Cheryl Reeve Has A New Challenge In 2019… And New Opportunities As Well

This year will be different than past years for the Minnesota Lynx. At the team’s media day on Thursday, head coach Cheryl Reeve made it clear that she’s not avoiding that reality. As a matter of fact, she’s looking forward to it.

Reeve has always had to coach—even with veteran teams it’s not like she just coasted along and let them do their thing. However, in terms of practices and game preparation, she could be a little more hands-off when everyone on the team had been there before. Now she is more active with the younger players and doing a little more learning herself as well.

“The group is actually enjoying practice. I haven’t had that in a while. We’re no longer in this less is more phase that we were in. I loved those days, but the new-ness, the eagerness to do anything that we ask, it’s different for sure in how much the new players just don’t know,” she said. “It’s fun. It’s fun to see them respond. Their effort and the way they treat each other is exactly what we want from a culture standpoint.”

Reeve has to learn the new iteration of this team. She has to figure out what works well for them, what won’t work as well anymore, how they respond to different styles of coaching, and importantly how they will respond to losses.

The Lynx have yet to lose a game this preseason, so spirits have been high. When things kick off for real though, the competition will pick up. The Lynx aren’t going to win every single game this season and a lot of the character of the team will be determined by how they handle losses and how they keep perspective on things.

“The regular season is completely different than the training camp. Everything gets ratcheted up a notch as teams embark on the 2019 journey. What I’ve learned is that this group really wants to learn and they play really hard,” Reeve said. “I think the combination of those two things is going to allow us to have some success. But now more than ever we’re going day by day. Get better each day, staying in that small view. I don’t want them to look out and look bigger, I want them to focus on doing something better than what you did the day before.”

Outside of the character of the team, there are X’s and O’s that need to be ironed out. Danielle Robinson has a very different play style than Lindsay Whalen did which means a lot of the schemes the Lynx have need to be tweaked. Reeve is working to learn the style of her new starting point guard just as much as Robinson is learning Reeve’s tendencies.

“We have to tweak our schemes because we’re very different. We’ve gone through that in the offseason as we’ve added the pieces we got through the draft to see what we have and say ‘OK, what can we do that was the same and what needs to change? What can we do differently to suit this group?’” said Reeve.

With Odyssey Sims and Seimone Augustus offering such different types of looks at shooting guard and players like Karima Christmas-Kelly, Napheesa Collier and Jess Shepard bring such different styles to the forward positions, and adding in the dominance of Sylvia Fowles, the Lynx and Reeve have pieces to play around with. Reeve’s creativity will be tested, but that’s part of the fun of a roster like this.

Reeve knows the Lynx will always play hard, play together and do everything they can to internalize what she is teaching them. That’s enough of a starting point for now. Though the regular season will have its fair share of challenges, they’ll be challenges the team is equipped to handle.