WNBA honors Reeve as Executive of Year despite first-round playoff sweep

Cheryl Reeve won her third WNBA Executive of the Year award on Monday, tying the record held by Atlanta's Dan Padover. The Minnesota Lynx head coach and president of basketball operations received 13 votes from her peers across the league's 15 teams—more than any other candidate that year. It was a substantial endorsement from the people who run women's basketball. It also arrived less than two weeks after her top-seeded team was swept out of the first round by the eighth-seeded New York Liberty, making Minnesota the first No. 1 seed in WNBA history to fall to an eighth seed without winning a single playoff game.

The timing created an obvious tension. Reeve had built a roster that finished 33-11 in the regular season and featured Olivia Miles, the unanimous Rookie of the Year who also finished second in MVP voting and set the league's rookie scoring record with 790 points. Miles averaged 19.8 points, 6.0 assists and 4.7 rebounds per game while shooting better from the field than most of her peers. The Lynx also signed Natasha Howard, who started all 44 games and earned an All-Star starting spot. By most measures of roster construction, Reeve had done her job well. Yet when the playoffs arrived, the team lost both games by 16 points, including a 91-75 home defeat in Game 1.

Much of Reeve's success in the draft came from good fortune as much as skill. Dallas, holding the No. 1 pick, chose Azzi Fudd instead of Miles—a decision the Wings publicly justified on shooting ability alone, though Fudd was also Paige Bueckers' girlfriend. That left Miles available at No. 2 for Minnesota. Reeve did execute a series of trades that strengthened the roster: in April 2024, she acquired Nikolina Milić from Chicago in exchange for Sika Koné, a 2025 second-round pick, and the right to swap first-round picks in 2026. A year later, she sent Chicago the No. 11 pick for Chicago's 2026 first-rounder outright, which canceled the earlier swap and allowed Minnesota to keep its own first-round selection. Those moves showed competence. But the Miles decision, once Dallas passed on her, was straightforward.

Reeve's record as an executive spans nine seasons since her most recent championship in 2017. During that stretch, she has won three Coach of the Year awards and all three of her Executive of the Year honors—six individual awards in total, with no championships. She reached the Finals once, in 2024, and lost to New York. The question of how to weigh regular-season success against playoff failure became central to evaluating what her peers were actually celebrating when they voted for her.

Beyond the roster decisions, Reeve has made her politics a visible part of her leadership. She wore a "Trans Kids Belong" shirt on the sideline against Indiana shortly after Sophie Cunningham's public comments about protecting women's sports. After Minnesota's regular-season finale on September 24, Reeve characterized the debate over male participation in women's sports as an attack on the "transgender community." She said, "They don't want transgender people to exist." That framing—equating opposition to male athletes competing in women's categories with a desire for transgender people not to exist—came from someone who holds both the head coaching job and the title of president of basketball operations. Her public statements carried the weight of both positions and represented the organization.

When the WNBA's executives voted to honor Reeve, they were endorsing not just her trades and draft picks but her leadership as a whole. That leadership includes the way she uses the team's platform to make political arguments about women's sports. Her colleagues were, in effect, applauding her approach to representing the franchise. The award raised a question about what the league's decision-makers were willing to celebrate: a leader who speaks openly about allowing males to compete in women's sports and share their facilities, or a leader whose regular-season roster construction had been sound but whose team could not win a single playoff game when it mattered most.