The good and the not-so-good of Minnesota’s trip to Sky Town

Minnesota swapped wins and losses on the road trip and now find themselves at 20-4 on the season (8-4 on the road) after defeating the Phoenix Mercury 79-66. They hosted the third-place Mercury in their final game before the league broke for the WNBA All-Star Weekend earlier on Wednesday.

As Frank Sinatra sang, Chicago is “the town that Billy Sunday couldn’t shut down,” a reference to the famous Chicago White Stockings pitcher-turned-preacher and the Chicago Tabernacle’s futile prohibition era efforts against the town’s industry of bootlegging, mobsters, and corruption. On Saturday afternoon, the Chicago Sky offense proved as equally impossible to shut down as the 1920s outfit, torching the Lynx for a season-high 57 first-half points en route to a wire-to-wire 87-81 win.  

“[The Sky] had a will to win. They came out to compete in a basketball game,” Lynx head coach and president of basketball operations Cheryl Reeve said after the loss on Saturday. “We can’t not show up. You cannot come out not ready to compete. It’s disappointing that it did. You show up for a game and not understand how hard it is to win possessions in this league, so we didn’t bring it in the first half. 

“Now there’s effort areas, and rebounding is an effort area,” Reeve continued. “You get your ass kicked by 17, if my math is correct. And 28 second chance points, that’s hard to do, that’s really hard to do. I’d be surprised if that’s not historic in some way. It’s really hard to do. That’s an effort area and we did nothing to impose our will, really at either end.” 

No one needed a reminder that Saturday’s performance was unacceptable by the Lynx standard. Mere seconds after the final horn sounded on their fourth loss of the season, Napheesa Collier gathered the team on the floor at Wintrust Arena to collectively turn the page on a disappointing afternoon. 

“I think I said something like we had a good push in the second half, but being down so much in the first half kind of put us in a hole,” Collier said after the game, when asked about what she said to the team immediately after the final buzzer. “We have to start games better. That’s really the bottom line. We keep saying ‘this quarter’s good, this quarter’s bad,’ and we’re doing it every game. We have to put together four good quarters.” 

Even during Minnesota’s 9-0 start to the season, the Lynx expressed frustration at the lack of wins during games where they felt they showed out for all four quarters. That high standard has bled into another trademark of this season’s Minnesota Lynx team, which has been the way they’ve responded to losses. 

They’re the only team in the league that has yet to lose back-to-back games in 2025. And no one was more ready for Monday night’s rubber match than Courtney Williams. Earlier in the season, Minnesota’s talkative All-Star guard asked DiJonai Carrington of the then 1-8 Dallas Wings, “Y’all ain’t beat Chicago?” on the Stud Budz Twitch stream, which she hosts with teammate Natisha Hiedeman. Williams’ question came roaring back to life in the immediate social media aftermath of Saturday’s loss, each post punctuated with the line “y’all ain’t beat Chicago?”

“I had a chip on my shoulder,” Williams said after Monday night’s 91-78 win where she stuffed the stat sheet with 18 points, eight rebounds, seven assists, and four steals. “After we lost the last game, all of my comments, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, was flooded with ‘you ain’t beat Chicago?!’ They wanted to be trolls, but they can’t troll a troll. So we had to get our get back. They knew what time it was.” 

Williams’ four steals on the night were part of a season-high 14 steals for the Lynx. Nearly half of those steals came in the 4th quarter, when Minnesota generated 13 of its 24 points off turnovers on the night. 

“It was [our] guards, they were really just getting up and pressuring the ball,” Collier said after Monday night’s win. “Then when it got into the post and we were battling the big girls down low, they’re getting their hands in there, trying to get traps on, trying to get their hands on the ball. It’s just so helpful and it allows us to get on transition and get those easy points.” 

Just over 48 hours removed from the likes of Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso doing whatever they wanted in the paint, Chicago could barely complete a single entry pass as the Lynx defense made the full transition from the befuddling sieve they were on Saturday to a ruthless and diabolical machine in their second game in the Second City. 

Under any microscope, the two-game set with the Sky is only 1/24th of a 44-game tour de force, but it showed the multiple sides to the coin of this Lynx team. They are a team that will enter the All-Star break with the league’s best record and still not a single losing streak to their 2025 tally. Not even another noon tipoff time can get in the way of that.