WNBA Season Preview 2019: Where do the Lynx go from here?

The 2019 Minnesota Lynx are faced with a good problem, but it’s still a problem. Even worse, Minnesota’s problem can’t be solved with more of their league-leading rigorous analytical knowledge, and it can’t be ironed out with an insightful tactical tweak on the floor. The problem is: what is the best way for a franchise to write a new chapter after an all-powerful dynasty has aged into retirement?

Recent NBA history has shown us two different ways this can go. Either one or both of the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics appeared in the NBA Finals each year from 2008-2010. After the next few years saw diminishing returns in the playoffs — much like the Lynx and their underwhelming 18-16 season in 2018 — both teams hit their fork-in-the-road moment.

The Lakers went on the side of sentimentality. It’s a completely understandable human impulse. Kobe Bryant had been with the franchise for about 15 years, going all the way back to the 90s, and Los Angeles was willing to retain him at a prestigious price point in order to ensure he’d be a Laker for a full 20 years — in order to ensure he’d wear only one jersey after graduating from Lower Merion High School. This decision came with some incredible emotional positives: in particular, the gigantic era of Bryant ended on the all-time sentimental note of him balling out like it was 2004 in the 1,346th and final game of his career. The Lakers locking in so many of their cap resources — and touches on the floor — to Kobe also has had its devastating consequences, consequences the Lakers have arguably not fully gotten over heading into the 2019-20 season. An ensuing habit of filling the coaching staff and front office with a talent pool that only exists of sentiment-inducing former Lakers means that a franchise that had never before missed three consecutive postseasons is now on its sixth sub-.500 season and counting.

In Boston, they made the unimaginably cold and shrewd business move. It seemed like no two players had ever played for their basketball team with the same type of emotional fervor that Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett brought to the Celtics. And yet they were shipped out of town, off to a doomed quick-building project with the Brooklyn Nets. The vast draft resources the Celtics received in the deal allowed them to almost immediately start planting the seeds that would grow into the next contender in Boston. The team only dipped out of the playoffs for a single year before making the postseason for five years in a row, with a young roster that’s capable of hitting the next five as well.

The Minnesota Lynx have not yet hit that critical fork-in-the-road moment that the Lakers and Celtics experienced in 2012 or 2013. In a way, Maya Moore’s decision to sit out the 2019 WNBA season has delayed that difficult moment. But you can see it coming up: will there be a moment when the Lynx receive an incredible offer to move on from 35-year-old Seimone Augustus, or 33-year-old Sylvia Fowles? Or have these players earned the right to be members of the Lynx for as long as they’d like? Is getting any additional value in future drafts really worth it, compared to the warm retirement send-off the team was able to give Lindsay Whalen and Rebekkah Brunson last season? It’s something rare and wonderful for such a deep bond to develop between player and franchise that it would be difficult, or maybe inconceivable, to trade them. It’s an emotionally loaded question, and there’s no way to logically sort it out — but the wrong move can still have repercussions years down the line.