The 40-point game had disappeared from the W.N.B.A. over the past several years. This season, it has made a comeback.
Ten times this year a player has scored at least 40 points in a game, by far the most in a single season in the league’s 27-year history. Before this year, there had been no such regular-season showings since 2018, when the star center Liz Cambage had two. And with at least nine games left for every team, as the W.N.B.A. stages its longest regular season ever, there is still time for more scoring outbursts.
“You see a lot of 40-point games this year, and I think that we’re just continuing to get eyes on women’s basketball,” Breanna Stewart, the star Liberty forward, said Sunday after notching the league’s most recent 40-point game in a 100-89 victory over the Indiana Fever.