Atomic Ball: The Scoreboard-Breaking 2010 Phoenix Mercury
The Las Vegas Aces set countless WNBA records during the 2023 regular season. In addition to finishing with 34 wins and a +502 point differential, they had a 59.7% true shooting percentage and became the first team in league history to have four players average 15.0 PPG.
However, despite their frightening offensive firepower, there was one mark the Aces fell just short of reaching. While they may have the most 10-point wins (26), 20-point wins (14), and 100-point games (11), the record for most points per game in a season still belongs to the 2010 Phoenix Mercury.
With a roster that lit up the scoreboard even more than the modern Aces, you’d be forgiven for expecting the 2010 Mercury to have been another one of the league’s all-time best teams.
Instead, Phoenix went just 15–19.
Part of a lineage of teams that pushed the tempo to extremes across several levels of basketball, the 2010 Mercury had championship pedigree and a legendary assortment of bucket-getters. They were one of the most entertaining teams in WNBA history, even in a down year for the franchise.
Phoenix had gone five straight years without a winning record when Paul Westhead was named the team’s head coach after the 2005 season. Westhead’s coaching career began in the late 1960s, but he became well-known in the 1979–80 NBA season when he was thrust into the Lakers head coaching job and won a championship with rookie Magic Johnson.
Westhead would be fired early in the 1981–82 season, and, following a one-year stint with the Chicago Bulls, became the head men’s basketball coach at Loyola Marymount.
At LMU, Westhead popularized a frenetic, fast-break style of offense known simply as “The System.” Led by stars Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, LMU reached three consecutive NCAA Tournaments from 1988–90.
The 1989–90 team set an NCAA Division–I record by averaging a staggering 122.4 PPG. For reference, Gonzaga led D-I in the 2022–23 season with just 85.2 PPG.
Following the tragic death of Gathers to a heart condition during the 1990 WCC Tournament, the 11-seed LMU advanced to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight, an inspiring run that included a 149–115 victory over 3-seed Michigan.
LMU’s success gave Westhead another NBA opportunity, as he became the Denver Nuggets head coach for the 1990–91 season. The Nuggets struggled mightily that year, going 20–62, but stayed true to The System, averaging a league-leading 119.9 PPG and allowing 130.8 PPG (nearly five points more than any other team in NBA history).
Over the first seven games of that campaign, the Nuggets gave up 153.0 PPG. In one matchup, the Phoenix Suns scored 107 points in the first half alone.
Westhead held several different coaching jobs over the next decade-plus yet kept his same philosophy when transitioning to the WNBA. Starting in 2006, his first season with Phoenix, the Mercury both scored and allowed the most PPG in the league for six straight seasons.
He stepped down after the 2007 Mercury won their first title in franchise history, but his replacement, former assistant coach Corey Gaines, had played under Westhead at both LMU and with the Nuggets and was more than willing to keep the run-and-gun going.
Phoenix had the roster to make it work to perfection and captured a second championship in 2009. During the following offseason, ’07 Finals MVP Cappie Pondexter was traded to the New York Liberty. Still, the Mercury seemed poised to be just as potent.
Diana Taurasi, considered by many to be the best women’s basketball player of all time, was firmly in her prime in her age-28 season, averaging a league-best 22.6 PPG.
Candice Dupree, acquired as part of the Pondexter trade, had made three All-Star teams in her first four WNBA seasons but elevated her game with one of the best shooting seasons the league has ever seen.
Coming off a career-worst 42.9% from the field in 2009, Dupree shot 66.4% in 2010, the second-best percentage (min. 250 FGA) in WNBA history, and just one made shot from passing Nneka Ogwumike’s 2016 season (66.5%).
While going on to make four more All-Star appearances, this would go down as Dupree’s only season shooting even 55%.
Veteran forward Penny Taylor had one of her best years, posting the only season of 15+ PPG, 5+ APG, and 50% FG in WNBA history, and DeWanna Bonner, the 5th overall pick in the 2009 WNBA Draft, provided a major spark off the bench before emerging as a star later in her career.
One look at the WNBA’s all-time scoring list should make it evident just how talented this team was.
And yet, nearly halfway through the season, the Mercury found themselves 5–11, already with as many losses as in their entire 2009 title year (23–11).
