Team USA won its fifth straight World Cup gold in one eight-minute stretch of Sunday’s third quarter, and Napheesa Collier spent that stretch doing everything except scoring.
The final score read 97-79 for the United States in Berlin, a fifth consecutive title and the program’s 12th overall. For a half it didn’t look like a coronation. France led by as many as 14 in the second quarter behind Gabby Williams and carried a 45-43 edge into the break. Then the third quarter arrived the way it always arrives for teams that hang around against this program.
The Americans outscored France 30-12 in the third quarter and never gave the lead back. Breanna Stewart finished with 22 points and 10 rebounds and won her second tournament MVP; Jackie Young added 18, Kahleah Copper 15, and Caitlin Clark 12 off the bench. Collier’s line in the final was six points, seven rebounds, one assist.
That box score is a trap. The scoreboard turned over in the third because the defense did, and Collier was the connective tissue of the turn — rebounding, switching, swinging the ball, making the hustle plays on both ends that never reach a stat sheet. She started all six games and averaged nine points and five rebounds on 50 percent shooting, third on the roster in scoring and first in doing whatever the possession asked.
The context is what makes it land. Collier had both ankles surgically repaired inside three months, the right in January and the left in March, and did not return to competition until late July. With her 30th birthday still ahead, in what should have been the wreckage of a lost year, she flew to Germany for the first World Cup selection of her career and walked straight into Kara Lawson’s starting lineup.
The gold was never going to be handed over. Team USA needed a second-half push to get past Spain 76-66 in the semifinal, then watched France dispatch host Germany to set up a rematch of the Paris Olympic final. This was the live opponent the bracket had promised, a French side that had beaten everyone else in its path, and for twenty minutes in Berlin it played the part. Collier’s job in that kind of game is locking France out of the possessions it needs to steal.
To make sure nobody mistook the role for a ceiling, she showed the top gear was still there. In the quarterfinal she dropped 19 on Hungary with a team-high seven rebounds and a block in 15 minutes of a 108-56 rout in which Team USA set a World Cup record with 31 assists. When the tournament asked her to score, she scored. When it asked her to rebound, defend, and get out of Stewart’s way, she did that instead.
The group stage told the same story in miniature. Reporter Cassidy Hettesheimer captured one of those Collier nights as it happened: a tidy double-figure line, one of six Americans to reach double figures.
https://x.com/cassidyhett/status/2097060606750675292
I went back through that third quarter twice, and the possession I kept landing on wasn’t a Collier bucket. It was a closeout and a box-out on the same trip, France coming away with nothing, Copper already gone the other way. That is the possession that wins a gold medal, and no one will remember it happened.
The timing could not be better for Minnesota. The Lynx come out of the World Cup break with four regular-season games left, the first against New York on Sept. 18, and then the playoff run they spent all summer positioning for. They did the positioning without a fully healthy Collier. A two-time MVP runner-up who spent the summer as a rehab project just came back tested against the best competition on earth, moving without a limp, and indifferent to who takes the shot.
Napheesa Collier is healthy again, and everyone else in the W should feel that.
