She does not change her pace for anyone. She does not hurry because the moment is big. She does not flinch in overtime, or double overtime, or triple overtime, or quadruple overtime — and on June 28, 2026, the Portland Fire’s Carla Leite proved all of that in one of the most remarkable individual performances in WNBA history.
The 22-year-old French point guard finished with 32 points, 9 assists, 6 rebounds, and 3 steals across 48 minutes in a 124-123 quadruple-overtime loss to the Washington Mystics — tying the longest game in WNBA history — while personally forcing overtime twice with clutch shots under pressure. She missed the game-winning floater in the final seconds. Portland lost by one. And the fact that the Fire came within a heartbeat of stealing that game against one of the league’s best rosters came entirely because of her.
That is Carla Leite. She is averaging 14.1 points and 5.5 assists per game in 2026 — leading Portland’s expansion franchise in both categories — and she is quietly becoming one of the most compelling stories in women’s basketball.
She is a dawg. The WNBA is just starting to notice.
Carla Leite was born April 16, 2004, in France, and grew up playing everything before basketball found her — soccer, tennis, any sport that would have her. It was not until she was 13 years old, joining Pôle d’Antibes in the south of France, that basketball became serious. What happened after that was fast.
She moved to Tarbes Gespe Bigorre, one of France’s top development programs known specifically for playing young players early. That was not a coincidence — it was a calculated choice by a teenager who already knew what she needed. “I wasn’t interested in just training with the pros,” she told French outlet Ouest France. “I wanted to play in the league. Tarbes is known for fielding young players. I thought it was the best place to develop and get some playing time.”
Her breakthrough came under French coach François Gomez, who put the ball in her hands at the highest level of French women’s basketball before most players her age were thinking about professional contracts. “Carla Leite was very mature and ready to play at our best level,” Gomez told The IX Sports. “She was very competitive with a plan for her career.”
He added with affection: “She had a strong character, sometimes too much. But in two seasons, she transformed her relationship with the others and used this personality trait as a strength.”
It is worth sitting with that description. Strong character, sometimes too much — then channeled into something that elevates everyone around her. That transformation from raw intensity to controlled will is exactly what you see watching Leite operate in crunch time. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is forced. She plays like someone who learned early that composure is not a personality — it is a weapon.
Leite once told French journalist Amaury Perdriau, who has been covering women’s basketball in France for years, that her role model is Kyrie Irving. Think about that for a second. Not a WNBA star. Not a French national team legend. Kyrie — the most handle-first, creativity-before-pace, “I move on my own terms” guard of his generation.
Watch Leite play and you see it. She does not get sped up. She does not take the defense’s offer. She operates at her own tempo, uses her handle to create space in ways that make defenses look foolish, and makes the pull-up or the floater look inevitable even when the game is on the line.
The Dallas Wings selected Leite ninth overall in the 2024 WNBA Draft, but rather than bringing her over immediately, they left her overseas to develop — a “draft-and-stash” move that meant American fans saw almost nothing of her until she arrived with the Golden State Valkyries in 2025. What she was doing overseas while the WNBA waited was quietly building one of the most decorated young resumes in European women’s basketball.
In 2023, Leite led France to the U20 Women’s European Championship gold medal — the country’s first since 2014 — while being named tournament MVP. She averaged 18.4 points, 4.3 assists, and 3.6 rebounds across the competition, shooting 48.5 percent from three. She was 19 years old.
In the 2024-25 season, Leite won the EuroCup Women with Villeneuve d’Ascq LM and was named Finals MVP — averaging 20.5 points, 6.0 assists, and 2.5 rebounds across the two final games, including 25 points and 5 assists in the first leg. She dropped 16 points and 7 assists in the second leg to close it out.
“She loves the pressure situation,” Gomez told The IX Sports. “She can play her best basketball in those moments. She is a fighter and she is never afraid. She thinks she can play the best opponents and dominate them. For me, she is the X factor.”
The following season, Leite helped her club reach the Euroleague Women Final Six — the elite eight-team competition considered the pinnacle of European club basketball — giving her Final Six experience before her 22nd birthday.
Leite arrived in the WNBA with the Golden State Valkyries in 2025, averaging 7.2 points and 2.0 assists per game in a reserve role across 37 games. Those numbers understated her impact — she was one of just seven rookies that season to accumulate 250-plus points, 40-plus rebounds, and 70-plus assists. When the Portland Fire used their second expansion draft pick to select her in April 2026, Valkyries GM Ohemaa Nyanin called it “a necessary step toward something bigger” but made clear the loss was real: “Carla Leite and María are part of our canvas, and we are thankful for their impact.”
With starting minutes and genuine offensive responsibility, Leite has become a different player. Her numbers in 2026 tell the story:
14.1 points per game — more than double her rookie average
5.5 assists per game — up from 2.0 in 2025
44.2 percent from the field — up from 38.7 percent as a rookie
33.3 percent from three — up from 17.2 percent in 2025
23.5 average minutes — up from 17.2 in her first season
She hit a career-high 18 points and 12 assists for Portland’s first double-double ever — becoming the first Fire player to post that kind of playmaking performance — before shattering it again on June 28.
Portland’s first win of the season came on May 11, 2026, and Leite was the engine. She dropped 21 points, 4 rebounds, and 6 assists — a new career-high at that point — carrying the Fire to a victory that announced this team was not just an expansion placeholder.
