Napheesa Collier
Napheesa Collier is a Minnesota Lynx forward, 2024 WNBA Defensive Player of the Year and UConn champion whose 2025 season produced a historic 50/40/90 line.
Napheesa Collier is a forward for the Minnesota Lynx and one of the most complete two-way players of her era, a University of Connecticut national champion who entered the WNBA as the sixth pick in 2019 and grew into a franchise cornerstone, a Defensive Player of the Year and a two-time MVP runner-up. Her 2025 season, a historic 50/40/90 shooting line paired with elite defense, is the signature campaign of her career, and her work off the court as a players’-union officer and co-founder of the Unrivaled league has made her one of the sport’s defining voices on labor and leverage.
| Vitals | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 23, 1996, Jefferson City, Missouri |
| Position | Forward |
| Teams | Minnesota Lynx (2019–present) |
| Draft | 2019, 1st round, 6th overall (Minnesota Lynx) |
| Contract | One-year, $1.4 million supermax reported April 17, 2026 |
| Number | 24 |
Storrs
The recruit. Collier arrived at UConn in the fall of 2015 and, as a freshman coming off the bench, helped the Huskies win the 2016 NCAA championship, the program’s fourth consecutive national title. Her role expanded steadily from there.
The résumé. Over four seasons she scored 2,401 points on 61.3 percent shooting across 150 games, leaving Storrs as one of the program’s top scorers and among a small group to clear 2,000 points and 1,000 rebounds. She earned multiple All-America selections and back-to-back American Athletic Conference Player of the Year honors, closing her college career as the 2018-19 AAC Defensive Player of the Year, an early signal of the two-way identity that would define her professional game.
The Lynx
The arrival. Minnesota selected Collier with the sixth overall pick in the 2019 WNBA Draft. She scored 27 points in her professional debut, which Wikipedia notes was among the highest-scoring debuts by a rookie, and averaged 13.1 points and 6.6 rebounds across 34 games on the way to the 2019 Rookie of the Year award.
The foundation. Collier established herself quickly as the hub of the post-dynasty Lynx. She lifted her scoring to 16.1 points per game in 2020 and remained a fixture of the rotation, interrupted only in 2022, when she appeared in just four regular-season games following the May 2022 birth of her daughter before returning for the postseason.
The leap. Her return to a full workload produced consecutive career years: 21.5 points in 2023 and 20.4 points with 9.7 rebounds in 2024. Minnesota re-signed her to a one-year deal on April 17, 2026, with the franchise having won the most regular-season games in its history the prior year.
The 2025 peak
The line. In 2025 Collier averaged 22.9 points, 7.3 rebounds and 3.2 assists while shooting 53.1 percent from the field, 40.3 percent from three and 90.6 percent from the line. That split made her just the second player in WNBA history to post a 50/40/90 season, joining Elena Delle Donne, and the first to do it while averaging more than 20 points.
The showcase. As a captain of the 2025 All-Star Game in Indianapolis on July 19, 2025, Collier scored a game-record 36 points on 13-of-16 shooting and was named All-Star MVP as Team Collier routed Team Clark. The point total broke the previous record of 34.
The near-miss. Collier made All-WNBA First Team and All-Defensive First Team, yet finished second in MVP voting for the second straight year, again behind A’ja Wilson. Her top-seeded Lynx went 34-10 and swept the first round, but were eliminated in the semifinals by the fourth-seeded Phoenix Mercury. Collier was sidelined by a left ankle injury sustained late in that series, and the shorthanded Lynx dropped the decisive game 86-81. She returned the following year and appeared in 16 games in 2026.
Defense and leadership
The stopper. Collier won the 2024 WNBA Defensive Player of the Year award, edging A’ja Wilson in a close vote, and repeated as an All-Defensive First Team selection in 2025. Her blend of positional size, foot speed and timing lets her guard across four positions while holding career rates near 1.7 steals and over 1 block per game.
The organizer. Off the floor, Collier serves as first vice president of the players’ union and co-founded the offseason Unrivaled league with Breanna Stewart, winning its inaugural MVP in 2025. She has used the All-Star stage and the league’s growth to press the case for higher player pay during collective-bargaining talks.
By the numbers
| Season | GP | PPG | RPG | APG | FG% | 3P% | FT% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 34 | 13.1 | 6.6 | 2.6 | 49.0 | 36.1 | 79.2 |
| 2020 | 22 | 16.1 | 9.0 | 3.3 | 52.3 | 40.8 | 82.9 |
| 2021 | 29 | 16.2 | 6.6 | 3.2 | 44.1 | 25.3 | 86.0 |
| 2022 | 4 | 7.3 | 3.0 | 1.0 | 42.3 | 28.6 | 71.4 |
| 2023 | 37 | 21.5 | 8.5 | 2.5 | 48.5 | 29.8 | 84.0 |
| 2024 | 34 | 20.4 | 9.7 | 3.4 | 49.2 | 31.0 | 80.4 |
| 2025 | 33 | 22.9 | 7.3 | 3.2 | 53.1 | 40.3 | 90.6 |
| 2026 | 16 | 16.8 | 6.9 | 2.6 | 50.0 | 44.4 | 85.7 |
Career totals
Ranks
- 1st Single-game WNBA All-Star scoring record (36 points, 2025)
- 2nd Scoring average, Lynx franchise history
- 2nd Steals, Lynx franchise history (345)
- 2nd 50/40/90 season, WNBA history (after Elena Delle Donne)
Honors
- 2024 WNBA Defensive Player of the Year
- 2019 WNBA Rookie of the Year
- 2× Olympic gold medalist (2021, 2024)
- 5× All-Star (2019, 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025)
- 2025 WNBA All-Star Game MVP
- 3× All-WNBA First Team (2023–2025)
- 2× All-Defensive First Team (2024, 2025)
- 2016 NCAA champion (UConn)
- 2025 Unrivaled MVP
Per Basketball-Reference and WNBA.com, through the 2026 season.
The arguments
The MVP question. Collier finished runner-up in MVP voting in both 2024 and 2025, each time behind A’ja Wilson, and the gap divided observers. Wilson’s backers pointed to record scoring volume and single-season franchise marks; Collier’s backers, as laid out in ESPN’s coverage of the 2025 race, argued that a 50/40/90 season paired with first-team defense represented a more complete case than any rival could match.
The empowerment question. Collier’s role as a union officer and Unrivaled co-founder placed her at the center of the sport’s labor debate. Supporters credit her with building leverage and new revenue avenues for players during collective-bargaining talks; others have questioned whether a parallel offseason league and public pressure campaigns complicate the WNBA’s own growth. Both framings were widely reported around the 2025 All-Star weekend, where her call for higher pay drew national attention.
The ceiling question. The 2025 semifinal exit, with Minnesota the top overall seed, reopened the debate over whether this Lynx core can win a title. ESPN’s postmortem weighed the injuries and coaching absence that hit Minnesota in the series against longer-running questions about the roster around Collier.
Why it matters
Napheesa Collier occupies the rare space where peak individual excellence, two-way impact and off-court influence converge. A national champion at UConn, a Rookie of the Year, a Defensive Player of the Year and the author of one of the most efficient scoring seasons the league has ever recorded, she has done all of it for a single franchise while helping reshape the economics of her sport. The MVP trophy and a WNBA title had eluded her through the 2026 season, but by any measure of all-around production and leadership, Collier stands among the defining players of her generation.
