The 2025 WNBA playoffs begin on Sunday. Here are some questions I’m asking about each team, paired by first-round matchup. If you, the person reading this, are not much of a reader, we also discussed a few of these questions on the most recent episode of Nothing But Respect.
(1) Minnesota Lynx: So how do you beat the Lynx? They may have answered that themselves on Thursday night—not by losing, but by wanting to win a game that didn’t matter. In the last game of the regular season, with the top seed firmly locked up, Minnesota’s starters still played heavy minutes against the Golden State Valkyries, a win that dropped the Valks to the No. 8 seed and moved Seattle to No. 7. Perhaps the Lynx wanted to avoid another round of Electric Slide taunting from Skylar Diggins. Perhaps they wanted MVP candidate Napheesa Collier to juice her numbers a little more. But they might also have been trying to avoid a matchup they didn’t like.
If the Lynx arrived in the Finals with a real flaw last year, it was the team’s relative lack of size in the frontcourt. Collier plays up so well that you don’t notice her true height (6-foot-1) on most nights. It’s a little more noticeable on nights when she’s suiting up against teams with deep frontcourt rotations, like Seattle or Atlanta, both of whom played the Lynx tough in the regular season. Same goes for the 6-foot-3 Alanna Smith, a Defensive Player of the Year candidate who looks like she’s fighting for her life when she has to guard Brittney Griner. To crudely illustrate the height difference at center there: Smith has won 45 percent of her jump ball attempts this year, and Griner has won 91 percent of hers. The good news for the Lynx is that they wouldn’t see either Atlanta or Seattle until the Finals, and they’ll begin the postseason against a Valkyries team with size problems of its own.
(8) Golden State Valkyries: Is WNBA basketball a “weak link” sport? This Valkyries season has reminded me of some conversations I heard during the 2024 WNBA Finals and 2025 NBA Finals about basketball’s new “weak link” era, in which being the team with the best player on the floor matters less than being the team without the worst player on the floor. What propelled Golden State to a historically successful expansion season was the team’s night-to-night unknowability. They didn’t really blink when All-Star Kayla Thornton suffered a season-ending injury. Eleven different Valkyries players had at least one team-high scoring night in 44 games, and the player with the most team-high scoring games, Veronica Burton, still only had a quarter of them. Rookie head coach Natalie Nakase so regularly tinkered with lineups and tailored her gameplans that it now feels like a Valkyries win can take many shapes. When a coach can trust everyone on the roster, the playoffs become much easier.
Their first-round opponent doesn’t make this series a great test case for the weak link theory, though: The Lynx had eight different players score the team-high total this season, and their greatest strength might be their total competence at every position. But it’s something I’m watching as the WNBA begins a period of rapid expansion and the league’s star talent gets spread thin.
(2) Las Vegas Aces: Will the Aces lose a basketball game ever again? The last time the Aces lost a game, they really made it count: a 111-58 loss to Minnesota, the largest margin of defeat in a home game in WNBA history. This happened more than a month ago. The Aces evidently got all the losing out of their system in one night and will now enter the playoffs on a 16-game win streak. A’ja Wilson remains the model of consistent excellence, but things around her seemed to click at the trade deadline, when the team dealt for NaLyssa Smith and brought her into the starting lineup in place of the offensively challenged Kiah Stokes. Head coach Becky Hammon also moved struggling offseason acquisition Jewell Loyd to the bench midseason, at Loyd’s suggestion.
The Aces’ effort on defense has certainly looked better during this streak than it did in the first half of this season, or even in the second half of last season. That might be a result of Hammon’s new motivational tactic: She told ESPN’s Kendra Andrews that she’d started to ask players to create their own scouting reports. The Aces like to switch everything, and while this has brought out point guard Chelsea Gray’s charming ability to guard the four, it might produce some mismatches that playoff opponents can attack. Keep an eye on how they’re communicating defensively and how they look guarding the pick and roll.
(7) Seattle Storm: How will fatigue affect teams this postseason? You might look at the Storm roster, which skews deep in the frontcourt and uber-athletic on paper, and guess they’d be pretty good on the glass, but they’re actually the worst rebounding team in the league. They can end possessions in other ways, forcing turnovers on a fifth of opponents’ possessions thanks to the pesky likes of Gabby Williams, Erica Wheeler, and deadline add Brittney Sykes. But a lot of the time, it just looks like they don’t have quite as much zip as the other team. Seattle’s roster is veteran-heavy, so age might have something to do the energy levels. Without a quality bench, the starters also end up playing a ton of minutes.
