Olivia Miles broke Caitlin Clark’s WNBA rookie scoring record on Sunday, the third rookie record she has pulled away from Clark in a single season. The Minnesota Lynx guard came into the game against the Connecticut Sun tied with Clark at 769 points, then spent the entire first quarter without scoring. She did not force a shot. She did not press. She drew a foul 29 seconds into the second quarter, stepped to the free throw line, and made the 770th point of her rookie year to stand alone at the top.
Minnesota won 101-89. Miles finished with 21 points and six assists on 7 of 10 shooting, putting her at 790 points for the season with two games still left on the schedule. That number is going to keep climbing.
Clark set the old mark of 769 across 40 games with the Indiana Fever in 2024. The WNBA expanded its regular season to 44 games after that year, which means anybody chasing Clark’s number has had four extra opportunities to do it. Sunday was Olivia Miles’ 40th appearance of the season. Same number of games, more points. There is no schedule asterisk to hang on this one.
The scoring record is not the first one she took. On June 4 against Golden State, Miles hit eight 3-pointers in a single game, the most any rookie has ever made in a WNBA game. Clark’s career high as a rookie was seven. Then came the fastest start in league history. Miles reached 500 points and 150 assists in 26 games, ahead of Paige Bueckers at 28 games and Clark at 29. She also got to 400 points, 100 rebounds and 100 assists faster than any rookie the league has seen, and she erased the Minnesota franchise records for points and assists by a rookie along the way.
Olivia Miles was the No. 2 overall pick of the 2026 draft, and she got there on a longer road than most. She spent the bulk of her college career at Notre Dame, and she almost certainly would have gone in the lottery had she declared in 2025. She chose to transfer to TCU for one more season instead, and she closed out her college run by carrying the Horned Frogs to the Elite Eight, logging a triple double and two additional double doubles in the NCAA Tournament.
Coming into the pros, nobody had her projected for this. A very good rookie season was the expectation. A record breaking one was not.
For the year, Miles is averaging 19.8 points, 6.0 assists and 4.7 rebounds while shooting 49.2 percent from the field, 38.8 percent from 3 and 87 percent from the line. She leads every rookie in the league in both scoring and assists, and those numbers are not just good for a first year player. She ranks eighth in the entire WNBA in scoring and seventh in assists. She has swept Rookie of the Month every single month of the season, which means the Rookie of the Year vote should be a formality rather than a conversation.
None of it happened on a bad team, either. The Lynx finished with the best record in the WNBA and are locked into a top two playoff seed under Cheryl Reeve. Olivia Miles has been the engine of that, and her coach spent the back half of the season making the case that her rookie was playing at an MVP level. That award is almost certainly going to A’ja Wilson in Las Vegas, but Miles has an All WNBA First Team nod waiting for her, which is rare air for a first year player.
Miles kept the focus off herself afterward, pointing to the veterans in the Minnesota locker room who gave her room to operate and the coaching staff that trusted her with the ball from day one. She described having “great teammates around me, great vets who allow me to be me out there,” and said it meant more that the record fell in a win.
Before Clark took it in 2024, the rookie scoring record belonged to Seimone Augustus, who put up 744 points for the Lynx back in 2006 and held it for 18 years. Clark broke it in 2024. Miles broke it in 2026. Records that once sat untouched for nearly two decades are now falling every other season, and part of that is the schedule and part of it is the level of talent walking into this league every spring.
That trend is about to accelerate. The WNBA regular season expands again in 2027, going from 44 games to 50, so whatever number Olivia Miles finishes on this week may not survive the next wave of rookies.
Minnesota is heading into the postseason as a title contender, and Miles is about to play her first playoff basketball as a professional. The regular season records are hers. The rest of it starts now.