A near-90% favorite that’s missing its franchise player for the entire season so far. Sit with that for a second, because it’s the whole story tonight. Minnesota is our No. 2 Elo team in the WNBA, 19-6, winners of two straight — and Napheesa Collier, the reigning MVP runner-up, still hasn’t played a minute of it. She’s rehabbing from surgery on both ankles. The Lynx also lost forward Emma Cechova to a non-contact injury in a recent win over Dallas serious enough that she needed help off the floor; she’s still waiting on a diagnosis timeline after an MRI. That’s two rotation pieces down on a team our model still rates as one of the best in the league. Meanwhile Phoenix walks in on a three-game skid that bottomed out Saturday in a 106-58 wipeout at Las Vegas — one of the largest margins of defeat in WNBA history, per Burn City Sports and Yardbarker’s recap of that game. A depleted contender hosting a team in free fall. That’s how you get a 91% number.
What The Call sees
The Call has Minnesota at 90.8%, a strong-confidence pick and the widest gap on our WNBA board this week. The Elo spread is the reason: Lynx 1706, Mercury 1388 — a 318-point separation, nearly double the gap in most lopsided games we’ve flagged this month. Form backs it up on both sides. Minnesota’s 7-3 over its last ten with the streak still running; Phoenix is 4-6 with the streak running the other way. Add a full cross-country trip for the Mercury — over 2,000 kilometers from Phoenix to Minneapolis with a two-hour time-zone jump — landing them in a building where the home team hasn’t needed its best player to win. When the talent gap, the form gap, and the travel gap all point the same direction, that’s how a number gets to 91.
What could break the pick
The obvious lever is Collier. She returned to full Lynx practices July 1, and per ESPN, coach Cheryl Reeve says she’s “obviously getting really close” — but Minnesota hasn’t attached a game date to that yet, and this preview goes up before Monday’s tip, so treat any in-game debut as a live possibility, not a lock. If she suits up, the number undersells Minnesota. If she doesn’t, the Lynx have been beating people without her all year, so it barely moves the needle either way.
The counterargument for Phoenix is thin, but it’s there. Sami Whitcomb is day-to-day after just 11 minutes in her season debut and could get another game off for injury management — Natasha Mack is already out, and guard Jovana Nogic is done for the year after her contract was suspended in June while she plays overseas in Russia, so the Mercury bench is already short. A 9-16 team playing its fourth game in what’s shaping up as a road-heavy stretch, against a two-seed at home, is exactly the setup where blowouts like Saturday’s happen again. There isn’t a real path to an upset here so much as a path to Phoenix simply not embarrassing itself.
The trip
If you’re catching this one in person, Target Center makes it easy: it sits inside downtown Minneapolis on the skyway system, so a hotel-to-arena walk can stay indoors even in a July storm. Mercury fans making the trip are rare enough on a Monday night that you won’t need to fight for a seat at the sports bars near the arena beforehand. Full neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown, parking reality, and getting-there options are in our Target Center guide.