I don’t love this inconsistent Seattle team’s chances against the red-hot Aces, but it’ll be interesting to see how they and the other playoff teams hold up after the WNBA’s longest-ever regular season. New this year, too, is a first-round playoff format that will require extra travel by guaranteeing both teams one home game. Travel from Vegas to Seattle isn’t too bad, but it’s certainly something to watch in the Lynx-Valkyries series, the Mercury-Liberty series and through the rest of the playoffs. For the first time, the WNBA Finals are best-of-seven. Having somehow survived the horrid sight of last year’s Finals Game 5, I shudder to imagine players with even deader legs.
(3) Atlanta Dream: Can you win a WNBA championship when your best player isn’t a big? Last year’s Finals left me thinking about all the cool stuff the league’s best bigs are doing these days: eating up crazy space on defense, operating as passing hubs in the paint. Atlanta’s bigs are not really doing any of that. That isn’t to say Traditional Big Things aren’t valuable. For the Dream, they absolutely have been. Overshadowed, maybe, by the team’s dramatic offensive improvement is the Dream’s second-best defense in the league.
Atlanta wins defensive possessions with suffocating pressure. The athletic Rhyne Howard and Allisha Gray force opponents into bad shots, and on the boards, Brittney Griner, Brionna Jones and Naz Hillmon make sure those are the only shots the other team gets. If I’m a little skeptical of their title chances, it’s only because the roster doesn’t quite look like recent Finals teams: There’s no Stewart-Wilson-Thomas-Collier-style game-wrecking power forward doing it all. But the WNBA is in a nascent golden age for dynamic guards—just look at its youngest stars and its next few draft classes. If we’re headed for the Guard Era, I’ll be watching the Dream to see what that might look like.
(6) Indiana Fever: What does postseason success look like for this Fever team? It’s been a bummer of a season for a team that began the year with real championship aspirations. Caitlin Clark missed most of the season with injuries, and as the season went on, more and more of her teammates joined her on the bench in street clothes. To declare that the Fever should just expect to get their young players experience and nothing more in the postseason brings on some 2024 déjà vu.
Certainly there have been bright spots peeking from behind the clouds of injury: Kelsey Mitchell led all WNBA guards in scoring. She belongs on an All-WNBA team. Aliyah Boston’s been a total pro this year; keep an eye on how she performs against the WNBA’s best rebounding team. As first-round matchups go, this is probably the one Indiana wanted. The Fever avoid the Aces and the champion favorite Lynx in the first round, and they may be able to challenge Atlanta by trying to play in transition more. The Dream are among the league’s slowest teams, 12th in pace, and for all their injury woes, the Fever still finished the season with a top-three offense.
(4) Phoenix Mercury: Is WNBA basketball a “weak link” sport? If any player can prove that stars matter—that one woman actually can win a postseason series by herself—it’s Alyssa Thomas, who can manufacture a paint touch or a good look for anyone at any time. Not surprisingly, she has looked absolutely awesome with a cast of capable three-point shooters and elite cutters around her, and the much clearer path to the rim in Phoenix has helped boost her own scoring numbers, too. The team’s relative experience might help here: Kahleah Copper was a Finals MVP, DeWanna Bonner and Sami Whitcomb have rings, and Thomas might be the best playoff riser never to win a championship. A few of their lovable rando rookie teammates will be making postseason debuts.
Getting out of the first round could be its own challenge for Phoenix: This isn’t exactly a true-talent five-seed they’re facing. Thomas is best when she can run the offense in transition, but the Liberty usually do well to limit points off the fast break. Everyone is at a size disadvantage against New York, and the Mercury’s frontcourt is already undersized to begin with. Natasha Mack probably shouldn’t be the starting center on a playoff team, though she’s fun to watch defensively and a good dancer.
(5) New York Liberty: Can the Liberty get away with it? While the Liberty did have some problems when fully healthy—they’re a weirdly terrible rebounding team, for one—it’s hard to know what to make of their season, which was just a mess of injuries to key players. In only 12 of 44 games did Sabrina Ionescu, Jonquel Jones and Breanna Stewart all start and finish the game healthy. (They won all 12.) It’s not surprising that the team never really seemed to get into a rhythm this year after a hot start to the season. I have absolutely no idea what version we’ll be seeing when the playoffs begin.
Pedigree still means something to me, especially in playoff basketball, so the idea that New York might flip a switch and figure things out is tempting. For inspiration, the Liberty could look to the 2021 Sky, a similarly talented No. 6 seed that happened to goof around and get hurt a lot in the regular season. Still, the Sky are an exception to the rule that lower-ranked seeds generally do not fare well in the WNBA playoffs. And if the absence of one player is enough to bring down an entire team, that might say something about the quality of the team. Sometimes you just are what the record says you are. In the last two games of the season—literally New York’s first injury-free games since the first two games of the season—head coach Sandy Brondello tested out some playoff combinations. A three-big jumbo lineup with Stewart, Jones, and midseason signing Emma Meesseman could be on the table. If it’s clicking, they’d be hard to stop.