Cheryl Reeve just won Executive of the Year for building the team that suffered the worst upset in WNBA playoff history, and the award arrived two weeks after the sweep that should have complicated it.
Reeve collected her third Executive of the Year award, tying Dan Padover’s league record, and paired it with her fifth Coach of the Year trophy in the same season. That double has happened exactly once before, Curt Miller in 2017. Reeve has now done it twice, which makes her the first person in league history to pull off the Coach-and-Exec combo more than once.
None of that is in dispute.
The Minnesota Lynx went 33-11, claimed the No. 1 overall seed, and set a WNBA record with 18 road wins. Reeve built that roster and that record herself, and the voting panel rewarded her for it: 13 ballots to Padover’s 11, with Golden State’s Ohemaa Nyanin a distant third at eight.
That 33-11 finish didn’t hold up. In the first round, the No. 8 seed New York Liberty swept Minnesota, 91-75 and then 87-71. No No. 1 seed had ever lost a series to a No. 8 in WNBA history before that series. Now one has, and it’s the same roster that just got handed the league’s top front-office honor.
The voting isn’t wrong on the facts. Every ballot was cast on a real 33-11 season that actually happened. But Executive of the Year locks in when the regular season ends, before a single playoff game is played, which means the award has no way to account for what October did to the case. A trophy that freezes in September and gets handed out in October is going to look strange some years. This is one of them.
https://twitter.com/RealDanZak/status/2109736931731091846
That tweet gets at something real.
An award built entirely on regular-season process just collided with a playoff result that undercut the premise, and the two things happened close enough together that nobody got to pretend they were unrelated. I’ve spent enough mornings running the Chicago lakefront turning WNBA storylines over in my head to know irony isn’t the same as injustice. Reeve’s roster-building was genuinely excellent this year. Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier’s head-to-head in that series doesn’t erase a 33-11 regular season any more than one bad series erases a career. But awards exist to tell a story about what mattered, and this one is now telling two contradictory stories at once: the Lynx were the best-built team in the league, and the Lynx were the first No. 1 seed ever swept by a No. 8. Both are true. Neither fits cleanly into a trophy case.
The calendar isn’t going to change. Executive of the Year will keep getting decided before the playoffs every single year, and most years nobody notices the gap between the vote and the result. This year, the trophy showed up two weeks late and still missed the point.
