The Minnesota Lynx are comfy. They woke up Wednesday morning at the top of the WNBA standings with a 21-6 record, the league's best net rating, and a bespectacled point guard who has become the coolest player in the league halfway through her first season. These are the sort of circumstances that allow for an organization to be extremely chill in coming up with a plan for reintegrating a four-time All-WNBA superstar back into the starting lineup.
It doesn't get much more chill than a Wednesday afternoon road game against the Seattle Storm, one day before the start of the all-star break. Those are the circumstances under which Napheesa Collier returned to the court for the Lynx. The Lynx won the game, 86-76, and afterwards all the talk was about how Collier, returning to action following offseason surgeries on both of her ankles, is going to be taking it slow.
"This is an evolution," head coach Cheryl Reeve said after the game, about Collier's reintegration. "We're not at the end of this ... there will still be ups and downs. There's no doubt about it." That echoed Reeve's pregame caution, when she stressed to reporters that Collier has "a couple more steps to go" and would be playing on a minutes restriction.
It's funny to juxtapose Reeve's temperature-lowering comments with what actually happened on the court. Collier was indeed playing under a minutes restriction (she played short spurts and finished with 22 minutes), but she didn't play like someone who is looking to ease back into things. She got 20 shots up during those 22 minutes, made nine of them, and finished the game with a team-high 24 points and 10 rebounds. Reeve and the front office may have been expecting the start of a multi-step evolutionary process, but Collier was looking to get these damn shots up. "I felt like a kid in a candy store," she told reporters after the game.
The Storm are a well-chosen provider of sweet treats for someone in Collier's position. They are the third-worst team in the league by net rating, but their twin towers defense of Dominique Malonga and Awa Fam at least provides some interesting problems for Collier to solve. Collier seemed to enter the game secure in the knowledge that she could spend as much time as she wanted shooting and experimenting, and the Storm's sluggish offense would never put the final result at risk.
So you can't really blame Collier for starting the game shooting 1-of-7 from the field, especially since those early misses had the intended effect of knocking the rust off. Collier made five of her next six shots, and the stiffness that she started the game with gave way to the smooth operating that has made her absence from this season such a bummer.
As if having the best record in the league weren't enough of a reason to pay attention to the Lynx, Collier's return makes them a must-watch throughout the second half. The big question everyone will want to see answered, and which will add a fascinating new dimension to the Lynx's season, is how Collier will fit with Olivia Miles. A ball-dominant point guard suddenly being asked to share the floor with a superstar forward she's never played with would seem to auger some tension, but everything has gone right for this team so far, so why should the good times stop now?
Anyone pining for the Lynx's second-half downfall would have had their hopes chilled by one play in particular on Wednesday, which came late in the second quarter. Collier set a pick for Miles as she dribbled up the right side of the court, and then popped to the three-point line. Both Miles and Collier immediately recognized that Collier had a mismatch with Zia Cooke, and so Collier cut hard to the block where Miles fed her a perfect entry pass. When Cooke scrambled out of the mismatch and let Jordan Horston take her spot, Collier just waited a beat and then went right to work, cooking Horston with one of her signature step-throughs.
It was a quick play, and an unglamorous one, but contained within it every reason for the Lynx's opponents to despair. Collier created the mismatch, Miles read the game, and before anyone could think too hard about what was happening, the Lynx were getting an easy bucket at the rim.
