Olivia Miles is the best rookie in the WNBA right now, and the most disorienting part is that Minnesota hasn’t even needed their best player yet.
The Lynx are 13-4, the best record in the league, while Napheesa Collier has not played a minute of the 2026 season. Two offseason ankle surgeries. Last year’s MVP runner-up. 22.9 PPG. Sitting. Per Yahoo Sports, Olivia Miles is averaging 18.5 PPG, 5.6 APG, and 4.9 RPG as the No. 2 overall pick, and she has carried a championship-caliber team through its first quarter of the season without the player the team was actually built around.
Two records in the span of a week. Against the Golden State Valkyries, Miles went 8-for-11 from three, setting a new WNBA rookie record with 8 made threes in a single game, surpassing the mark held by Caitlin Clark, Crystal Robinson, Elena Baranova, and Cynthia Cooper. She finished with 28 points, 7 assists, 4 rebounds, and 3 blocks in an 87-84 win. The WNBA’s own account kept it brief:
https://x.com/WNBA/status/2062727847509196898
Six days later against the LA Sparks, Miles scored 24 first-half points on 10-of-11 shooting, breaking another rookie record for most points in a single half. She finished 12-for-15, totaling 31 in a 99-83 blowout.
I’ve covered enough of this league to know that rookie seasons like this don’t arrive quietly. They announce themselves in fragments, and then you look up and realize the ceiling you were tracking has become someone else’s floor. That’s what is happening in Minnesota right now.
The context makes it stranger. Miles was 2-for-18 from three through her first nine games. The record-breaking night didn’t come from a shooter locked in from day one. It came from a player adjusting, recalibrating, and then erupting. She’s the fourth player in WNBA history to average 15 or more points, 5 or more rebounds, and 5 or more assists through her first six games. A lot of players have posted those early numbers. Very few built on them.
Minnesota is not a team in a rebuild. The roster around Collier was already one of the best in the league. What the coverage of Olivia Miles in the WNBA has failed to account for, consistently, is how much the league’s competitive floor has risen. Miles isn’t an outlier in a weak era. She’s a generational player in a league where the rookies are arriving better than they ever have, on a team that hasn’t needed its franchise cornerstone to win 13 of its first 17 games.
The question isn’t whether Miles is a star. It’s what happens to this team in August when Collier walks back through the door.
The Lynx haven’t even started yet.
