The Minnesota Lynx winning streak reached 10 straight Sunday afternoon with a 108-100 win over the Indiana Fever, and it happened in a building where the basketball was only part of the story. Inside and around Target Center, crowds of critics and supporters of Fever guard Sophie Cunningham gathered over her stance on transgender participation in women's sports. Two things were true at once in Minneapolis. The gym was loud before anybody scored.
Let's start with the game, because the game was excellent.
How did the Lynx beat the Fever 108-100?
Olivia Miles put up 28 points and looked every bit the rookie sensation the league has been telling you about since the spring. Courtney Williams added 27. Fifty-five points between two guards, and the thing that stood out to me was not the volume but the efficiency of the whole Minnesota operation. When a team scores 108 in a 40-minute game, the offense is not scraping. It is humming.
Indiana was not the problem. Kelsey Mitchell was a certified bucket, as the kids put it: 37 points on 14-of-21 from the floor. That is the kind of afternoon that usually decides a basketball game by itself.
| Player | Team | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Kelsey Mitchell | Indiana | 37 |
| Olivia Miles | Minnesota | 28 |
| Courtney Williams | Minnesota | 27 |
So how do you lose that game? You lose it because the other team got 55 from its backcourt and the rest of the roster filled in the gaps. Mitchell shot 66.7 percent and still walked off with nothing. That's the cruelty of the sport in one line.
What happened outside Target Center on Sunday?
Before and during the game, people showed up on both sides of the Cunningham conversation, some in the concourse, some on the street. I am not going to referee that argument here, and I am not going to pretend it did not happen either. It happened. It was visible. It was audible. And the players had to go play a professional basketball game inside of it.
Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve addressed a conversation she had with Cunningham afterward. I do not have the full text of what Reeve said in front of me, so I am not going to put words in her mouth, and I would rather report a gap than fill it with a guess. What I will say is that Reeve has been in this league since 2010 as Minnesota's head coach, and she has never been the type to duck a microphone. When she talks, it is usually worth reading in full.
checked the almanac: the lynx have four titles, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017, and reeve coached every one of them. this franchise has a long history of its players and coaches speaking on things bigger than box scores. that part is not new in minneapolis.
What comes next for the Fever and the Lynx
For Indiana, this is the second straight loss in a season that keeps asking Mitchell to carry a heavier load than any one guard should. She is answering. The supporting cast has to answer with her, because 37 points from your lead guard should be a win night, not a moral victory.
For Minnesota, 10 in a row in the league's 30th season is the loudest statement anybody is making right now. Miles is a rookie playing like a problem. Williams is playing the best two-way basketball of her stretch in this uniform.
What I am watching next: whether Indiana can find a second scorer who takes 15 shots, and whether Minnesota's streak survives its next real test on the road. And I would like to see Reeve's full comments, because those tend to age better than the noise around them.
