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NEW YORK — Cheryl Reeve knows how to win better than anybody in the WNBA.She proved as much Wednesday night as the Minnesota Lynx beat the Connecticut Sun on the road 86-80, making her the winningest coach in WNBA history. Reeve, who already owns the WNBA’s playoff wins record, tied Mike Thibault (379-289) for the WNBA’s record for most regular-season wins with the Lynx’s win over the Dallas Wings on June 28.
Her 380th victory isolates her atop the mountain.
“I’m so glad this is over,” Reeve said on the postgame broadcast.
“I learned a lot from Mike through the years,” she added. “Tremendous coach. So much respect that we’ve had for each other through the years. I know he’s happy for me. And somebody’s going to pass me and I’ll be happy for them, too.”
This season’s 16-6 record especially validates her coaching prowess.
Reeve, a four-time WNBA champion, has missed the playoffs only twice in her 17-year tenure as the Lynx coach — her first season in 2010 and in 2022. Even though the Lynx were expected to have a down year entering 2026, Reeve’s resume makes it hard to doubt her.
The Lynx, after all, lost two key contributors in Alanna Smith — 2025 Co-Defensive Player of the Year — and forward Jessica Shepard, both of whom signed with the Dallas Wings as unrestricted free agents. Reeve took a swing at 11-time All-Star and 2016 WNBA MVP Nneka Ogwumike and struck out. And although she re-signed her second- and third-leading scorers in Courtney Williams and Kayla McBride, respectively, legitimate questions lingered about what the Lynx would look like without MVP runner-up Napheesa Collier, who has been sidelined after undergoing offseason surgery on both ankles.
Yet where many saw question marks, Reeve had answers.
She brought back Natasha Howard, the 2019 Defensive Player of the Year, and signed 10-year WNBA journeywoman Nia Coffey, inking both of them to two-year deals. Reeve’s biggest coup, however, was her 2024 draft-day trade with the Chicago Sky, which translated to the No. 2 pick in the 2026 draft, which she used to select Olivia Miles.
McBride led the way on Wednesday with a game-high 23 points. Williams and Howard added 12 apiece and Dorka Juhász added 12 off the bench in her second game back for the Lynx after suffering a right foot injury in April.
Roughly halfway through the season, the Lynx are No. 1 in the league standings with the best net rating (11.8) — even without their MVP-caliber franchise player.
On June 27, Reeve was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
“She is just brilliant in what she does,” Miles, who was sidelined for her second consecutive game with a right calf injury, said of Reeve on Friday. “She understands how to use players to their strengths. You see (Howard) playing out of her mind. Everyone thought she was done. She’s playing some of her best basketball of her career. It’s things like that that Cheryl sees in players and allows people to raise to their full potential.”
The four-time Coach of the Year was hired by the Lynx in 2010 after eight seasons as a WNBA assistant, including the Detroit Shock’s final four seasons (2006-2009) when they made three WNBA Finals appearances and won two titles.
In 2017, she added the role of general manager to her plate, and in 2022, she was promoted to president of Lynx basketball operations. She is the last remaining dual coach and general manager in the WNBA, making her accomplishments all the more staggering.
Between 2011 and 2017, she solidified the Lynx as a WNBA dynasty, winning four titles and making six finals appearances in that span. Rebekkah Brunson and Lindsay Whalen, two standouts in the Lynx championship quartet, now share the sideline with Reeve as assistants.
Brunson, who joined Reeve’s staff in 2020 after officially retiring that February, has been part of all but 18 of Reeve’s wins. Whalen accounts for 247 of Reeve’s regular-season wins after retiring in 2018 and joining the Lynx coaching staff in 2025. Eric Thibault was another addition to Reeve’s staff last year.
Thibault drafted Whalen to the Connecticut Sun with the fourth overall pick in the 2004 draft. She played six seasons for Thibault before being traded to the Lynx in 2010. He spent 10 seasons as an assistant coach on his father Mike Thibault’s staff in Washington.
“Lindsay’s responsible for a whole bunch of my wins and my son’s been part of a bunch of them, too,” Mike Thibault said. “I’ve been giving him crap about helping her break my record.”
The elder Thibault spent 13 of his 20 seasons competing for wins against Reeve.
Early in Reeve’s tenure as a head coach, the pair started a preseason tradition of conducting a joint practice for one day before their teams played each other in an exhibition game. In 2024, they won an Olympic gold medal together at the Paris Summer Games, Reeve as the head coach and Thibault as an assistant.
In his final season before retiring in the fall of 2022, he got his 273rd career win in what would be his last meeting against Reeve and the Lynx.
“If anybody was going to break it, I’m happy it’s her,” Thibault told The Athletic. “I think it will sit for a long time, too, because we have a lot of young coaches in the league with a long way to go.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Minnesota Lynx, WNBA
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