Is A'ja Wilson About to Rain on Napheesa Collier's MVP Parade? (Again?)
Or maybe the better question is: *Should* she?
With just about 2 weeks remaining in the WNBA’s regular-season schedule, there’s still plenty left to be settled, including the final playoff spot — Valkyries or Sparks?1 — a bunch of seeding below the Minnesota Lynx (who’ll almost certainly be No. 1), the status of some big names recovering from injury and, of course, the awards races.
Some of the hardware is all but handed out already. Paige Bueckers, for instance, has a 95 percent chance to win Rookie of the Year according to Polymarket’s odds, thanks to her “great player on a bad team” performance that I wrote about last week. But one race that seemed settled not too long ago — yet has now become un-settled — is the MVP battle between presumptive favorite Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx and defending winner A'ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces.
Here’s the evolution of the Polymarket implied probabilities for various major candidates as the season has gone on:
We can see that Collier’s odds were at a season-high 85 percent on August 4, while Wilson’s sat down under 7 percent. The market basically viewed the race as all but over — more than five full weeks before the season ended.
It made sense: On the one hand, Collier had achieved that very familiar basketball-MVP formula of “best player on the best team”, leading the Lynx’s league-best record while topping the league in my various value metrics (including Estimated RAPTOR and Consensus Wins) for the majority of the season’s first two-and-a-half months. And while Wilson maintained her usual statistical excellence, Vegas’ underwhelming performance as a team hampered her bid.
Following their ugly 111-58 loss to Minnesota (of all teams) on August 2, it was the first time since 2018 that the Aces had dipped below a 15002 Elo rating this late in a season — and the first time they’d been so low since 2019 at all. Voters often downgrade players whose teams fall short of expectations, so Wilson looked like she’d ceded the race at that point.
But the ankle injury Collier suffered during that blowout win, while her team was leading by 43 points, re-opened the door some — if anyone wanted to crash the MVP party, that is.
Collier ended up missing 22 days before returning to game action last Sunday, a time period that coincided with a couple of counter-bids. Phoenix Mercury F Alyssa Thomas, herself a perennial MVP hopeful,3 rose to as high as 30 percent in the Polymarket odds after a series of triple-doubles. And Wilson kept producing, with the timing of Collier’s absence coinciding perfectly with Wilson’s hottest stretch of the season.
In what has been an absolutely monster month of August, Wilson is averaging 25.5 PPG, 11.8 RPG, 2.4 APG, .498/.476/.871 shooting splits and a league-high average Game Score of 22.4 — a real upgrade on her 19.7 mark heading into the month. Along the way, she has seven 30+ point games in her past 14 outings, plus two more games with 25+ points. This was the run of MVP-level dominance Wilson needed, at exactly the moment when Collier was sidelined.
And the Aces have responded with the pride of a champion over the same span. After that 53-point drubbing at the hands of the Lynx, Las Vegas has won 12 consecutive games and played themselves back into a likely Top-3 seed in the playoffs. In the past three-and-a-half weeks, they’ve tacked 118 points onto their Elo rating with Wilson’s torrid run leading the way:
Because of this, Wilson now actually leads Collier in Estimated RAPTOR wins added, 9.6 to 7.7, on the 2025 WNBA season. If that holds, it would be the second straight year she was RAPTOR’s MVP, following last year’s No. 1 showing — which presaged her eventual official MVP win. And it’s not just one metric; Wilson also now outpaces Collier in Consensus Wins, which blends estimates of value added via RAPTOR, Player Efficiency Rating (PER) and Win Shares (WS) — each of which favors Wilson in terms of aggregate value:
Some of that is because Wilson has played nearly 250 more minutes than Collier, though that should surely factor into MVP discussions as well. (Aside from a concussion that cost her a few games in June and a 1-game absence with a wrist injury in July, Wilson has stayed as durable as ever.) But even on a per-minute or per-play basis, it’s not clear that Wilson isn’t still the league’s best all-around player. Take a look at the tale of the tape between the pair in the advanced metrics:
Collier certainly retains an edge in plenty of important categories, and on a per-minute basis she may indeed deserve a slight edge over Wilson. But Wilson has Collier beat in just as many areas (more, actually) before we even account for the former’s advantage in sheer playing time. Even in the best season of Collier’s career, up against what many have seen as a down year for Wilson, she still may not measure up.
But that’s also part of why the all-important narrative favors Collier this year. Collier has always finished behind Wilson in MVP voting (2020, 2023, 2024), including ranking exactly one slot behind her in each of the past two seasons. This season was supposed to be hers, with a career-best performance leading the best team, and the dual possibility of a title/MVP combo — something only Wilson has done in the past five seasons.
Collier would also be a new face for the award after repeat winners took each of the previous three MVPs, and she would represent the story of a player who has improved her game continuously. From not even being the highest-drafted UConn player in her class, to winning Rookie of the Year anyway, then leveling up from Defensive Player of the Year to potentially being the Most Valuable Player and finally breaking out of Wilson’s shadow, Collier is everything voters tend to love.
But is “it’s finally her year” — an inverted spin on the NBA’s familiar voter-fatigue concept — really the best MVP argument? Or beyond that, is it about being the best player in the league (Wilson) or the best player on the league’s best team (Collier)?
In Wilson’s case, she dragged a struggling Aces team back into contention: While their playoff probability had dipped as low as 81 percent by early August, now they’re title contenders again. With Collier, she delivered wire-to-wire dominance, leading her team to the league’s best record. And in fact, maybe the way the Lynx slowed some when Collier was hurt merely proves how valuable she truly is to their efforts.4
The pro-Collier argument seems to be winning as we approach the MVP race’s finish line. Even after the injury, Wilson’s surge and everything else, Collier is still the betting favorite, with a 76 percent chance in Polymarket’s current odds. But Wilson isn’t exactly going away. There she is, looming again, trying to snatch the MVP moment away from Collier — just like every other time she has gotten close in the past.
Collier has the team, and the narrative. Wilson has the numbers. And although it seemed wrapped up earlier in the year, this fight still isn’t quite over yet.
Filed under: WNBA
Or the Mystics, I guess, who had a 0.5% chance on Thursday afternoon.
Or roughly league-average. (The low initial rating I had to give the expansion Valkyries complicates that some, but it should work out with time after this cycle of expansion teams gets settled in.)
She’s finished Top 5 in the voting each of the past three seasons.
Thursday’s disappointing home loss to the Storm with her playing 35 minutes notwithstanding.