MINNEAPOLIS — For the first two months of the 2026 WNBA season, the Minnesota Lynx boasted the stingiest defense in basketball. Outscoring the Lynx in May and June was akin to finding a winning lottery ticket. Over the last month and change, scoring on the Lynx has been about as simple as getting a free car from Oprah.
Minnesota’s 10-game winning streak, the franchise’s longest such streak since rattling off 13 straight to start the 2016 season, ended with a thud on Thursday night against the Los Angeles Sparks.
A pair of losses in which the defense fell well below Minnesota’s standard bookended the 10-game streak. Two losses in a 12-game span wouldn’t normally trigger any alarm bells, but something most of the 10 wins in that stretch held in common was a lackluster effort on the defensive end of the floor.
In July, the Lynx in July made a habit of coming out on top in high-scoring shootouts. However, that run ran out of steam in the 89-82 loss.
“Yeah, let’s talk about our offense. Is that what we’re gonna do?” Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve said after the first question of the postgame press conference referenced fourth-quarter shot selection. “Let’s talk about our offense; we lost the game because we don’t play any fucking defense. If you want to talk about offense, you sound like the players.”
Los Angeles shot 50% from the field against Minnesota and 38% from beyond the 3-point line. The Sparks scored 46 of their 89 points in the paint and shot over 60% on their paint touches.
“Literally, a team can get whatever they want on us,” Reeve added. “Doesn’t matter the action. Doesn’t matter which personnel you go against. They get anything they want. That’s what I watched for 40 minutes. Actually, we played well for the first four minutes of the game. It’s a shame that [the players] have to keep playing hard for the rest of the game. That’s really difficult.”
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There were no silver linings or complex diagnoses to be made on what went wrong and what cost the Lynx an 11th consecutive win — and made a number of preceding wins much closer.
“Every player at every position was terrible,” Reeve said. “Every player that played in the game at every position.”
The Lynx’s recent defensive struggles run counter to who the team was at the season’s halfway point. Minnesota allowed an average of 95.9 points per 100 possessions in the month of May, the fewest allowed by any team in the league. The 98.1 points per 100 possessions allowed in June was also a league-best mark. That average rose to 109.3 in July (No. 8 in the league), and is at 118.9 through two games in August (No. 14 in the league).
The Lynx now enter a pivotal weekend of back-to-back home matinees against WNBA contenders. First, they have a chance to get a win against the lone team in the league they’ve yet to beat, the defending champion and currently second-place Las Vegas Aces on Saturday. Win or lose, there won’t be much recovery time as the fifth-place Dallas Wings come to town on Sunday.
“Player-led,” Reeve said when asked how the Lynx defense can get back on track. “Player-led defense is when we’ll know. You guys will know. You’ll see it. It’s not player-led [right now]. Anything that’s being done is being done because the coaches are imploring them to do it, if they decided to do it. Player-led. Those are the best teams, and we don’t have that. Not right now.”
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Olivia Miles echoed the need for the players to be excellent in the areas uncontrolled by the coaching staff, such as effort and taking a win-every-possession mindset out onto the court.
“I think we just have to put consistent effort forward, regardless of if adjustments are made or whatever they may look like,” Miles said after the game on Thursday. “Just got to stick to our habits. [Cheryl] can’t coach effort. At the end of the day, that’s a non-negotiable whether the other team is scheming or not. I think it’s just a will and want to on every possession. Deciding that you’re not going to get beat. It’s a pride thing, and being there for your teammates. I actually thought our rotations were really good today, but who knows. What happened down the stretch, we kind of lost focus, but it’s the every possession sort of mindset that we have to get back to.”
The Lynx could have statistically clinched a playoff spot with a win on Thursday night that also would have given them a 3.5-game cushion between them and the second-place Aces. Instead, the creative “clinched” graphics that would have flooded social media and the playoff priority ticketing emails were put on hold for at least another day, and the Aces will touchdown in Minneapolis with a chance to make up real ground in the race for the No. 1 overall seed.
“I think two things,” Napheesa Collier said postgame of the quick turnaround. “One, we need to know why we lost, the things that we need to get better at on defense. But at the same time, you have to be able to flush this too and move on because we have a back-to-back this weekend with two good teams, so just take what we learned today and apply it to the game on Saturday.”
