WNBA: Will Reeve, Smesko or Nakase be the Coach of the Year?

When previewing potential candidates for the 2025 WNBA Coach of the Year award, Beckett Harrison outlined three typical resumes:

Coaches that lead a team to a dominant, league-leading record

New coaches that improve drastically upon a previous year’s win percentage

Coaches that take a roster that’s generally perceived as sub-par to an impressive playoff seeding

Turns out, this year’s eventual candidates almost perfectly align with Beckett’s categories. Last year’s winner, the Minnesota Lynx’s Cheryl Reeve, has steered her team through a dominant regular season. Karl Smesko has executed an impressive turnaround in his first-year at the helm of the Atlanta Dream. And Natalie Nakase has the expansion Golden State Valkyries on the precipice of a playoff berth believed to be impossible.

That’s three great candidates with three strong cases. Here’s more on Reeve, Smesko and Nakase:

Cheryl Reeve (Minnesota Lynx)

While there’s no specific criteria for Coach of the Year, one common theme among past winners has been their ability to get the best out of their players. Every year, the candidates seem to fall into two subcategories: those who lead a plucky, hard-working roster to a better-than-expected record, and those who take a team that was already expected to be good and make it even better.

Cheryl Reeve’s 2025 coaching performance falls into the latter group. She last earned Coach of the Year honors in 2024 when the Lynx were pleasant surprises, going 30-10 and finishing in second place in the regular-season standings, and while the Reeve and her team had no such element of surprise this year, they’ve stood out anyway. The Lynx have steamrolled through their regular-season schedule, sitting at a league-best 31-8 and owning a 5.5-game lead over the second-place Las Vegas Aces, and they’ve made a bit of history in doing so, setting a franchise record for wins in a season.

For a head coach who has won four WNBA championships, that’s an impressive achievement, and it’s a good encapsulation of Reeve’s case to win Coach of the Year yet again. With the exception of a couple of key bench players, Minnesota’s roster is mostly the same as the one that nearly won it all last season. They’ve just been even better this time around. The Lynx lead the WNBA in both offensive (110.2) and defensive rating (97.6), again displaying remarkable chemistry and cohesion on both ends of the court regardless of which players are on it. They’ve also played particularly well against most of the WNBA’s other best teams, going a combined 9-2 against the Aces, New York Liberty and Phoenix Mercury.

Reeve has been doing this for a while, and her resume speaks for itself. She just won Coach of the Year last season, after all, so she’d need a pretty solid argument to win it again in 2025. She has one: Reeve and the Lynx have once again raised a bar that was already set high, this time separating themselves from other contending teams by a healthy margin. A vote for Reeve as 2025’s Coach of the Year is a vote for excellence, and that’s something that should be at the core of every major award, no matter the narrative surrounding it.

Karl Smesko (Atlanta Dream)

Part of being the Coach of the Year is getting the most out of your team. That’s exactly what we’ve seen head coach Karl Smesko do with the Atlanta Dream. At the start of the season, not many people had Atlanta as a title contender, but they are currently the No. 3 seed in the WNBA and just a half-game back of the No. 2 seed.

Under Smesko’s guidance, players are shining. Allisha Gray is a prime example. She is having a career year, averaging 18.7, 3.6 assists and 5.4 rebounds per game. Those are all career bests for Gray, and she’ll absolutely be considered for All-WNBA First Team honors.

As a team, Smesko has helped modernize the Dream offense. Last year, Atlanta took 19.4 3-pointers per game and shot 30.8 percent on those attempts. That conversation rate was the second lowest in the WNBA. This season, however, the Dream are taking 28.2 3-pointers. Only the Valkyries take more 3s. With Atlanta making 33.1 percent of their 3s in 2025, their offense is much more potent, spreading opposing defenses out as they have to respect the threat the Dream have become on the perimeter.

In just one year in charge, Smesko has optimized Atlanta and essentially shifted the team’s culture overnight. They are now one of the best teams in the WNBA and will be a formidable opponent in the postseason. Simply put, there aren’t many—if any—head coaches in the WNBA who have overachieved this season as much as Smesko has with the Dream. — Edwin Garcia

Natalie Nakase (Golden State Valkyries)

There are two ways to evaluate Natalie Nakase’s coaching ability.

One is by simply observing the Valkyries. The other is by watching her former team, the Las Vegas Aces. Yes, there have been issues other than losing Nakase’s input as an assistant coach that contributed to struggles the Aces experienced for much of this season, but take a look at some stats. The Aces’ former strengths have deteriorated, while Nakase’s Valkyries have thrived in areas that the Aces used to own, even though they are a team with no superstars and a much smaller budget.

It must be stated that no other WNBA head coach did so much with so little this season. She allowed Kayla Thornton to become a first-time All-Star at age 32, only to lose her to season-ending injury after 22 games. Nakase then reorganized the team and kept winning games, continuing to cook with what has been the secret sauce of the Valkyries success all season: a perfectly-executed zone defense. And she’s elicited such execution, buy in and belief with a team that has seen a rotating roster that has depended on three regular rotation rookies in Janelle Salaün, Carla Leite and Kaitlyn Chen.

If the Valkyries become the first expansion team to make the playoffs, that will be another argument in favor of Nakase winning Coach of the Year. — Łukasz Muniowski