The WNBA Playoffs Start With One Question: Who Can Actually Beat Minnesota?

The Minnesota Lynx locked up the WNBA's No. 1 seed for the second straight year, finishing the regular season with a dominant record and the league's best road mark by a wide margin. The more interesting question heading into the playoffs isn't whether Minnesota deserved the top seed. It's how a team that's spent much of the season without its best player still ended up this far ahead of everyone else.

Napheesa Collier, the Lynx's franchise cornerstone, missed a significant chunk of the season recovering from offseason ankle surgery on both feet. In a league this competitive, that kind of absence usually costs a contender its margin at the top of the standings. Minnesota's didn't shrink. It barely moved.

Depth that doesn't depend on one star

The reason sits with a rookie class that outperformed almost every reasonable expectation. Olivia Miles, the No. 2 overall pick, stepped into a lead offensive role and produced All-Star-caliber numbers across assists, scoring and efficiency, essentially replacing a chunk of the production Collier's absence should have cost the team. Natasha Howard and Courtney Williams also earned All-Star selections of their own, giving Minnesota three All-Stars on a roster that, on paper, was supposed to be leaning on one.

That's the part that should worry the rest of the league heading into the postseason. Teams built around a single MVP-caliber player tend to live and die by that player's health in the playoffs, where opposing defenses can focus an entire game plan on shutting one person down. Minnesota has spent an entire regular season proving it doesn't need to lean that hard on any single name, which makes it a much harder matchup to scheme against than a typical No. 1 seed.

The scar tissue from last year

There's a caveat worth sitting with, because Minnesota has been here before and it hasn't always translated. The Lynx earned the league's best record in 2025 too, only to be beaten in the semifinals by a Phoenix team that went on to get swept in the finals itself. Regular-season dominance and playoff success have not been the same thing for this roster in recent memory, and that history is exactly why oddsmakers, while still favoring Minnesota, aren't treating this as a formality.

What actually beats a team this deep

If there's a blueprint for taking Minnesota down, it likely isn't going to come from out-talenting them on a given night. It's going to come from exploiting whatever seam exists between a rookie point guard still learning the pace of playoff basketball and a supporting cast that's proven it can win in the regular season but hasn't yet proven it can close out a title. Las Vegas still has the most dominant individual player in the league in A'ja Wilson, and a champion's pedigree from last year's title run. Golden State and Atlanta both enter with momentum of their own.

Minnesota has built the most complete roster in the league without ever needing its best player at full health to prove it. Does that make them the team to beat, or does it just mean nobody's actually found the weakness yet, because nobody's had to?