WNBA: Minnesota Lynx 2025 MVP hopeful Napheesa Collier is on a tear

2019 was an interesting year as far as the WNBA Draft was concerned. With many drafts, there is a phenomenal college star who is expected to go on and also become a generational talent at the next level.

Arike Ogunbowale was the phenom in 2019, having electrified college basketball with her offensive pizzaz, including back-to-back game-winning shots to lead the Notre Dame Fighting Irish to victories in the 2018 Final Four and title game.

But when Ogunbowale didn’t go No. 1 overall to the Las Vegas Aces, it wasn’t a shock. For a rare moment, prognosticators saw that the phenom wouldn’t be the top selection. They saw that other players were considered more pro-ready by WNBA general managers and that then-Las Vegas Aces head coach Bill Laimbeer liked Ogunbowale’s Irish teammate Jackie Young’s fit with his team.

So Young won the coveted feeling of hearing her name called first, despite scoring 7.1 fewer points per game as Arike’s teammate in 2018-19.

Not too surprisingly (because she truly was more of a fit pick than most No. 1s), Young did not become a star as a rookie, averaging just 6.6 points per game. Ogunbowale averaged 19.1, finishing 10th in MVP voting and second in Rookie of the Year voting. Young has since become a better player than Ogunbowale though, and also has far more team success with two WNBA championships.

The player who has become the best from that draft also featured less offensive pizzaz and received less attention than Ogunbowale in college. While she played for the most notable team in the UConn Huskies, her star years at UConn were marked by the beginning of the eight-year championship drought that Paige Bueckers and company just ended.

That player wasn’t the phenom. She wasn’t hyped-up—she didn’t even go in the top five in the draft. She went sixth, but stole the Rookie of the Year award away from the player drafted just ahead of her and now leads Ogunbowale and Young 3-0 in top-five MVP finishes, including her second-place finish last year. This year, she is WNBA general managers’ pick to rise to the top of MVP voting, and she is currently leading the league in scoring average at 28.3.

Her name is Napheesa Collier.

You know her as Phee, @PHEEsespieces (on Twitter/X) and the co-founder of Unrivaled, the now highly-successful stateside women’s 3×3 basketball league. She was named MVP of the inaugural season, while also winning the 1-on-1 tournament against some of the best competition from the W.

Needless to say, Collier has been on an absolute tear, one that has most importantly featured a whole lot of team success, as her Minnesota Lynx won last season’s Commissioner’s Cup and barely lost Game 5 of the Finals in 2024.

You could argue that the Lynx outplayed the New York Liberty in the Finals and were just unlucky to not win. You could argue that Collier was the most feared player on either team because the Liberty’s Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu struggled mightily at key moments. Minnesota seemed to have the better chemistry, and therefore the better team, as well as the better best player. If you were scared of Collier last year, you should be terrified now because she realizes all of the above … and is coming for revenge.

I was one of those people who was scared. I’m a diehard Alyssa Thomas fan (we’re both Maryland Terrapins) and I’m from Boston, so I was rooting for the Connecticut Sun against the Lynx in the semifinals. I was rooting against Minnesota in the Finals as well; a lot of my family is from New York or New Jersey and I have a lot of childhood memories there.

Yes, Thomas was great for parts of that semifinal series, with some near-triple-doubles. I felt she should have won MVP in 2023 and, bias aside, I didn’t think there was a more fierce competitor in the league—I really thought 2024 was going to be her year to finally win a championship. But Collier always seemed to have the upper hand. In Minnesota’s Game 3 and Game 5 wins, she had 26 points and 11 rebounds and 27 and 11, respectively, including shooting 10-for-16 from the field with four blocks in Game 5.

With Thomas and the Sun eliminated, I switched over to hoping New York would finally capture a ring. The Lynx remained the bane of my existence by winning Game 1 of the Finals behind six(!) Collier blocks. She would go on to average 19 points, eight rebounds, 3.4 steals and 1.8 blocks for the series, constituting a strong case for Finals MVP had the Lynx won.

True, she didn’t completely dominate the series—it was a team effort from Minnesota that pushed New York to the brink. But it was Phee’s leadership and composure under the bright lights that gave me the most nightmares out of anyone on the Lynx. She was the head of the snake, the face of the Minnesota monster.

And, in the end, she left me so fearful that I have trouble remembering that the Liberty actually won the series.

The fact that Collier is the MVP favorite among general managers when A’ja Wilson is 28 years old and coming off the greatest individual season in WNBA history makes quite the statement. Also, Wilson was one of those phenom No. 1 picks. Collier, remember, comes from underdog beginnings—a No. 6 pick.

She plays for a franchise that won four championships when led by one of the greatest players the game has ever seen in Maya Moore. But Moore had a superteam surrounding her. Look at what Collier did last year with what most would consider a much less-talented supporting cast. She has a long way to go to match Moore’s level of greatness, but she has more than proven herself to be a franchise player, if not the person you would draft No. 1 if you were starting a team right now.

Collier opened her highly-anticipated 2025 campaign with 34 points in the Lynx’s 99-84 win over the Dallas Wings last Friday. Yes, she was upstaged by Kelsey Plum’s opening game-record 37 for the Los Angeles Sparks, but Collier has followed it up with 23- and 28-point efforts to lead the league in scoring. She is 21-for-21 from the free throw line! That includes a 12-for-12 showing Wednesday night, when she would have been 13-for-13 had Dallas’ Myisha Hines-Allen not pointed out after a make that she shouldn’t have been at the line. Even the ones that don’t count are going in for Phee!

Collier was 0-for-3 from beyond the arc Wednesday night, but her first bucket of the game was nearly a 3 and she was 2-for-3 in each of her first two games. Her field goal percentage of 57.7 is eighth in the league; on Wednesday night, she was 8-for-10 on 2-point attempts, and only one of the makes was an easy layup. She connected on four mid-range shots, a layup after a spin move and a reverse layup to help put Minnesota alone in first place at 3-0.

I’m not necessarily rooting against the Lynx this year, so I’m able to sit back and enjoy these performances from Collier, unlike during last year’s playoffs.

But there are 12 teams rooting against her, and for them, the fear of Phee is starting to take hold.