Napheesa Collier Is Making the Game Run on Her Terms

Napheesa Collier works best in context. 

Any individual highlight might show a basket, yet miss the point. The most impressive part of her game is what she does away from the ball: The Lynx forward has an uncanny ability to establish her position in the right place at the right time. It’s a matter of practiced reading and cutting and screening, but it’s a matter of instinct, too. “She has this innate understanding of the game,” says Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve. “All of her movements make sense. All of them.” That motion is constant but never feels rushed. She sees more action than almost every other player in the WNBA, always playing both ends of the floor, a perpetual display of perfect footwork. Yet that never seems to come with visible fatigue. She forces the game to run on her terms.

That makes her a dream for a coach. But it did not automatically make Collier a star. “She’s always been someone who’s been O.K. living in the shadows,” says basketball trainer Alex Bazzell, her husband of two and a half years. “Her game is not loud.” Collier has a style built more for film sessions than for highlight reels. Over her first several years in the league, Collier grew from a very good player to an excellent one. But it could feel like hardly anyone noticed. “I asked the question for years,” says Reeve, who has been her coach since the start of her pro career. Why is Napheesa Collier not recognized as one of the best players in the WNBA? The answers never satisfied her.

Until suddenly it felt like the question was moot. Women’s basketball captured unprecedented, seismic attention in 2024, and those who tuned in saw the best of Collier.

She put together a career season in the WNBA, with personal bests across nearly every statistical category, finishing as MVP runner-up and Defensive Player of the Year. She won her second Olympic gold medal after starting every game for Team USA in Paris. She pushed the Lynx to the WNBA Finals and set a league record for postseason scoring (285 points) before falling in a gut-wrenching Game 5. And in the winter, when players traditionally disappear from view while playing another season overseas, Collier, 28, instead built a platform to keep WNBA talent visible in the United States. The cofounder of three-on-three league Unrivaled, which played from January to March in Miami, she dominated, finishing as its leading scorer, its most compelling spokesperson and its first MVP.

Collier played like she built the court. And now, in training camp for her seventh season with the Lynx, she is readying herself to apply her growth from the last few months in a new context.

Collier is an excellent listener. This is one compliment that surfaces over and over. “She’s going to look you straight in your eyes and ask really good questions,” says former Lynx general manager Clare Duwelius. “And just see how she can take all of that information and apply it.” This has been key to how Collier has grown as a player, cerebral and patient.

It’s part of why she’s surpassed expectations. Collier was a two-time All-American at UConn, but she fell to No. 6 in the 2019 WNBA draft, seen as too undersized to capably play inside but without the skill set to thrive outside. But the Lynx found that she was insightful enough to adjust and play far bigger or smaller than her 6’1″. Reeve asked Collier to switch between small forward and power forward that first year and shifted her role considerably over the course of the season.

Collier became the first WNBA player in more than a decade to be drafted lower than fifth and win Rookie of the Year. There was no one major leap forward in the years that followed. She built her game out gradually. “Each year, she comes back, she adds something,” says Reeve, who has watched her become a more aggressive rebounder and a more comfortable ballhandler. Collier never had an obvious individual signature. She is perhaps the inverse of the league’s flashiest player. She instead has come to seem like its most universally competent.

“She stacked up seasons and seasons of results,” Bazzell says. “Which led to more and more confidence each year, and I think, such a belief in what her abilities hold.”

And that growing belief in herself aligned with a belief in her sport. Collier did not enter the WNBA with strong thoughts about its structure. (“There was probably a bit of naivete,” Reeve says of Collier’s first two years in the league.) But as she kept listening, asking questions, using those same fundamental skills that allowed her to develop as a player, Collier grew more certain. The women’s sports landscape was shifting radically around major influxes of viewership and cash. She believed that was an opportunity to build something for the athletes themselves.

“You see how much women’s sports are exploding, and it’s not equating to what we’re making and the experiences that we’re having,” she says. “You see the money that’s coming in. You see how much people are enjoying it. We’re not benefitting from that. And so I just wanted to be a part of that change.”

Collier smiles.

“I have a lot of ideas. I want people to hear them.”

Such as: WNBA players going overseas to supplement their salaries no longer served either the league or the players themselves. There had to be a way to build an offseason initiative that paid fairly and developed their games while still building their brands stateside. Such as: There was an opportunity in the fact that newer fans cared about individual athletes as much as, or more than, they cared about teams. Such as: The sport was growing so fast that a nimble start-up could harness that attention in ways that an established operation could not. Such as: Investors and brands would get the vision.

