{"id":280990,"date":"2025-11-09T09:23:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T09:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/280990\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T09:23:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T09:23:14","slug":"lynx-playing-game-4-without-coach-star-player","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/280990\/","title":{"rendered":"Lynx playing Game 4 without coach, star player"},"content":{"rendered":"

PHOENIX \u2014 A different coach took questions in the Lynx\u2019s pregame news conference ahead of Sunday night\u2019s must-win Game 4 of the WNBA semifinals. But the message was a familiar one: \u201cYou find out what you\u2019re made of in situations like these.\u201d <\/p>\n

Those words came from associate head coach Eric Thibault, not head coach Cheryl Reeve. <\/p>\n

Now the Lynx are without both Reeve and Collier, ruled out with a left ankle injury<\/a>, in Game 4, down 2-1 in the best-of-five WNBA semifinal series. Thibault, who joined the Lynx this past offseason, will step into head coaching duties in place of Reeve for Game 4 (7 p.m., ESPN). <\/p>\n

When asked about managing the team\u2019s emotions after Game 3, Thibault said: \u201cYou have the most success in these situations when you control what you can control. For us, that\u2019s playing better, playing through exhaustion, playing until the tank is empty, and being sharper in execution on both ends of the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thibault isn\u2019t a stranger to calling the shots. Before joining Minnesota, Thibault spent 12 seasons with the Washington Mystics, the last two as head coach with a 33-47 record. He helped Washington reach back-to-back WNBA Finals in 2018 and 2019, including winning a title on the second trip.<\/p>\n

The Lynx also aren\u2019t strangers to playing without Collier this season. The MVP runner-up missed 11 of the team\u2019s 44 regular-season games, with forward Jessica Shepard typically taking her place in Minnesota\u2019s starting lineup.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if you spend a ton of time talking about how we\u2019re going to play differently [without Collier], or how we played then,\u201d Thibault said. \u201cPeople will have been through that, the experience that our team has, going through that in some pretty important games at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHOENIX \u2014 A different coach took questions in the Lynx\u2019s pregame news conference ahead of Sunday night\u2019s must-win…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":{"0":"post-280990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}