On Friday night, the Minnesota Lynx were without Napheesa Collier, the current MVP frontrunner. She showed up on the injury report Friday morning with a knee issue and ultimately didn't play in the game against the Phoenix Mercury.
Considering Phoenix is one of the WNBA's top teams and Collier might be the league's best player at the moment, her absence seemed like it might doom the team's undefeated start to the 2025 season.
But then the ball tipped, and Minnesota did what it's been doing all year: it took care of business.
Maybe it wasn't quite as easy as it could have been as the Lynx played their first one-possession game of the season, winning 74-71, but the fact that the team managed to get the W with Collier sidelined really shows why this team is a contender.
The Lynx have the WNBA's best depth situation
One big reason Minnesota won on Friday night was that the team has a great supply of talent to make up for Collier's absence.
Kayla McBride — who was absent to start the season for personal reasons — scored 20 points. The frontcourt of Jessica Shepard and Alanna Smith combined for 27 points and 14 rebounds, with Smith blocking four shots.
Courtney Williams had a rough shooting night, connecting on just 27.8 percent of her attempts, but she can be a high-volume shooter when she needs to be.
Natisha Hiedeman provides a nice scoring punch off the bench, while Karlie Samuelson and Bridget Carleton both offer the team solid wing shooting, though both have been a little off at times this year.
But the right players have stepped up at the right times. That's part of what makes the Lynx so good, which is that they have a number of players who can take the mantle if Collier is off the floor or injured. Even Alissa Pili and Diamond Miller — two players buried on the bench — could probably be rotation pieces somewhere else in the league.
Are the Lynx title favorites?
Minnesota is the league's deepest team. It's got the most likely MVP winner at this point in Collier. But are the Lynx the No. 1 title favorite in the WNBA?
Not quite.
It's not Minnesota's fault, but the New York Liberty have the league's best starting unit with Jonquel Jones, Breanna Stewart, Leonie Fiebich, Sabrina Ionescu and Natasha Cloud. The depth might be a little more of a question there, but that starting until is loaded, and it edges the Liberty ahead by a nose.
But these two teams are a step above everyone else in the league. And because they don't play until July 30, there's a long time for the matchup between the teams to be hyped up, for discussions in the abstract about which is better to emerge.
Hopefully those games late in the year live up to the hype, especially in August, when Minnesota plays three consecutive games against the Liberty. (New York has two games sandwiched in between in that stretch.)