Miles Passes Clark's WNBA Rookie Scoring Record at 790 Points

Olivia Miles' first season with Minnesota outscored Caitlin Clark's 2024 debut with Indiana, though Clark's rookie marks in assists and rebounding held up.

Minnesota guard Olivia Miles closed her debut WNBA campaign with the highest point total ever recorded by a league rookie. Chosen second overall in 2026 after finishing her college career at TCU, she started every one of the Lynx's 40 games and piled up 790 points, moving past the 769 Caitlin Clark compiled for Indiana in 2024. Miles added 6.0 assists, 4.7 rebounds and 1.3 steals per game.

The gap between the two debut seasons came to 21 points over an identical 40-game workload. Clark appeared in every Fever contest in 2024 and scored at 19.2 per outing. Miles' 19.8 average left her in front on both total output and per-game production.

Accuracy favored the 2026 rookie as well. Miles converted 49.2 percent of her field goals and 38.8 percent of her threes during the regular season, alongside a 60.6 percent true shooting figure. Clark's rookie rates were 41.7 percent overall and 34.4 percent from deep, though her 122 made triples dwarfed Miles' 64.

Playmaking remained firmly in Clark's hands. Her 337 assists in 2024, at 8.4 per game, set a WNBA single-season record and remain the standard for first-year players. Miles delivered 239 assists at 6.0 per game, the second-highest total ever by a rookie.

The rebounding battle also went to the former Iowa star. Clark collected 227 boards in 2024, 5.7 a night, with 213 of them on the defensive end. Miles pulled down 186 at 4.7 per game over the same number of appearances.

Miles added a second first-year scoring standard with 22 performances of 20 or more points, surpassing the previous rookie mark of 20 held by Seimone Augustus. Augustus continues to top the rookie list in scoring average at 21.9 in 2006, with Miles' 19.8 ranking third. Clark's debut generated its own milestones: a 19-assist performance against Dallas on July 17, 2024, which still stands as the league's single-game assist record, plus two triple-doubles after she became the first first-year player in league history to notch one.

Award voters threw their support behind both guards. Miles won the 2026 Rookie of the Year unanimously, taking all 74 national-panel votes, while Clark claimed the 2024 trophy on 66 of 67 ballots, with Angel Reese receiving the other. Clark was also the lone rookie chosen for that season's All-WNBA First Team. Each player started the All-Star Game in her first year — Clark, the seventh first-year player to earn a WNBA All-Star starting assignment, set an All-Star rookie record with 10 assists in 2024, and Miles joined the 2026 starting five.

Team situations diverged sharply. Minnesota went 33-11 and claimed the No. 1 playoff seed, arriving there off a 34-10 season in 2025; Indiana finished 20-20 in Clark's debut, a seven-win rise from 13-27 in 2023 that returned the Fever to the playoffs for the first time since 2016.

The two guards reached the league by different paths — Clark as the 2024 No. 1 pick out of Iowa, Miles at No. 2 in 2026 from TCU — and each stepped directly into a starting role, opening all 40 regular-season contests for her club. No freshman in men's or women's NCAA Tournament history had posted a triple-double before Miles did it in her first tournament game. The final ledger splits cleanly: Miles holds the advantages in points and shooting percentages, while Clark counters with more assists, rebounds and made threes along with her additional record-book entries.