Despite making it to 100% of the All-Star games that have been available to her, there’s one honor that evaded Collier. She was never named as a starter.
Well, Phee, instead of All-Star starter, how does All-Star captain sound?
“It’s really cool,” Collier said to reporters on the day she and Indiana’s Caitlin Clark were announced as the game’s captains as the top two recipients of fan voting. “I went from never being a [All-Star] starter to a captain. But it’s really cool to know that fans are voting for me. I definitely couldn’t do it without my teammates, so definitely all the credit goes to them and our coaching staff, but it’s really cool.”
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Collier, who is averaging a career-best 23.2 points per game at the All-Star break, and also flirted with the exclusive 50/40/90 line (for 50% shooting from the field, 40% shooting from 3-point range and 90% shooting from the foul line) earlier in the season. Her 3-point shooting has since fallen to the more human level of 34.2%, but her free throw shooting at 94.6% (105-of-111) is better than anyone in the league besides her Lynx and Team Collier All-Star teammate Kayla McBride at 94.7% (54-of-57). Collier set a franchise record earlier in the season with 54 consecutive makes at the line, 6th best in league history and 10 shy of Elena Delle Donne’s all-time record Per Lynx PR.
“Man, I think it means everything. Honestly, I mean she’s been putting the work in,” Courtney Williams said after a Lynx win against Connecticut on June 29, the day the All-Star captains were announced. “She’s having an amazing season. Obviously, our team is not this good if not for Napheesa Collier, man. I love seeing her being rewarded. This is exactly where she’s supposed to be.”
It’s not just Collier’s current teammates who are totally unsurprised to see her receive a prestigious appointment reserved for only two players in the WNBA. Occasions of this season have brought franchise stalwarts Seimone Augustus, and Sylvia Fowles back to Minnesota, both of whom did not hesitate to speak on the promise of greatness that Collier made apparent when she was a rookie with the Lynx in 2019.
“It was always a no-brainer,” Fowles said in an interview with The Next in June. “And the no-brainer came from just how she didn’t complain. You can always tell a good player from an elite player with how they approach things and, you know, practices can sometimes get intense and Phee never budged. That’s how I knew she was going to be special. She’s coachable, but also, she’s a freaking beast. There’s nothing she really can’t do, and if she can’t do it, she’s going to figure it out. That’s something I learned about her early on as a rookie … I’m not surprised, but I am happy to see it come full circle for her.”
Augustus, who only got to be teammates with Collier during her rookie season in 2019, confirmed the Lynx had a player on their hands whose wisdom far exceeded her age.
“Her maturity as a leader, when I was there, obviously she was still looking and kind of watching us — me and Sylvia — to see how we were leading the girls, and I think she just kind of took an observative approach to that,” Augustus told The Next. “Now I can see she really was paying attention because she is a vocal leader, but she also really leads by example more than she does vocally.”
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A fifth career All-Star Game selection and a first All-Star captain appointment is a milestone moment for a star player who rose to stardom in a quieter fashion than most. Though Collier, while appreciative of the added notoriety in the public space, maintains it’s more of a luxury and not a necessity for her biggest ambitions.
“It’s like icing on the cake,” Collier said on June 29. “It’s a cool thing to add on, but I’ve always tried to be the best for my teammates and to win games. So the fact that’s paying off way more in that way is more fulfilling … we made it to the Finals last year and we have another chance this year, so that part is way more rewarding. The other stuff is cool but it really means nothing in the scheme of what my ultimate goals are.”
There may not have been much public surprise for Collier to finish second in the league’s fan voting process, but the element of surprise was at play when the time came for one of Collier’s teammates and most outspoken advocates, Courtney Williams, to receive their call to be an All-Star.
“Yeah, man, Cathy called me. I actually declined the phone call at first because I [didn’t have] her number,” Williams recalled of receiving the All-Star news from WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert during a postgame TV spot after the Lynx beat the Sky on July 6. “But she called right back, she said, ‘This is Cathy.’ I said, ‘Cathy, who?’ And she said, ‘I have good news for you, you an All-Star,’ man. Yeah, she turned me up, I was super hype. I was so excited to call Cheryl. I called Cheryl and we both went on the phone yelling, ‘Let’s go!’”
The selection marks the first for Williams as a Lynx and her second overall. She was last selected to the game as a member of the Atlanta Dream in 2021.
“We’re excited, we felt like we had more All-Stars than just two,” Lynx head coach and president of basketball operations Cheryl Reeve said on the day the All-Star reserves were announced. “Courtney, it was a goal of hers this season, and so knowing that she put the work in as she’s talked about, and seeing the reward, as a coach knowing that somebody wanted something so bad and they accomplish it, to see that joy that they have, that’s why we coach.
“And now I can use that, you know, she’s got to play like an All-Star,” Reeve added with a smile. “So I love having that tool too.”
Reeve not only gets to continue coaching Williams to an All-Star level with the Lynx, but will be able to do so in the All-Star Game itself. Reeve and New York Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello were announced as the games coaches on July 3, as their teams were in first and second place in the league standings respectively.
“I had this discussion recently that these are first-world problems.,” Reeve said when asked about coaching in the game instead of having some rare time off during the season. “How dare I for a second think that this isn’t a tremendous honor [for] our team doing this, and that’s the space I’m in. I’m excited to join Phee and hopefully other Lynx players. No question about it, you cannot ever take these things for granted, so it’s a great honor.”
Reeve’s status as head coach of the team with the league’s best record slotted her in to coach Team Clark, as Clark was the only player to earn more votes than Collier. When asked about the possibility of coaching against Collier, Reeve didn’t hesitate to place her faith in the future GM abilities of her star player.
“There’s transacting that can happen,” Reeve said. “That’s happened before.”
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Collier made an All-Star Draft day deal with Clark to swap head coaches in the game, and used her first overall pick in the pool of reserves on Williams. When the first injury replacement for this year’s game was needed for Atlanta’s Rhyne Howard, Engelbert appointed Kayla McBride to take her place on Team Collier. The selection marked McBride’s second-consecutive All-Star appearance as a Lynx, the fifth of her career and first time she gets to be All-Star teammates with Collier (they squared off against each other in last year’s USA vs All-Star format with Collier on the Olympic team).
“It’s an honor, I’m very fortunate for this group and this organization,” McBride said after Minnesota’s final game before All-Star weekend on July 16. “It hits different here, just the camaraderie and the chemistry and the love that I have for the people in our locker room, my teammates, the coaching staff, and so that we get to all do this together, Cheryl as the coach, Phee and Court, T (Natisha Hiedeman) our fellow StudBud, it’s really cool to do this together because that’s what the season’s about.”
McBride, currently in the middle of her 12th season, echoed Reeve’s stance to never take these opportunities for granted.
“It’s really special, and like I said, as you get older, they get a little bit more special because you never know how many you’re going to get,” she said. “When you’re 23 you don’t think, ‘oh this might be my last one,’ but when you’re 33, you do. I’m really fortunate and I just have a lot of love for this organization for believing in me, for Cheryl, and so to be able to do it alongside them it’s really, really special. So I’m excited.”