Cameron Brink had one of the more memorable games of her young career on Saturday night, and unfortunately a lot of the memorability came from a bloody nose and a strange-looking brace.
The Los Angeles Sparks forward was battling Las Vegas Aces forward NaLyssa Smith for a rebound in the first quarter at T-Mobile Arena when she caught an inadvertent elbow to the face. Blood started flowing immediately. The Sparks trainer stuffed both nostrils with gauze and tried to keep her in the game.
The gauze did not work. Brink kept bleeding. Eventually she had to come off the floor and put on a nose brace that was so unusual it became the dominant talking point of the night. It looked less like a piece of medical equipment and more like something you would see in a costume shop.
The 24-year-old former No. 2 overall pick is no stranger to weird injuries at this point. Brink has spent most of her young pro career trying to get healthy after tearing her ACL early in her rookie season. She missed most of her first two professional years and has only recently started to look like the player the Sparks drafted out of Stanford.
The good news is that the nose brace did not slow her down once she got back into the game. Brink finished with 16 points and 8 rebounds in 24 minutes and was a major factor in the Sparks pulling off an upset 101-95 win over the reigning WNBA champions. That is the kind of toughness that turns heads in a league where physical play is the rule rather than the exception.
The Sparks needed every bit of Brink’s effort. Las Vegas came into the game with championship pedigree and the best player in the league in A’ja Wilson. Beating the Aces on their home floor is the kind of win that can change the trajectory of a season for a team that has been searching for an identity.
For Brink personally, this is exactly the kind of game that should give Sparks fans hope. She showed up in a hostile environment, took a brutal shot to the face, played through significant pain, and still impacted the game on both ends. That is not the kind of resume you build by being a one-dimensional player.
She also had a moment earlier this month against the Indiana Fever where she got a rejection on Caitlin Clark and had an emphatic reaction that went viral. Brink is starting to put together the kind of highlight tape that justifies the high draft slot the Sparks used on her three years ago. The team has been patient with her recovery, and the patience is starting to pay off.
The bigger picture for the Sparks is that they need Brink to be a difference-maker if they are going to compete in a tough Western Conference. Los Angeles has been building around a young core and Brink is supposed to be one of the cornerstones. Games like Saturday are a glimpse of what that vision looks like when it actually works.
The nose brace will be the photo people remember. The dunk highlights and the rebounding numbers will be what matters in the long run. Brink is finally healthy, finally productive, and finally giving the Sparks a reason to believe their patience was worth it.
If she keeps playing like this, the only thing she will need to fix is the helmet design. Maybe the Sparks training staff can find her a brace that looks slightly less like a science experiment before the next game.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