On Sunday, June 28, 2026, the Portland Fire visited the Washington Mystics and played one of the greatest basketball games in WNBA history. The final score: Mystics 124, Fire 123 — in four overtimes, tying the record for the longest game ever played in the league.
Carla Leite played all 48 minutes. She scored 32 points on 12-of-26 shooting, added 9 assists, 6 rebounds, and 3 steals, and single-handedly forced overtime not once but twice — hitting a buzzer-beating three-pointer off a defensive rebound to tie the game and extend it, then doing it again later to force yet another period.
Her coach Alex Sarama said: “I felt like we couldn’t have got a better look, and it’s tough, that’s the one. Carla was so clutch, and that’s always the way it is. She played an incredible game. She’s the ultimate competitor, but her execution, the clutch was incredible. It just didn’t go our way with the last shot, but I was really happy with the shot we got coming out of that.”
With the score tied and the clock in single digits of what would have been the final overtime, Leite got the ball on a designed play out of a timeout, drove toward the paint, and released a floater that just missed — a devastating near-miss that sent the game into another overtime and ultimately ended in a loss.
She was devastated in the tunnel afterward. The kind of devastated that only lives in people who compete at the highest level and care with everything they have. That image is as important as anything she did on the court — because it tells you who she is when no one is supposed to be watching. She left everything on the floor, and even 32 points and nine assists was not enough.
That competitive fire is the foundation of everything she has become.
The defining characteristic of Carla Leite — the one that separates her from most guards her age in the WNBA — is that she simply does not get sped up. The bigger the moment, the more deliberate she becomes. Where other young guards rush, overthink, or take bad shots under pressure, Leite operates with an almost eerie calm, reading the defense, identifying the right angle, and then making the play that was already there.
“The fearless that we have in our game,” Belgian guard Julie Vanloo, who played alongside Leite with the Valkyries, told The IX Sports. “We’ve been in this professional station, sometimes since we were 16 or 17 years old, and I think we already played against people that are older than us, stronger than us, bigger than us. Carla is a perfect example of fearlessness.”
Leite’s handle is what makes everything else possible. It is a Kyrie-influenced, euro-trained skill set that allows her to change speed, change direction, and create separation in spaces most guards could not navigate. She draws contact at the rim, finishes through contact, and uses the floater — the same one that almost won that four-overtime game — as her equalizer against bigger defenders.
In 2026, she is shooting 65-plus percent on paint attempts, meaning she is not just getting to those spots — she is converting at an elite rate once she is there.
The other thing about Leite that coaches and teammates consistently point to is her basketball IQ and team-first instincts — a product of the European system she came up in, where playmaking and system basketball are prioritized over individual scoring. Portland GM Vanja Černivec noted when the Fire acquired her: “It’s more team oriented, high basketball IQ, it’s not just individual skill sets. So I think that’s where we were more attracted to those skill sets.”
Her 5.5 assists per game in 2026 are not an accident. They are the natural output of a point guard who reads the game at full speed, makes the right decision before the defense has time to react, and trusts her teammates.
Leite is not just building a career in Portland — she is building toward something bigger. French basketball journalist Amaury Perdriau, who has followed her career since her teens, told The IX Sports he believes her career will be “dedicated to the WNBA” as the league expands and grows. She has plans to play in Turkey after the 2026 season and has stated goals of winning the EuroLeague.
In France, she is increasingly compared to New York Liberty guard Marine Johannes — a pioneer of French women’s basketball in the WNBA — but described as a different, more evolved version of that archetype for the current era. Perdriau said bluntly: “She’s a bucket. She can do anything she wants.”
The French national team she wants to represent at the World Cup in September and ultimately at the 2028 LA Olympics is already built around one of the most talented rosters in the world — a group that pushed the United States to the wire for the gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 2024. Leite wants to be in the middle of that, and the way she is playing in 2026, it would be hard to keep her off the roster.
At 22 years old, she is averaging career-best numbers across the board for an expansion team, playing all 48 minutes in the longest tie in WNBA history, hitting two buzzer-beaters in a single game, and walking off devastated because she did not win.
She is a dawg. She moves at her own pace. Her handle is elite. And the best of Carla Leite is still ahead of her.
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References:
ESPN.com – Carla Leite 2026 Stats — espn.com
ESPN.com – Mystics 124-123 Fire (Jun 28, 2026) Game Recap — espn.com
The IX Sports – Carla Leite Is Reinventing Herself with the Portland Fire — theixsports.com
The IX Sports – Portland Fire’s Mystics Loss Comes with Lessons Learned — theixsports.com
The IX Sports – Valkyries Lose Carla Leite in 2026 WNBA Expansion Draft — theixsports.com
FIBA Basketball – Leite Lands EuroCup Women Finals MVP Honor — fiba.basketball
StatMuse – Carla Leite Career Stats — statmuse.com
Reddit / Her Hoops Stats – Carla Leite Has Proven She’s a Starting Point Guard — reddit.com
WNBA on Facebook – Carla Leite 32 PTS, 9 AST vs. Mystics — facebook.com
WNBA on Instagram – Carla Leite Sends Game to OT Twice — instagram.com
EuroBasket.com – Carla Leite Player Profile — eurobasket.com
FIBA YouTube – Carla Leite Full Highlights, FIBA U20 Europe 2023 — youtube.com
WNBA YouTube – Game of the Season: Fire vs. Mystics Quadruple OT — youtube.com
