MINNEAPOLIS—Entering Monday night’s game against the Golden State Valkyries, the Minnesota Lynx were on top of the world.
The team finished perhaps its most demanding stretch of away games of the season with a perfect 4-0 record.
The trip began with a win in which the Lynx held on for dear life against a determined Portland Fire team.
What followed were three separate visits to teams who all look to be right in the mix come playoff time: the defending champion Las Vegas Aces, the Golden State Valkyries boasting the league’s stingiest defense, and the pugnacious Washington Mystics, who are playing as well as anyone since All-Star Weekend.
All three tipped off against the Lynx on their respective home floors, and all three ended up as more cannon fodder for Minnesota’s historically great road record (17-2) so far through 2026.
Minnesota’s reward for such a display of success on the road was the chance to clinch the No. 1 seed in the 2026 WNBA Playoffs at home against the Valkyries, who entered Monday night with a worse ‘all-time’ winning percentage against the Lynx than the Washington Generals have against the Harlem Globetrotters.
It did not end that way.
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Golden State’s suffocating defense turned in one of its best performances of the season to come away with an 80-66 victory, their first ever against Minnesota. It also keeps the Lynx at about a 99% chance of clinching the No. 1 seed and home-court advantage for the entire playoffs as opposed to 100%.
The Valkyries ate up virtually all of Minnesota’s attempts at meaningful ball movement. Olivia Miles in particular had a hard time injecting life into the Lynx offense, something that Lynx head coach and president of basketball operations Cheryl Reeve said could serve as a key learning opportunity as Minnesota continues to try to climb the mountain of winning a championship.
“I want games like this for [Miles] as a rookie,” Reeve said after Monday night’s loss. “We need games like this so that there’s learning that happens. There’s disappointment, maybe, that she’s feeling for sure; she needs that. We need that, and so that’s the kind of stuff that makes us a better team. I’m quite confident that the next time we’re in a hard situation, what we went through tonight will be really valuable to her and to our team.”
All-Star center Natasha Howard, who led Minnesota with 13 points on the night, echoed Reeve’s assessment that the loss creates an opportunity for the Lynx to head into the postseason on the right foot.
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“Yeah, I agree with Cheryl. Absolutely,” Howard said when asked about it during the postgame press conference. “Because you don’t want to have these types of losses during the playoffs. Because you get one of these losses, series tied up, the team that loses that game is like, ‘oh shit,’ you can’t get it back. Right now, it’s good for all of us. It’s a learning lesson for the whole group as well, so it’s not all on Liv; it’s the whole team.”
Minnesota keeping its feet properly pressed on the gas has been a theme Reeve and the Lynx have focused on through the dog days of August with the end of the regular season in sight.
Last year’s Lynx team also clinched the No. 1 seed with several games to spare, and the way in which they finished their regular season slate wasn’t up to their championship standard. They went 2-2 over the season’s final week, including an 83-72 loss at Indiana in the penultimate game of the season that tinged the regular season’s final days with a sour taste.
“We were saying we’d rather be battle-tested going into the playoffs than, you know, I thought last season, we had a five-game lead and the way that we finished the season is just not what you hope for going into the playoffs,” Reeve said before Minnesota’s game against the Dallas Wings on August 9 when asked about the remaining strength of schedule. “We talked about this being a sprint. You know, seven games to the break and then four games we have on the other side of the break; basically, playoffs will be starting on the other side of the FIBA Break.”
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Those seven games have been reduced to one as the Lynx have a few days off before wrapping up their August slate in Atlanta against Angel Reese and the Dream on August 30.
Minnesota has gone 5-1 since those remarks and has a firm grasp on the top spot in the WNBA. The Lynx are a team that has responded positively to disappointment. After their last disappointing loss against the Los Angeles Sparks, the Lynx got back to their championship standard with back-to-back double-digit wins on back-to-back days against the Las Vegas Aces and Dallas Wings.
There are far fewer games in a far larger span of time as the WNBA breaks for the 2026 FIBA Women’s World Cup in Berlin on Sept. 1.
Regardless, the standard remains the same in Minnesota: not only to sprint to the playoffs, but to run through them until no one else is left running.
