A Record That Stands Alone
Cheryl Reeve has won the WNBA Coach of the Year award for a fifth time, more than any coach in the league’s history. The Minnesota Lynx coach collected 40 of 74 votes from the national panel of sportswriters and broadcasters that decides the honor, roughly double the tally for Golden State’s Natalie Nakase, who got 20, and nearly triple Washington’s Sydney Johnson, who got 14. Since the award began in 1997, no other coach has claimed it more than three times. Reeve now has two more than anyone else in league history, with previous wins in 2011, 2016, 2020 and 2024.
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Seventeen Years, One Number That Keeps Growing
The 2026 trophy comes on the back of a 33-11 regular season, the best record in the league, but the context runs deeper than one year. Reeve is in her 17th season at the helm in Minnesota, and her overall record with the franchise now sits at 397-201, a .664 winning percentage across 598 games on the Lynx bench. On July 8 this year, a win over Connecticut made her the WNBA’s all-time leader in regular-season victories, her 380th with the club. Few coaches in any American pro league get to build that kind of body of work with a single franchise, let alone keep adding to it at 60 years old.
The vote itself was locked in before the playoffs started, which makes the timing almost beside the point. Reeve already had the trophy before her team played a single postseason minute this year.
Eyes on a Fifth Title
The award means little on its own if the season ends without a championship, and Reeve knows that better than most. Minnesota enters the playoffs as the top seed, chasing what would be a fifth WNBA title under her direction. Her four previous Coach of the Year trophies came bundled with three championship runs; this fifth one arrives with the Lynx favored to add a fourth banner to the rafters in Minneapolis before the year is out.
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