Angel Reese Makes WNBA History with 500 Rebounds
Angel Reese didn’t just grab another rebound on Saturday. She grabbed a slice of WNBA history and tightened her grip on a season that already belongs to her.
In the first half of the Atlanta Dream’s matchup with the Chicago Sky, Reese hauled in her 500th rebound of the year, becoming the first player in league history to hit that mark in a single season. Five hundred. One year. One relentless forward owning the glass.
This isn’t a late-season surge. It’s the continuation of a campaign that has rewritten the rebounding record book in real time. On Aug. 24, in Atlanta’s 78–71 win over the Los Angeles Sparks, Reese set the WNBA’s single-season rebounding record. The milestone barely had time to breathe before she raised the bar again.
Her mindset has been clear for weeks. Speaking that same night, Reese distilled her approach into a simple rule of engagement on every shot. “Anything that goes up is mine,” she said, via USA Today’s Cydney Henderson. That’s not a slogan. It’s a scouting report.
She’s not just vacuuming up misses. She’s stacking history across categories. On Aug. 30, Reese set the league’s single-season record for double-doubles, reaching 29 and turning what used to be a notable achievement into a nightly expectation.
The numbers behind the noise are staggering. Heading into Saturday’s game, the three-time All-Star was averaging a career-high 16.5 points and a league-leading 12.4 rebounds per game across 40 appearances. She’s filling out the rest of the box score, too: 2.8 assists, 1.8 steals and 0.7 blocks per night, a stat line that speaks to a player everywhere at once.
Her impact stretches far beyond the counting stats. With Reese on the floor, Atlanta owns a plus-10.2 net rating this season, according to WNBA.com. When she sits, that number plummets to plus-0.2. Same team, same system, entirely different force of gravity.
That gravitational pull has helped drag the Dream into the thick of the playoff picture. Atlanta sits at 27–14, fourth in the WNBA standings as the postseason approaches, with Reese anchoring the frontcourt and shaping the team’s identity around her edge on the boards and her consistency in the paint.
“I want to be one of (the best) when I walk away from the game,” she said in August. Nights like this push that ambition from aspiration toward inevitability.
The ball goes up. Angel Reese goes up. And this season, history keeps coming down with her.
