I’ve watched a lot of guards get overshadowed in my time covering this league, but nobody’s pulled it off quite like Kelsey Mitchell.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being the second-best player on a team everyone’s watching for the first-best player: you can average 20 points a night and still get asked, in every single interview, what it’s like to play with someone else. That’s been Kelsey Mitchell’s last two seasons in a sentence. Caitlin Clark arrives in Indiana in 2024, the cameras follow, the ratings spike — and quietly, in the corner of every box score, there’s Mitchell, doing what she’s done since 2018: putting the ball in the basket at a rate most of the league can’t touch.
I bring this up first because I think it’s the whole story, honestly. Not the record books. Not the supermax. The fact that she’s been elite this entire time and only some of us noticed.
The Ohio Kid Who Never Stopped Scoring
Mitchell’s from Cincinnati (Princeton High School, Sharonville, if you want the specific dot on the map), and she’s got a twin sister, Chelsea, which — I don’t know why, but I always find that detail sticks with me more than it should. Twins who grow up shooting in the same driveway. There’s a whole essay in that alone.
At Ohio State, she didn’t ease into stardom. As a freshman in 2014-15, she scored 873 points — the second-highest total by a freshman in NCAA Division I history, trailing only a mark set back in 1983-84. That’s not a typo. That’s a teenager outscoring almost every freshman who’s ever played the sport.
By the time she left Columbus, she’d finished her college career with the second-most points in NCAA Division I history, behind only Kelsey Plum. She won Big Ten Player of the Year in 2018 and the Dawn Staley Award that same year — the trophy that basically says “best guard in the country,” in case the point totals hadn’t made that clear already.
The Fever took her second overall in the 2018 draft. She made the All-Rookie team alongside A’ja Wilson, which, in hindsight, is one of those draft classes people are going to be talking about for decades.
The Overseas Years (aka the Grind Nobody Sees)
Here’s a part of Mitchell’s story that gets skipped a lot: before WNBA salaries caught up to what these players are actually worth, she did what almost every top American women’s basketball player used to have to do — she went overseas, every single offseason, to actually make a living.
Egypt in 2019, playing for Al Ahly in the FIBA Africa Women’s Clubs Champions Cup. Israel in 2021-22, with Elitzur Ramla. Spain in 2023, splitting time between Uni Girona’s domestic league and EuroCup. That’s three continents, in the years most fans only remember her scoring buckets in Indianapolis. I think about that a lot when people act surprised these athletes are exhausted.
The Slow Build to Superstardom
What I actually respect about Mitchell’s career arc is that it isn’t a flash. It’s a climb. Her scoring average has gone up nearly every year since she entered the league in 2018, and by 2025 she was putting up a career-high 20.2 points a game, adding 3.4 assists and appearing in all 44 regular-season games plus every postseason game. She’s now a three-time All-Star and made All-WNBA for the first time in 2025.
Then 2026 happened. And this is where the story stops being just about buckets.
The Supermax, and What It Actually Means
In March 2026, just after the WNBA’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement, Mitchell signed a $1.4 million supermax deal with the Fever — the same number as A’ja Wilson and Napheesa Collier, making her one of the highest-paid players in the league. Her salary jumped nearly five times over, which sounds absurd until you remember average WNBA salaries roughly quadrupled under the new CBA too. This isn’t a story about one player getting rich. It’s a story about a league finally paying its stars something closer to what they’re worth — and Mitchell, after all those seasons in Egypt and Israel and Spain, is one of the faces of that shift.
She also signed on to play in Unrivaled for the 2026 season (drafted by Hive BC) and inked with Project B, a new league set to launch in fall 2026. Kelsey Mitchell, it turns out, isn’t just adapting to this new era of women’s basketball. She’s stacking her calendar with it.