The project was a stretch for Collier. In her early years with the Lynx, the organization had encouraged her to participate in public speaking opportunities and brand partnerships, believing that she needed to grow those skills in order to be the next face of the franchise. (“We worked hard to put her in those situations,” Reeve says. “The knowledge grows, the comfort grows, the overall confidence grows.”) But she steadily became more confident as a leader and more balanced as a person. While she was growing as a player, Collier also became a team captain, a union officer and a mother. (She gave birth to daughter Mila in 2022.) She kept listening and kept asking questions.

“Her recognition of her value, I think, has been her greatest evolution,” Reeve says.

And then Collier was ready to jump.

“You have to be O.K. potentially failing, and failing in public,” Bazzell says. “Putting her name on the line like that for a bigger mission, more than herself, with her public perception, was an immense thing to carry. I think you have to have that blind faith, which is what she’s had from Day One, for this thing to even launch, let alone be successful.”

Collier built out the vision with Bazzell, who took on the role of president, and in late 2022, they pitched Breanna Stewart, Collier’s former UConn teammate. The two-time WNBA MVP and Liberty forward signed on as cofounder of the league they would soon name Unrivaled. They first publicly spoke about the project in the summer of ’23. “We just hit the market at the right time,” Collier says. They raised $35 million in funding over the next year and a half, with investors like Carmelo Anthony, Michael Phelps, Dawn Staley and numerous other sports icons. As women’s basketball exploded in popularity behind Caitlin Clark Mania, Unrivaled was lining up sponsorships, getting players on contracts and signing a multiyear television deal with TNT Sports.

Duwelius, who had been in the Lynx’s front office for a decade, left the team to become Unrivaled’s GM.

“It was Phee, just knowing the kind of person and player that she is,” Duwelius says of why she wanted the job. “That was pretty foundational for me.”

They built something that was relatively small in size but sweeping in ambition. As a starting point, they tackled a list of items that players had long been told was impossible in the sport. Everyone made six figures. (The average salary was $220,000, compared to an average of $130,000 in the WNBA under the current collective bargaining agreement.) The season began late enough to give players a break after the WNBA playoffs ended in October and finished early enough to ensure they did not have to go straight into training camp in April. The facility had a practice court, a weight room and a childcare space.

“We’re building this league because of the holes that we’re seeing, right?” says Collier, who is part of the executive committee negotiating a new CBA for the WNBA. “We’re trying to make a change all around and change the ecosystem.”

A few months before Unrivaled officially began, Collier sat with the worst loss of her basketball life. Game 5 of the 2024 WNBA Finals between the Liberty and the Lynx was the most watched championship series game in 25 years. Collier has not rewatched and does not wish to.

The forward is typically so unflappable that Reeve once asked Collier’s parents for advice. How do you raise a person this even-keeled? The coach wanted to know anything she could apply to raising her own son. “No matter the situation, her mood is the same,” Reeve says. The only exception she has seen in six years was the aftermath of the winner-take-all Game 5, which the Lynx lost in overtime, 67–62.

“Simply put, the injustice of it all really hit her,” Reeve says. “That feeling that she has is deep.”

That sense of injustice was not tied so much to the specific whistle on Lynx forward Alanna Smith at the end of regulation that awarded Stewart two free throws and subsequently sent the game to overtime. (Although it was tied a little to that specific whistle.) It was a larger frustration with refereeing in a series during which both coaches had pointedly criticized uneven officiating. It was a persistent, structural criticism in a league that has long faced complaints about how well it trains and retains officials. It was about the fact that when a WNBA coach uses a challenge, the play is reviewed by the same referees in the arena who made the original call, rather than by off-site officials, like in the NBA. Part of it was about fairness. Most of it was about competence.

As she was asked about the Finals again and again while doing press for Unrivaled, she found that she could not be anything other than fully, miserably honest. No, she wasn’t over it, and yes, she knew she could sound like a sore loser, but it was horrible, and she might never be over it.

This was a new kind of loss for her. (“More than anything, it’s like, O.K., what can I do to make sure that we’re never in this situation again?” she says. “Because I never want to be—I never want this feeling again.”) What she has added to her game this winter is a bit of an edge.

“This was a winnable championship for us, and then to have it end in such a crushing way, it was like we went through the stages of grief—denial, anger,” Collier says. “And then as I looked into Unrivaled, I feel like the anger stayed a little bit, and it kind of fueled me.”

Collier did not exactly play mad. But she did play driven. “It forces you to have to get better at different levels of your game,” she says. And it felt like she got better at everything. Collier led Unrivaled in points, steals and blocks, and she won its one-on-one competition. She played like she might be the best player in the world, and it felt possible to believe, no matter the context.