It’s not hard to figure out why. While the Mercury would finish with a WNBA record 93.9 PPG, they allowed 93.8 PPG — no other team has even been in the same ballpark. In fact, the Tulsa Shock (89.8 PPG) was the only team within 10 PPG in 2010.
They dropped to 5–11 with a 107–104 home loss to the Washington Mystics on July 1. It was their sixth consecutive defeat, and the season seemed to be rapidly slipping away.
With pressure mounting, Phoenix responded — not by tightening things up on defense, but instead by an unparalleled offensive explosion.
Over the following 11 games, the Mercury went 9–2, only once scoring fewer than 97 points. By the end of the run, they were 14–13, back above .500.
Starting on July 1, the Mercury scored 1,251 points over a 12-game span, good for 104.3 PPG. The next-highest points total over a 12-game span in WNBA history is 1,156 by the 2023 Aces, a full 95 points behind.
Las Vegas averaged 96.3 PPG in that span, meaning they were roughly an entire game behind the Mercury’s pace.
Phoenix’s opponents over their 12-game run scored 1,150 points, which itself would be the third-most in a 12-game span. They were giving up points at a rate basically never seen before (and higher than their average over the rest of the season), and it just didn’t matter.
Anyone playing the Mercury became a legendary offense that still couldn’t keep up with the team on the other side of the floor.
Corey Gaines’ squad racked up seven 100-point games over the 12-game stretch. The only other teams to reach that mark over an entire season are the 2007 Mercury, 2009 Mercury, and 2021–23 Aces, who did so each year.
In the 13 seasons since 2010, two WNBA teams (the Sparks and Fever) have just eight total 100-point games apiece. The Mercury nearly accomplished that in a period lasting just over a month.
Clearly, the entire split is remarkable. Yet, the two games in the middle took things to a completely different level.
On July 22, Phoenix blew the doors off the Tulsa Shock, scoring 123 points — then a league record. Then, in Minnesota just two days later, both teams eclipsed that figure as the Mercury defeated the Lynx 127–124 in 2OT.
No one has bested any of these performances since. The three-highest single-game scoring totals in WNBA history took place over a three-day span.
Hilariously, the Lynx from another game against the Mercury (this time from 2022) is part of a tie for fourth at 118 points.
Over those back-to-back games, the Mercury dropped a combined 250 points. That’s 29 more points than any other two-game span in WNBA history. 29!!
The team with 221 points? Also the 2010 Mercury, just over a separate span in June! No other WNBA team has reached 220 points across two games. 250 simply makes no sense.
In the first game of that sequence, Phoenix beat the Shock 123–91. At 6–28, the Shock were an abysmal team (the following season they would go 3–31, the worst season in league history), but the Mercury in particular had their way with Tulsa.
Three of the Mercury’s five games with 110+ points came against the Shock. The 2023 Aces are the only other team to score 110+ points three times in an entire season.
Phoenix swept the four-game season series against the Shock, outscoring them by 87 points in the process. In all other matchups, the Mercury were outscored by a total of 83 points.
Following their 12-game supernova, the Mercury fizzled down the stretch, dropping six of their final seven games to end at 15–19. It was a rollercoaster of a season as their 5–5 start was followed by 0–6, 9–2, and 1–6 stretches.
In a lackluster Western Conference, Phoenix was able to make the playoffs and win their opening series against the San Antonio Silver Stars before bowing out in the conference finals to the eventual league champion Seattle Storm.
Corey Gaines went 36–53 in the rest of his tenure with the Mercury before being fired during the 2013 season. In 2014, new coach Sandy Brondello led Phoenix to its third and most recent title.
That year, the Mercury led the WNBA in PPG but also had the second-best scoring defense. It added up to a 29–5 record — no team would eclipse that mark until the 2023 Aces and Liberty. Those Liberty are also coached by Brondello.
The 2010 Phoenix Mercury may have used an offense famous for emphasizing pace, but it wasn’t tempo that led to their gaudy scoring outputs. Through 27 WNBA seasons, they rank fourth all-time in true shooting percentage (57.8%) and 11th in offensive rating (109.9).
It goes without saying that they effectively rewrote the record books at the time.
And yet, they scored just four more points than they allowed. The Mercury were violently mediocre, but they sure knew how to put on a show.
Statistics for this story were primarily found through Basketball Reference and Stathead.
