A mid-second-round pick in the 2019 draft, Marina Mabrey was never guaranteed anything in the WNBA. But she put in the work between her rookie and sophomore years, and had her best friend and college roommate Arike Ogunbowale in her corner.
Mabrey and Ogunbowale, of course, won the national championship together as members of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in 2018. Mabrey then was drafted by the Los Angeles Sparks before teaming up with Arike as a member of the Dallas Wings in the 2020 Wubble. She
went from 11.5 minutes and four points per game on 27.3 percent shooting from 3 as a rookie in LA to 21.3 minutes, 10 points and 41.8 percent from deep with the Wings in Bradenton.
She had earned her spot in the league.
In 2021, Mabrey averaged 13.3 points, and finished third in both Most Improved Player and Sixth Woman of the Year voting. The Wings also made the playoffs that year. They then improved to .500 in 2022 and again made the postseason, with Mabrey starting 32 times, playing 28 minutes per contest and posting 13.6 points and 3.7 assists.
It was a sad day in both Dallas and South Bend when Marike was broken up; Mabrey was traded to the Chicago Sky on Feb. 11, 2023.
Three years later, Mabrey has the opportunity establish a legacy somewhere, as it looked like she might have done in Dallas.
Mabrey enjoyed a career-best 15 points per game on 39 percent shooting from downtown in 2023, but was traded to the Connecticut Sun during the 2024 season, before she could become a Chicago legend. Her 2024 playoff run with the Sun will certainly always be memorable, as she outplayed then-rookie Caitlin Clark by dropping 27 points on 5-for-12 shooting from distance in Game 1 of the first round.
But by the start of the 2025 season, she was demanding a trade out of Connecticut that never came to fruition, as the rest of the Sun’s veteran core had departed Uncasville. She went on to average 14.4 points, but on a career-worst 27 percent from long range, as Connecticut withered to a 11-33 record.
Now, Mabrey has gotten her wish to get out of CT, but she hasn’t landed in a situation that will likely allow her to relive her 2024 playoff glory of reaching the semis. At least not right away. No. She’s on an expansion team.
However, it’s an expansion team that took a win-now approach to constructing their inaugural roster. In addition to selecting Mabrey in the expansion draft, the Toronto Tempo signed another veteran scorer in Brittney Sykes in free agency. Sykes led the 2025 Washington Mystics in points per game and was an All-Star alternate before being traded to the Seattle Storm midway through the season.
Canada has wanted a WNBA team for so long. We’ve seen the passion for basketball north of the border with the #WeTheNorth movement and the outpouring of love for the Raptors when they won their first NBA championship in 2019. We’ve also seen it with the WNBA Canada preseason games that were played in front of sold-out and raucous crowds. It became a top priority for WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert to get a team to Toronto, and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Tempo are going to have a phenomenal fan base from the jump.
There’s a mystique surrounding Canada basketball, similar to the mystique that surrounded the Bay Area this time last year before the expansion Golden State Valkyries made their magical run to the playoffs. And there’s a mystique surrounding Marina Mabrey. What she did Philly is Unrivaled in January was nothing short of iconic; her 47 points in that game stands as the Unrivaled record, and she finished the season with a league-leading 25.3 per game.
Her aforementioned Game 1 against the Fever in 2024 also serves as a strong example of Mabrey Magic. There has never been a hype machine more colossal than that surrounding Clark, and yet Mabrey stole the headline.
And the key thing is the emotion she does it with. When she’s on a heater, her opponents are sure to hear about it—nobody in the league does prideful celebrations quite like she does. She’s also got the crashouts. (And a crashout jar that sends money to good causes.)
All this is to say that maybe, just maybe, the Tempo can make something special happen, even in Year 1.
Sykes will have something to say about it as well. Both she and Mabrey are going to score a lot of points. The question is: Can they do it efficiently?
Mabrey shot 40 percent from 3 with 274 makes in college. In the pros, her 2020 and 2023 clips were also elite, as was a 42.4 percent stretch over her 16 regular-season games with the Sun in 2024. For her career in the W, she’s shooting 34.7 percent. The bad sign is that her poor 2025 clip came most recently, and in Unrivaled it didn’t return to the high 30s, instead coming in at 33.3.
Sykes hasn’t been as much of a 3-point shooter as Mabrey throughout her career, but actually hit at 40 percent with 2.1 makes per game in Unrivaled. (She was the league’s eighth-leading scorer with 20.3 points per contest.) She is going to attack the basket and draw fouls; she was fifth in the W in total free throws attempted in 2025 with 219. In her 25 games with the Mystics, she registered a career-high 6.3 attempts per game and converted at a solid 78.5 percent.
If Sykes can prove that her improved 3-point efficiency is for real, and if Mabrey can get back to her sharpshooting ways, we will look back on this offseason and wonder why we weren’t higher on the Tempo. If they can share the ball and not worry about who ends up being the team’s leading scorer, they can become a dangerous duo.
For now, Mabrey appears to be happy in Toronto. Though it will be difficult, at least she and the front office want the same thing: to win now.
After what she did in Unrivaled, all eyes will be on her to see if she can deliver for the Tempo, and if the Tempo can deliver for her.
