August 31, 2026
August 31, 2026
Minnesota Lynx’s 2025 season opened with a score to settle. Cheryl Reeve’s team had reached the WNBA Finals the year before. New York walked away with the trophy, and that loss hung over every roster decision Minnesota made that winter. The Lynx rebuilt around continuity rather than upheaval. They bet that the core which carried them to the brink of a title in 2024 simply needed sharper edges. That bet paid off almost immediately. It kept paying off for five months of basketball that felt, at times, unbeatable.
The Lynx front office lost pieces before it gained them. General manager Clare Duwelius departed to help launch the Unrivaled 3×3 league. Forward Cecilia Zandalasini was claimed by the expansion Golden State Valkyries, and Myisha Hines-Allen signed away to the Dallas Wings in February. Assistant coach Katie Smith left for a job on Ohio State’s staff. That stripped away another voice from a bench that had helped build a champion-caliber culture.
Reeve answered by reaching into her own history. She brought Lindsay Whalen back to Minneapolis as an assistant. Whalen, a Lynx legend, had helped deliver four championships as a player, and she was paired with Eric Thibault on the bench. The front office also flipped a future asset into a present one, acquiring a 2026 first-round pick from the Chicago Sky. Trades for Karlie Samuelson in April and DiJonai Carrington in August added depth and defensive versatility for a stretch run. The May draft brought Anastasiia Kosu into the fold at fifteenth overall, a low-cost addition to a roster that was never built to lean on rookies.
Napheesa Collier’s brilliance was the engine of Minnesota Lynx’s 2025 season from its opening tip. She averaged 22.9 points a game. She claimed Western Conference Player of the Month honors in May, June, and July alike. She did it while anchoring a defense that gave up fewer good looks than almost any in the league. Voters noticed. Collier earned a spot as an All-Star captain. She then walked away with All-Star Game MVP honors in front of a national audience, a personal highlight in a season full of them.
The recognition kept coming. Collier was a unanimous choice for the AP All-WNBA First Team. She also landed on the All-Defensive First Team, a rare two-way distinction that spoke to how completely she controlled games. Only the MVP trophy slipped away. A’ja Wilson claimed the award over Collier despite Minnesota’s superior record. The decision stung a fan base convinced its star had carried the league’s best team on her back.
Minnesota Lynx’s 2025 season reached its clearest statement in the standings. The 34-10 finish did more than top the Western Conference. It matched the gaudiest record in franchise history. It also made the Lynx the story of the regular season. Minnesota finished four full games clear of the Las Vegas Aces by the time October arrived.
The Lynx never staged a single dramatic surge, because they never needed one. Minnesota went 20-4 at Target Center and a stout 14-8 on the road. That balance let Reeve rest starters without ever losing the thread of the season. Basketball-Reference’s season log shows a team that rarely lost consecutive games. Minnesota absorbed the occasional bad night and answered with a winning streak before doubt could set in. Courtney Williams ran the offense at 6.2 assists a game. Jessica Shepard matched Collier on the glass at 7.3 rebounds a night. Kayla McBride and Alanna Smith supplied the shooting and switchability. That depth let Minnesota’s lineups survive foul trouble or an off night from any single starter.
The one blemish came in June. Minnesota rolled to a 5-1 mark in Commissioner’s Cup play and won its pool outright, setting up a title-game date against Indiana on July 1. The Fever seized that night instead. Indiana pulled away for a 74-59 win that exposed the one weakness the Lynx would carry into the postseason. Against a team playing with genuine desperation, Minnesota could still be rattled. It was a warning the Lynx would not fully heed.
Minnesota opened the playoffs the way it had opened the season, in complete control. The Lynx buried the expansion Golden State Valkyries 101-72 in Game 1. That margin made the top seed’s intentions clear before the series even had a chance to breathe. Game 2 demanded more, and Minnesota delivered anyway, clawing out a 75-74 road win to close a clean sweep. The victory sent the Lynx into the semifinals having outscored an opponent by nearly thirty points across two games. It did nothing to prepare anyone in Minneapolis for what waited in the next round.
Phoenix arrived with nothing to lose. That made the Mercury dangerous in a way the Lynx’s earlier opponent never was.
Minnesota looked like the better team when it mattered least, winning Game 1 at home 82-69 and appearing to set the tone for a short series. Then Game 2 turned into a slow-motion warning. The Lynx led for long stretches before Phoenix clawed back. Phoenix forced overtime, then stole an 89-83 win that evened the series and cracked open a door Minnesota had spent five months keeping shut. Reeve called it plainly afterward: a coaching loss, not a talent gap. The distinction mattered, because it meant the series was still winnable if Minnesota tightened up.
Game 3 broke the season in a single sequence. Napheesa Collier crumpled to the floor late in Minnesota’s 84-76 loss, on a play Reeve believed should have been a foul. The ankle injury that followed was later described as torn ligaments and a torn shin muscle, serious enough to end Collier’s series. Bleacher Report detailed the severity of the damage in the days that followed. Reeve did not hide her anger. She called the no-call malpractice and drew a fifteen-thousand-dollar fine, along with a one-game suspension that kept her out of the arena for Game 4.
Watching from a hotel room, Reeve could only listen. Her team lost 86-81 without its best player, closing out a semifinal defeat that no one in Minneapolis saw coming in May. She later called her outburst the product of a cumulative frustration that reached back to the previous year’s Finals loss. In a wide-ranging conversation with the Star Tribune, she reflected on the collapse. She placed the blame on Phoenix’s disruptive defense as much as on any single injury or officiating decision. Whatever the cause, a team that had spent five months looking unbeatable was eliminated in the semifinals, one round short of the rematch it wanted.
Numbers alone do not capture what Minnesota built and then lost, but they frame it. Thirty-four wins remains one of the finest regular seasons in franchise history. That mark came wrapped around a run of individual honors. Alanna Smith shared Defensive Player of the Year. Courtney Williams and Kayla McBride joined Collier among the league’s All-Star selections. The full postseason bracket shows a Lynx team that beat every opponent it faced except the one that eliminated it. That distinction offers little comfort to a fan base that watched a historic year end a round early.
That is the shape Minnesota Lynx’s 2025 season will hold in franchise memory: brilliant, nearly complete. It was finally undone by an ankle injury and a series Minnesota controlled before it did not. Collier’s brilliance and the depth Reeve assembled around her proved the Lynx could be the best team in the league for five months running. Whether that group gets another chance to finish what it started is a question for another season. The standard it set in 2025 will not soon be forgotten in Minneapolis.
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