Marina Mabrey Was the 19th Pick. Now She’s an All-Star and the Face of Toronto’s WNBA Team.

Marina Mabrey wasn’t supposed to be here. Not in the WNBA eight years after being drafted. Not as a starter. Not as an All-Star. And definitely not as the face of a brand-new expansion team in Toronto.

But here she is. The 29-year-old guard just got her first All-Star nod, and she’ll suit up in a few days at the United Center in Chicago. That’s the same city where the Chicago Sky left her unprotected in the expansion draft. The Tempo grabbed her, and she’s made them look like geniuses.

Because here’s what Mabrey is doing this season: 20.6 points a game. 3.7 rebounds. 3.7 assists. 1.1 steals. All career highs. She dropped 53 in a game earlier this month, tying the WNBA single-game scoring record. That’s absurd for anyone. It’s even more absurd when you remember she’s the 19th pick in the 2019 draft.

The long road to a breakout

Mabrey has played for five teams in eight seasons. She’s been waived. She’s been traded. She’s been an afterthought. Most players with that resume would have washed out. But she never stopped believing she could be more.

“You wake up every single day, you’re working out, trying to get a competitive advantage somehow, bring in life coaches, SD coaches. You name it, we’re trying to do it. Sometimes you still come up short, and I think you have to be able to accept that and come back up and try again. That’s always been my motto,” Mabrey said in a video posted by Winsidr’s Madisyn Cunningham.

She’s right about coming up short. That happened a lot early on. She averaged single-digit scoring her first four seasons. She didn’t start regularly until her fifth year. The easy move would have been to settle for a bench role somewhere and collect a paycheck. Mabrey didn’t do that.

Betting on yourself when nobody else will

“Being the 19th pick, I wasn’t supposed to be in the league still. I wasn’t supposed to be on a team, I wasn’t supposed to be playing, I wasn’t supposed to be starting, I wasn’t supposed to be a star,” Mabrey said. “If you continue to work hard and believe in yourself, and get a little bit lucky here and there, it can still work out for you.”

She’s living proof of that. And the Tempo are 9-12 right now, which is about what you’d expect from an expansion team in its first season. They lost to the Golden State Valkyries on Wednesday, and Mabrey had a rough night — 11 points, six rebounds, four assists, five turnovers. That 53-point game feels like a while ago now.

But that’s the thing about expansion teams. There will be bad nights. There will be growing pains. The difference is that Toronto has a real star to build around. Mabrey has been through every kind of adversity the league can throw at a player, and she’s still standing. If anyone can help steer a first-year franchise through the turbulence, it’s the guard who was told she wouldn’t make it — and made it anyway.