The first text that Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve received after the team drafted Olivia Miles this spring was from a prescient Kayla McBride: “I’m going to be wide open.” The stats are bearing that out to an extent; the veteran sharpshooter is putting up some of the most efficient numbers of her career this year, and the Lynx offense is humming. After Minnesota’s 103–90 win over the Dallas Wings on Sunday afternoon, McBride told reporters that sharing a backcourt with Miles has made her feel like “a kid in a candy store.” Was she selling herself short? What strikes me about watching McBride this year is not how easy her job is, but how easy she’s made a difficult job look. Without Napheesa Collier around for the first few months of the summer, McBride drew frequent doubles and was left to pick up the extra defensive slack. All season long, she’d quietly kept the Lynx rolling with all her hard work.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, she decided to do it a little louder. She'd played 35 minutes against the Aces the day before, and was handed the Paige Bueckers assignment in this game. She still had the legs to hit 10 of her 14 three-point attempts, setting a WNBA record for most made threes in a game. She finished with a career-high 43 points on 16-for-21 shooting (and only one attempted free throw—as ethical an outing as they come).

The Wings defense spends too much time on its heels, admittedly, and they were missing their best perimeter defender with Azzi Fudd injured, but to McBride’s credit, she was getting her points every which way: beating defenders off the dribble, knocking down catch-and-shoot looks with her quick release, cutting to the basket, pulling up in transition. “She just knows where to be,” Reeve said after the game.

The depth of guard talent in the league this year—plus her slower shooting start—meant that the five-time All-Star McBride wasn’t among the three players the Lynx sent to the All-Star Game last month. One, of course, was Miles, who has transcended the Rookie of the Year race with an offensive season that has her in MVP conversations. The other two selections were something like subplots of the Olivia Miles story. Having ceded her old position to a “true” point guard this year, Courtney Williams is free to operate as a scorer, getting shots up on one or two dribbles. (“Playing point guard … I got to think a lot more,” she told the ESPN studio last month. “Thank god I don’t got to do that too much now.”) Natasha Howard has re-asserted herself as the consummate pick-and-roll big now that she’s playing alongside the most prolific pick-and-roll ball-handler in the WNBA.

Even after the best game of her career, a 34-year-old McBride didn’t mind considering herself in relation to the Olivia Miles story. “Her ability to get to the paint and her ability in the pick-and-roll just creates so much for me,” McBride said postgame on Sunday. “There’s nothing like getting the ball in the laces at that velocity.”

But the Kayla McBride story is plenty rich itself. When she hosted McBride on a recent episode of her podcast, Sue Bird observed that “rock solid can get overlooked.” McBride has spent much of her career as the “rock solid” foil to more high-profile teammates. She played the first seven seasons of her WNBA career in San Antonio and Las Vegas, leaving just before the Aces dynasty took off. Overseas, she’s been on teams with the likes of Breanna Stewart, Courtney Vandersloot, Emma Meesseman, and Satou Sabally.

So you couldn’t blame McBride for being a little unused to the crowd’s chants for her on Sunday. The home crowd was so electrified by her performance that she had no choice but to stay on the floor after the buzzer and accept their adulation, delaying the start of the Lynx's customary Electric Slide routine. Some of the strangeness, she said, was that they chanted her full first name, and not her nickname, K-Mac. (“Do you remember that your name is Kayla?” Miles asked her. “Sometimes,” McBride said. “In those moments, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, that is my name, right?’”) More than anything, she said, she was grateful for the city of Minneapolis and the community she'd found there since joining the Lynx in free agency in 2021. McBride was rock solid again this offseason, when she re-signed in Minnesota without any fuss, making her one of just three returning rotation players on the roster. “It’s my 13th year in the league,” she said. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”