The countdown to the start of the 2025 WNBA season is on, and it’s time for groups to place their toes on the fuel. In what would be the best season in WNBA historical past, groups can’t let up for a single day. Proper now, it’s time to shift from coaching camp mode into common season mode.
Coaches anticipate 100% on the very least from their gamers each single day, and a few should not afraid to inform it as it’s after they don’t get that. Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve is aware of what it takes to construct a championship staff, and typically meaning robust love. After Lynx apply on Monday, Reeve known as out her staff for not bringing their A-game to that day’s apply.
“It’s why we’re right here so early,” she mentioned to reporters after the Lynx concluded their apply.
“The best way they confirmed up at the moment, it felt like they weren’t involved in actually being right here and dealing on something,” Reeve added with a sarcastic chuckle.
Cheryl Reeve on the Lynx apply shifting to the common season
“The best way they confirmed up at the moment it felt like they weren’t involved in actually being right here and dealing on something so… I used to be nonetheless in coaching camp, they weren’t”@terryhorstman asks did that get higher all through… pic.twitter.com/bL4h6qXp6u
— Andrew Dukowitz (@adukeMN) Might 12, 2025
Powerful? Perhaps. Efficient. Very doubtless. Reeve is likely one of the most revered coaches in girls’s basketball, and if she is disenchanted in you… Nicely, I do know it will make me have a look within the mirror and get myself in test.
Minnesota is making an attempt to make a return to the WNBA Finals this season after shedding in final 12 months’s Finals sequence 3-2 in opposition to New York. It was a good sequence and will have simply gone the opposite manner, and let the Lynx win their first WNBA Championship for the reason that days of Maya Moore in 2017. As an alternative, they went residence empty-handed, and the Liberty gained their first title.
This 12 months will likely be even more durable, provided that the Liberty have leveled up their roster in numerous methods, and the Las Vegas Aces are already trying menacing within the preseason. The Indiana Fever have boosted the encircling roster round Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston, and plenty of different groups are ready on the perimeter to take over a championship-contending spot on the league energy rankings.
Because of all that, it’s no shock Reeve is anticipating such a excessive degree of effort from her staff, it doesn’t matter what day of the week it’s. They may must be at 100% each single minute of each single sport to compete with the excessive degree of expertise the WNBA is at the moment working with.
Mentioning that to reporters isn’t simply an off-handed dig at her staff’s effort in apply, it’s a approach to maintain them accountable. Typically, just a little public shaming to the media is what gamers must kick themselves into gear.
Furthermore, coming from a coach as extremely revered as Reeve ought to make the general public feedback really feel much less about being imply, and extra merely about being truthful. She tells it how it’s, and when you’re not prepared for that, properly, there are about 100 recently-cut coaching camp gamers prepared to come back in and take your roster spot.
