Jacksonville got the first basket Sunday afternoon at Bojangles Coliseum, and that was as good as the day ever got for the UpShot League's first-place team.
Charlotte answered with a 9-0 run and controlled everything after it. Final: 105-73. Your Charlotte Crown, the women's pro basketball team in the first-year UpShot League, did three things at once on Sunday, folks. They won a seventh straight game, the longest winning streak by any team in this league's first season. They set the league's single-game scoring record for regulation play. And they handed the Jacksonville Waves, owners of the best record in the league, a 32-point loss.
Let me give that scoreline some context. Jacksonville walked in at 20-5. The Crown's biggest win of the season before Sunday was 20 points, back on June 20 in Greensboro. This one was 32, and it was never close: Charlotte led by at least 15 at every quarter break, then closed on a 29-15 run in the fourth, in their second game in barely 24 hours.
And it was not one hot hand doing it. Schaquilla Nunn went for 18 points and 11 rebounds, and six Crown players scored in double figures. SIX. That is not a hot night. That is a rotation.
If you are new here, and Sunday's score is going to mint some newcomers, the quick primer: the UpShot League launched in May with four founding teams, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Savannah and Greensboro. (Savannah, for the record, dropped its 10th straight on Saturday.) The Crown are run by Zawyer Sports, the same operation behind the AHL's Charlotte Checkers, and the league was built from day one as a pipeline to the WNBA. That pipeline is no longer a pitch. On Friday the Indiana Fever announced the signing of Crown forward Michelle Onyiah, the first player in UpShot League history to reach the WNBA. Three months in, the league has a WNBA signing on its resume and a Charlotte team on the longest run it has ever seen.
About that record: the Crown's previous season high was 103, and here is the detail I love. They set it in the franchise's very first game, May 15 in Jacksonville. This team introduced itself to the league by putting up 103 on the Waves, and this weekend it broke its own ceiling against the same club. Some rivalries you have to manufacture. This one is writing itself: Jacksonville has lost six games all season, and three of them are to Charlotte.
Sunday also closed out a weekend that showed both sides of this team. Saturday, same building, nothing came easy: Savannah erased a nine-point halftime deficit with a 16-4 run to open the third quarter and went in front, before forward Reigan Richardson took the game back. She finished with 33 points, the most by any Crown player this season, 12 of them in the fourth-quarter stretch that decided it, and the Crown won 76-65. Saturday was a fistfight. Sunday was a coronation.
And remember, this streak did not start at home. It started at the tail end of a five-week, 13-game road trip the Crown closed out 9-4, then followed them home for the homestand they wrap up this week.
I told you in July that there was a pro basketball team winning in Charlotte that almost nobody was talking about. On Saturday I told you the league itself is real. Consider this the third column in the series, and the last one that needs to make an argument. The argument is over. The Crown are 16-10, they own the longest winning streak this league has seen, and on Sunday they took the floor against first place and won by 32.
Here is the part you can act on. The Crown are back home Wednesday night, 7 p.m., against the Greensboro Groove, and the league's first championship weekend lands August 29 in Jacksonville. The inaugural season has less than a month left, and the team this city spent the summer overlooking is the one playing its best basketball right now.
Jacksonville got the first basket on Sunday. Charlotte got the next nine points, the record, the streak and the ballgame. That is not a team sneaking up on people anymore. That is a team arriving, right on time, whether this town is watching or not.