The Lynx play the Portland Fire Wednesday night (9:00 PM Central, WNBA League Pass / Victory+ MIN), and the honest framing is that Minnesota clinched a playoff spot over the weekend, in the second week of August, before any other team in the league had gotten around to it.
Sit with that. The Lynx are 27-7. They spent the first two months building the WNBA’s best record at 21-6 without Napheesa Collier, who was rehabbing offseason surgery on both ankles while a rookie point guard held the whole operation together. Then the 2025 MVP runner-up came back in late July, and the weekend just ended with a 98-87 win over the defending champion Aces, a four-point halftime game that Minnesota broke open in the third quarter behind 26 from Olivia Miles, and a 103-90 dismissal of Dallas to slam the door on the clinching weekend.
The one blemish in the last month, a loss to the Sparks that snapped a 10-game winning streak, was answered with two straight wins over playoff-caliber teams. That’s the whole scouting report on this team’s psyche.
The rookie is the story that keeps compounding
Olivia Miles is averaging 19.7 points and 5.8 assists as a rookie running the league’s best team — three straight Rookie of the Month awards, the first Lynx rookie ever to do it. The Collier return has not shrunk her; it’s clarified her. Phee draws two defenders on the catch; Miles makes the read; someone in a white jersey is shooting a shot they like. With Kayla McBride spacing, Courtney Williams doing chaos-agent work, and Natasha Howard playing All-Star-level ball on both ends, the Lynx have the luxury every contender claims to want: a superstar who doesn’t have to be one every night until September.
About Portland
The Fire are an expansion team playing out an expansion season, and the two previous meetings went how you’d guess: 107-74 and 101-93, both at Target Center. Wednesday is the first Lynx trip to the Moda Center, where there are two reasons to actually watch. One is Bridget Carleton, who went No. 1 overall in April’s expansion draft after parts of seven seasons of professional glue-work in Minnesota, and gets her first home crack at her old team. The other is on the Fire bench, where Sylvia Fowles is a first-year assistant coach — meaning the greatest center in franchise history will spend Wednesday night trying to beat us. The scoreboard will forgive her. I won’t have to, because it won’t be close enough to matter.
The trap-game case writes itself if you squint: third game in five nights, a 9 PM Central road tip, a clinched berth, an opponent with nothing to lose and a building that’s been loud all summer. The counter-case is that second Portland game: the Fire cut it to 53-50 in the third quarter last month before Minnesota slammed the door, and Cheryl Reeve’s teams treat even three competitive minutes as a personal insult in the rematch.
I’ll be watching the way I always watch these West Coast trips from Chicago — TV muted, radio call synced, neighbors’ opinions unsolicited. What I’m watching for: whether Reeve keeps staggering Collier and Miles so one of them is always on the floor, and whether the bench units that leaked points in the Sparks loss stay patched against a team that can’t punish them.
The Lynx are the best team in basketball, the Fire didn’t have a roster until April, and Wednesday should say so by the third quarter.
Prediction: Lynx by 18, and Fowles gets the only ovation Portland enjoys.
