Cheryl Reeve Slams ‘Every Player at Every Position’ After Lynx’s Loss to Sparks
For years now, Cheryl Reeve and her Minnesota Lynx teams have been the standard for sustained success and excellence in the WNBA. That’s why Reeve can build a championship contender even when the odds are stacked against her. When players don’t live up to that standard, Reeve will let them know.
After an 89-82 loss to the Los Angeles Sparks, she let everyone know that her team’s defensive effort was unacceptable.
“46 points in the paint,” Reeve said in the postgame media availability, per a video on the Lynx’s YouTube page. “Literally, a team can get whatever they want on us. Doesn’t matter the action. Doesn’t matter which personnel you go against. They get anything they want. That’s what I watch for 40 minutes.”
She also added, “Every player at every position was terrible.”
Moreover, Reeve said any kind of defensive effort had been a result of coaches pushing the players and that they needed a player-led defense to get back to where they should be—and where they were to start the season.
The Lynx’s defense fell off in July
Minnesota started the season off hot defensively. They finished May with the best defensive rating in the league (96.8 over eight games), and continued that trend in June. Again, they finished first with a defensive rating of 97.9.
In July, things started going downhill. They regularly allowed teams to score 90 or more points and finished the month tenth with a defensive rating of 109.9. That’s not the kind of defense Minnesota is known for. The Lynx finished the last two seasons first and second in defensive rating, respectively. They also never finished worse than third in all four of their championship seasons.
No matter the players on the roster, defense has always been a strong part of the Lynx’s identity in winning seasons. Recently, they haven’t shown much of that. They allowed the Phoenix Mercury, Seattle Storm, and Indiana Fever to score 100 points and were lucky to outscore them, and even let the short-handed Toronto Tempo put up 93 points.
Los Angeles didn’t crack the 90-point-mark, but the defensive effort from the Lynx still wasn’t great. LA shot 50% from the field and 38% from deep, dominated the paint 46-28, and outscored the Lynx on fast-break opportunities. Nneka Ogwumike, Dearica Hamby, and Cameron Brink only missed seven combined shots from inside the 3-point arc.
Even after the loss, the Lynx sit on top of the standings. Still, hopefully this game will be a wake-up call. Minnesota has a chance to compete for a championship this season, after losing out on the 2024 title in overtime and watching Napheesa Collier’s 2025 postseason be cut short by a devastating injury. If the Lynx want to put themselves in position to avoid another heartbreak like that, they need to lock in defensively and realize their two-way potential.
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Elaine Blum covers women’s basketball for On SI from Europe. She has been writing about women's hoops since 2023 and holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism and a master’s degree in American Studies with a focus on women’s and gender studies. She started playing basketball when she was 10 years old and won several league and state championships at the youth and senior level.