So far, 2025 has been the season of Napheesa Collier. The 28-year-old forward finished as the runner-up to A’ja Wilson in last season’s MVP chase, but she’s poised to do one better and finally get her hands on that coveted silverware in 2025. She’s currently a -260 favorite at DraftKings Sportsbook, as her Minnesota Lynx are a league-best 14-2 with a plus-14.0 net rating.
Tonight, Collier and the Lynx will host the Washington Mystics. With eight teams making the WNBA playoffs and four squads at 5-13 or worse, it’ll likely be a four-for-three battle between the Golden State Valkyries, the Indiana Fever, the Las Vegas Aces, and the Mystics, with Washington currently holding +115 odds.
Minnesota is a 12-point favorite on DraftKings Sportsbook (-800 Moneyline), with the total set at 157.5 points. Below, I’ll break down the clash and offer my prediction.
Mystics at Lynx prediction, pick
There are no holes in Collier’s game. She can score, rebound, and facilitate at a high level, and prior to a one-for-four night from deep in Sunday’s blowout over the hapless Connecticut Sun, she was on pace to join Elena Delle Donne as the only players in WNBA history to join the elite 50-40-90 club, as she’s made 52.5% of her field goals, 39.6% of her triples, and 94.6% of her triples. She also won last season’s Defensive Player of the Year award and is producing nearly as many defensive win shares per game this season as in 2024. With her on the court, the Lynx are blitzing opponents by an eye-popping 19.0 points per 100 possessions.
To be fair, she might be exhausted after playing in the Commissioner’s Cup championship on Tuesday, which Minnesota lost, 74-59, to a Caitlin Clark-less Fever squad. Collier was uncharacteristically poor in that game, scoring just 12 points on six-for-18 shooting and coughing up five turnovers, though she still made her presence felt defensively with three steals and a block. More than anything, I’m going to consider it an aberration — the Milwaukee Bucks beat the Oklahoma City Thunder to win the Emirates NBA Cup, and look how the season ended up for both of those squads.
If Washington wants a chance of pulling off an upset, it’ll need to control the glass, the one area in which the Lynx have had any sign of weakness. This season, Minnesota has allowed the fewest points and second-fewest assists but only the seventh-fewest boards. It has also conceded 11.6 second-chance points per game, the fourth-worst mark in basketball, while turning the ball over at merely a league-average rate. The Lynx have also struggled to close out on corner threes sometimes, allowing the sixth-highest percentage from the left corner and the third-best mark from the right corner. Thankfully, the Mystics have the personnel to do so; third overall pick Sonia Citron ranks third in left-corner threes made and fourth overall pick Kiki Iriafen ranks eighth in second-chance points.
The good thing about having such a young team — three of Washington’s five starters are 24 or younger, and sixth woman Jade Melbourne (fittingly, from the city) is 22 — is that the Mystics are improving. They’ve won five of their last eight games, including a 68-64 triumph over Minnesota on June 24, though they can’t expect that sort of result again, given that Collier sat out that game with a back injury. Still, the fact that Washington has had the league’s third-best defensive rating across that span is promising, especially since four-time All-Defensive honoree Brittney Sykes missed two of those games. I’ll take the Mystics with the points.
