Marcus Vale: Long week — but I'll tell you what snapped me out of it. Did you see the Griner thing?
Cole Bryant: The record — yes. I've been obsessed.
Marcus Vale: So paint the picture. July 20th. Phoenix Mercury hosting the Connecticut Sun. DeWanna Bonner grabs six rebounds in that game, pushes her Mercury career total to 2,324. Griner held that record at 2,322. Two rebounds. That's the margin.
Cole Bryant: Two! And Griner played 315 games for Phoenix over 11 years — No. 1 pick in 2013, won them a championship in 2014 — and Bonner beats that record by two possessions.
Marcus Vale: From the other bench.
Cole Bryant: Dude — from the Connecticut Sun bench! She signed with the Atlanta Dream in February 2025, then ended up with Connecticut, and now she's an opponent watching someone else rewrite her chapter of Phoenix history. That's — I mean, that's not poetic, that's actually painful.
Marcus Vale: Gracious though. Griner hugged Bonner during the timeout recognition, gave her a push. Which is the right move. But the story behind that hug — that's what we're here to pick apart.
Cole Bryant: Because a franchise that still believed in Griner doesn't end up in this moment, right? Like — she doesn't become the opponent unless someone decided the relationship was over.
Marcus Vale: But pump the brakes on the displacement story — because Griner didn't get erased from that record book. She got distributed across it. She still holds blocks at 812. Two-point field goals made, 2,183 — that's a Mercury record too. Scoring, she's second all-time at 5,572 points. The only person ahead of her there is Diana Taurasi at 10,646.
Cole Bryant: Wait — so she lost one record and still owns like three others?
Marcus Vale: Exactly. And here's why that matters — franchise all-time rankings only count what you did in that uniform. Her Connecticut stats, her Atlanta stats, none of that touches her Mercury legacy. It's frozen at whatever she posted in 315 games for Phoenix.
Cole Bryant: Oh — okay, that's actually — wait, so it's like a house you sold. The renovations you put in are still there, they're just, someone else owns the house now.
Marcus Vale: That's the right frame. She renovated multiple rooms. Bonner just remodeled one of them.
Cole Bryant: And she's — I mean, she's the only Mercury player besides Taurasi sitting at the top of multiple categories, right? That's not a player who got written out. That's a player who got... split up across the index.
Marcus Vale: Correct. Distributed. So the story isn't torch-passing. The story is fragmentation — and frankly, that's a harder thing to process than a clean handoff.
Cole Bryant: Because a clean handoff has a hero. Fragmentation just has — a spreadsheet and a lot of complicated feelings.
Marcus Vale: But spreadsheet and complicated feelings — that's actually where Bonner's arc gets genuinely weird. Because she isn't just some long-tenured player who outlasted Griner. She left Phoenix in 2019. Ten years, gone. Then she comes back in 2025. And the only reason her franchise total keeps climbing is that return. If she stays gone, Griner's record stands. Full stop.
Cole Bryant: Wait — so Bonner originally needed 335 games to get to 2,072 rebounds the first time around?
Marcus Vale: Right. And Griner passed that mark in 276 games. Faster. More efficient. By every per-game measure, Griner was the better rebounder in a Mercury uniform. But efficiency without tenure means nothing for franchise totals. Bonner came back, kept adding, and the counter never reset.
Cole Bryant: Okay that is — no, hold on, that's the thing I didn't fully get. It's like Griner won the sprint and Bonner won the — I mean, the marathon isn't even the right word because Bonner left for six years and then came back. That's not a marathon, that's two separate races and she got credit for both.
Marcus Vale: That's exactly it. Two-stint arc. 2009 to 2019, then back in 2025. The franchise record doesn't care about the gap — it's cumulative tenure. So Bonner is arguably the most durable institutional presence in Mercury history, not despite the departure but because of the return.
Cole Bryant: Dude. That's — the city council member who loses reelection and comes back six years later to cast the deciding vote.
Marcus Vale: And Griner's sitting in the public gallery when it happens. Which is the kernel of truth in the whole hot-take version of this story — Bonner's return is the actual mechanism. Cole's instinct that this is an institutional presence story? That part's right.
Cole Bryant: I'll take the partial win. But — and we'll get into this — the sportsmanship of that hug gets a lot messier once you look at why Griner left Phoenix in the first place.
Marcus Vale: Yeah. The hug was real. What surrounds it — less clean.
Cole Bryant: Okay but the hug is doing a lot of lifting here, right? Like — nine days before Bonner breaks that record, the Las Vegas Aces beat Phoenix by 48 points. Forty-eight. That's not a loss, that's a mercy ruling.
Marcus Vale: Kahleah Copper said the team was embarrassed. Her word.
Cole Bryant: Embarrassed! And they've got 19 games left to even make the playoffs — one year after the WNBA Finals. So the franchise that Griner built for 11 seasons, that she anchored through a championship in 2014, ten All-Star selections, six All-WNBA honors — that franchise is now in a genuine survival situation.
Marcus Vale: And the warm moment happens inside that context. That's the actual read.
Cole Bryant: Right — and I think that's the defensible claim we keep circling. The hug is real. Multiple reports, warm, mutually respectful, Griner gives Bonner a push — that's genuine, I'm not disputing it. But — I mean, the sportsmanship is also doing organizational cover work at the same time? Both things are true?
Marcus Vale: Both things are true. And nobody's answered the actual question — did Griner leave Phoenix, or did Phoenix leave Griner? She signed with Atlanta in February 2025. That's not a player demanding a trade. That's a player who needed somewhere to go.
Cole Bryant: Wait — that distinction matters so much. Because if Phoenix made that call — cap, roster, whatever — then they didn't just lose Griner, they accelerated their own collapse. And now they're celebrating a rebounding record milestone while they're, like, genuinely fighting to exist in the postseason.
Marcus Vale: That's the retention failure story. Player was the system. She leaves, the system collapses. Speed of decline confirms it.
Cole Bryant: So the calibrated take is — that hug on July 20th, it's a real sporting moment and it is also the most expensive photo op in Mercury history. Both.
Marcus Vale: And that's where I'll actually land on this whole thing. Griner is first in blocks at 812, second in scoring at 5,572, and now fifth in rebounds. She didn't get erased — she got distributed. Bonner has 2,324 rebounds and a hug. Phoenix has a record book full of ghosts and 19 games to figure out whether they even make the playoffs. That's the story.
Cole Bryant: It's — I mean, you started this whole thing with 'did you see the Griner thing' and I was like yeah, record broken, cool sports moment. And now I'm sitting here thinking about a front office looking at a cap sheet. Two rebounds. That margin is the same, the facts haven't changed, but what it means is completely different from where we started.
Marcus Vale: Two rebounds. Same number. Different weight now.
Cole Bryant: Yeah. Good one to dig into.
Marcus Vale: Worth every minute.
