Eleven makes on 16 shots is a night built in the paint, not on a heater from the logo. Jessica Shepard's career-high 26 points in Dallas' 91-85 win over Indiana arrived that way: catch, finish, repeat, with a plus-8 in 35 minutes that ESPN's box score also filled with eight rebounds, one assist, one steal, and one block.
Call her the Star of the Game for the efficiency as much as the total.
Shepard shot 11-for-16 from the field and 1-for-1 from three. The free-throw line was the leak, 3-for-8. Everything else in the line describes a forward who punished a Fever frontcourt for 35 minutes and never left the plus column.
A career high on 68 percent shooting
Career highs usually need a volume night or a three-point binge.
CBS Sports and ESPN both have her at 26 points on those 11-for-16 looks. That is 68.8 percent from the field. The AP recap, which led on Arike Ogunbowale's 32, still put Shepard's 26 in the opening sentence.
The two of them scored 58. The difference in how they scored is the Plano version of this game: Ogunbowale created off the bounce; Shepard finished at the rim and on short jumpers. ESPN's play-by-play lists the diet: a 7-foot make, a 6-foot floater, a 7-foot finish, a 5-foot bucket, a 23-foot three, a 14-foot jumper, a layup, a driving layup, a 13-foot jumper.
The three was the only shot that left the paint-and-elbow area. The rest was work on the block and on the roll. Odyssey Sims, Awak Kuier, Paige Bueckers, and Ogunbowale all show up as assist partners on those makes in the same log.
The minus on the night was the stripe. Three of eight from the line left five points on the floor in a six-point game. The Wings still won because the field-goal rate was high enough to survive those misses.
How a plus-8 looked in the fourth
The AP recap is the best public window into the fourth quarter, and it runs through Shepard.
Dallas was up by five, matching its peak lead to that point, when the fourth quarter opened with Bueckers seated. Shepard scored in that stretch, the AP wrote, and so did Alysha Clark. Caitlin Clark hit a three.
Sims made a pair of free throws. When Bueckers checked back in, her jumper pushed Dallas in front 74-64, the first time the lead reached double digits, per that recap. That sequence is why the Star of the Game tag sits on Shepard rather than on the first-quarter noise.
