The Minnesota Lynx had the best regular-season record in the WNBA. But according to Cheryl Reeve, that did not necessarily mean they had the team built to win in the playoffs.
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After another dominant regular season ended with another disappointing playoff exit, Reeve offered a remarkably candid assessment of where the Lynx stand. Minnesota finished as the No. 1 seed but was swept by the eighth-seeded New York Liberty, and the Lynx coach admitted that her team may have exceeded expectations during the regular season without having the right personnel to translate that success into the postseason.
“There are sometimes when you have that team, and that would be the case, you should feel that way. I have not felt like we’ve had that team over these three years, and so what we’re doing is sort of maybe exceeding expectations in the regular season.”
“Then when it comes to the playoffs, maybe we don’t quite have the right group to be effective,” Reeve said in the post-game press conference, per the WNBA YouTube channel.
The Minnesota Lynx have now suffered disappointment after a remarkable regular season under head coach Cheryl Reeve for three consecutive years, from 2024 through 2026. Despite entering the postseason as top-tier title contenders each time, their campaigns have ended in heartbreak.
In 2024, they finished as the No. 2 overall seed but eventually lost to the New York Liberty in the WNBA Finals in a controversial Game 5 overtime thriller. In 2025, the Lynx finished as the No. 1 seed with a franchise-record 32-8 mark. However, they were eliminated in the semifinals by the Phoenix Mercury after an ankle injury sidelined star Napheesa Collier.
Now, the 2026 season has brought an even greater disappointment. The Lynx finished as the No. 1 overall seed with a league-best 33-11 record. But they ended up suffering an historic collapse, becoming the first No. 1 seed in WNBA history to be swept in the first round by a No. 8 seed, the New York Liberty.
Cheryl Reeve’s verdict on this series of postseason failures is that the Lynx simply do not have the right combination of players to make their regular-season success count when the playoffs begin. And for all the success they had during the regular season, it did not help against a New York Liberty team with proven veterans like Breanna Stewart, alongside Jonquel Jones and Sabrina Ionescu, who did the most damage in the 87-71 loss that ended their playoff run.
“We became a great regular-season team this year,” Reeve said, “and we ran into the wrong team. I thought the playoffs would be hard for our team, regardless of who we were playing in the first round. We probably needed a little better matchup to do some of the things that we did all season long, but that’s not how it works.”
As far as Reeve is concerned, there is now a lot to be done to turn this Lynx team from one that has become a regular-season powerhouse into one that can also deliver when the playoffs arrive. And she’s announced that she’ll be making some hard decisions.
“I just know we have some work to do. I have to help us, I have to get us the appropriate help to do it, make the hard decisions to do that. And I couldn’t get us there in this series, and so it’s on me.”
“I have to help them win in the playoffs… both as an executive [president of basketball operations] and as the coach, and I’ll find a way to do that.”
Perhaps that could mean bringing in more playoff-tested reinforcements ahead of next season. But whatever that might mean, Reeve and the Lynx now have a clear challenge: find a way to make their regular-season dominance translate when the games matter most.