Eight weeks, then 15 points
Brittney Sykes played her first game since June 16 on Tuesday night. She scored 15 points and handed out five assists for the Toronto Tempo, a line that would read as ordinary on most evenings and did not on this one. A left plantar fascia injury had kept her out for eight weeks.
Toronto was getting 20.1 points a game from her before she went down. The Tempo sit at 10-24 and have now lost 11 in a row, a run that began while their leading scorer was on the sidelines.
“It’s been a testing eight weeks but, you know, it taught me a lot about myself,” Sykes said. “In this point in my career, I’ve been here before but it seems like this injury was way harder to deal with.”
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The number behind the losing run
Sykes comes back to a team whose problem was never putting the ball in the basket. Toronto has conceded at least 90 points in ten consecutive games and 100 or more six times inside that stretch. Indiana put up 101 on Tuesday. A defence leaking at that rate does not get repaired by one player coming off the treatment table, however productive she was in June.
Washington arrives on Wednesday night with the profile to punish exactly that weakness. The Mystics lead the WNBA in rebounding at 37.7 per game and rank second in scoring defence at 82.4 points allowed. Their own offence sits 14th at 81.6, which tells you plainly where their wins come from. At 20-14 they are pointed toward a first playoff appearance in three years.
Washington has taken all three meetings with Toronto this season.
What is actually at stake
For the Mystics, Wednesday is arithmetic. Every win shortens the path to a postseason berth, and a road trip to the league’s most generous defence is the kind of fixture a team in that position needs to convert.
Toronto’s season ended some time ago in any practical sense, which changes what these games are for. Sykes has eight weeks of rust and a short run of fixtures left to shake it off. How many minutes she takes on, and how the plantar fascia holds up under them, is the question worth watching in this building.
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