-time All-Star in Chicago this coming weekend.
It’s all quite prophetic for the combo-guard who made a name for herself back in February during the WNBA off-season playing in Unrivaled. Not did Mabrey put up gaudy numbers, but her authenticity shined through as she opened up about her personal struggles.
Mabrey is currently having a career-year in scoring and efficiency, averaging 21.3 points and 3.4 three-pointers per game. She’s also shooting 40.3 percent from beyond the arc, over 13 percent better than she did last year in her second season with the Connecticut Sun.
Mabrey admitted that she was very disappointed with how she played last season. She told Sue Bird on her podcast Bird’s Eye View that what irked her the most about her game was the inconsistency in her footwork and the process to get to her spots on the floor.
She decided to reinvent how she was approaching skill work, including her ball handling and was able to work one-on-one with her coach from Unrivaled, DJ Sackman.
“If I took 10 step-back threes, all the footwork would look different,” she told Bird. “I’d be at the same spot every time, but it just doesn’t look the same. I didn’t even have the footwork down to be doing all that. So I went back to footwork and fixed that, and then I went back to my ball handling and fixed that because it slowed me down, and I and I feel like my biggest thing is my decel[eration] and change of direction.”
She also changed the way she attacked endurance and balance. Instead of a lot of cardio, she focused more on working with a medicine ball to improve her core strength and explosive speed.
Compliments to the chef
Something to expect at a home game in Toronto or wherever the Tempo are playing in Canada are the chef hats in the stands. That’s a direct reference to Mabrey, and it’s a symbol of yet another one of her motifs that’s been woven in-and-out of her career since she entered the league in 2019.
💰🍁👩🏻🍳 Spotted at the Coca-Cola Colosseum:
— Marina Mabrey HQ (@MarinaMabreyHQ) July 18, 2026
Tempo fans show Marina 'Chef' Mabrey some love by rocking customized Tempo chef hats!
(📷: @zulfi_sheikh) pic.twitter.com/Jeh0XEFMbn
As a rookie with the Los Angeles Sparks, Mabrey was a part of the grassroots movement that made women’s basketball something to behold rather than snicker at. She launched her own tee shirt that featured a basketball court logo that read “This Is My Kitchen.”
This was a reference to a tweet she posted during her college days at Notre Dame where she helped lead her team to the 2018 National Championship over Mississippi State: “To all the male women’s basketball haters, y’all can get in the kitchen and make us a sandwich now, thanks.”
At the time, some accounts often would use that phrase on social media to belittle the grassroots women’s basketball movement and the players. The idea of “being in the kitchen” is a phrase to refer to a domesticated woman who stays at home to cook and clean rather than play on basketball. The shirt earned a lot of attention and praise online, especially from NBA player.
But the idea of cooking in a kitchen later became something that Mabrey embraced not only quite literally, but also figuratively.
It all started when she began making “Cookin’ w Mabrey” TikTok videos in Winter of 2025 that showed her, sometimes her siblings and teammates, tasting the different dishes she would cook. Part of the allure was that Mabrey is naturally comedic and is a self-made foodie.
Mabrey went on “In The Test Kitchen” last fall to discuss exactly how she got in the kitchen on her own terms rather than because of random trolls on the internet.
During Unrivaled’s first season at the beginning of 2025, Mabrey was dealing with a nagging calf injury that kept her on the sidelines. She needed something outside of basketball that was going to not only to keep her sane, but give her some joy while she wasn’t able to play.
Mabrey’s time in the kitchen reminded her that she’s not just a basketball player, she’s human. And then she realized the similarities between the creativity she applies to the court and the kitchen.
“So when I got in the kitchen and I started cooking things, I was creating the same kind of chaos that I create on the court offensively,” Mabrey said. “I think that that’s kind of a way to describe my game, because you know when I get going, I think it’s kind of hard to stop, and you try to do these schemes, but no one really knows what I’m gonna do because I actually don’t know what I’m gonna do until I shoot it.”
Mabrey’s approach to cooking was also how she approaches basketball and almost everything else in her life including her sense of fashion, hair styles and makeup. She doesn’t have the fear that comes with trying something new. She tries it, accepts the mess that comes with it and if she likes it, she continues until she can achieve some more mastery.
“It was a disaster until it got to the final result, and I think that that kind of speaks to a lot of times people end up in jobs,” she said about her cooking. “Something’s gonna take a wild turn somewhere, and I think just being able to put out fires and be like, no, okay, like, all right, I’m gonna do this.”
This exact approach is the one that she brought to refining the type of player she is, It’s not just changing up her basketball skill work and endurance techniques, but also refining the ways her mind plays a role in her game.
Back in early June, Mabrey told NBC Sports that the infamous crashout jar hasn’t really been needed. It’s still with her to hold her accountable if necessary, but there’s less of a reliance on it now. Mabrey has worked with what she describes as an “energy leadership person” who has helped her acknowledge the steps she takes every week.
Energy leadership is a process where people become more intune with how they are using their different types of energies including physical, mental and emotional. “It takes a lot of energy out of me to keep fighting all the time,” Mabrey told NBC Sports.
Mabrey and the person she’s been working with focus on progress, and it has shown up in real time during games. Mabrey has been using her breath often to regulate her emotions instead of suppressing them, which originally was a challenge when she first began with the crashout jar this past January.
When Mabrey and the Tempo defeated the New York Liberty in a game that would become more known widely as the “shoe gate game”, a reporter asked Mabrey what her thoughts were about how chippy the game got. There were a ton of foul calls in addition to a shoe unintentionally being thrown at her.
Her coach in Brondello looked to her left at her star, waiting for what she was going to say. Maybrey paused, closed her eyes, squinted, scrunched her face, took a breath, and smiled. Then she answered. “I am working on not being rage baited,” she said in response and then exhaled.
Brondello smiled widely and acknowledged the work Mabrey has done in the past six months. “She did well, didn’t she,” Brondello said. “Deep breath, breathe.”
There were laughs in the room because it was a funny quip, but both Brondello and Mabrey meant what they said in earnest. When Mabrey got called for a foul while guarding Dream star wing Rhyne Howard days later, she didn’t agree with the call. But she didn’t crash out either. Although she put her arms up in the air expressing confusion, what followed was again a deep breath, her eyes closing and then a sigh.
The work on her game and her mind continues to pay off for Mabrey, and she’ll get to show it off in a major way in Chicago this weekend at All-Star.
It’s quite symbolic that Mabrey’s first appearance as a WNBA All-Star will take place in Chicago, a city where she played a season-and-a-half a bit “lost” before she eventually got traded to Connecticut. “I lost the vision of who I know I can be,” she told The Chicago Sun Times about that time in her career.
She’ll be returning to Chicago with that vision self-actualized.
