Lynx vs. Storm: Natasha Howard's Season-High 27 Fuels Minnesota's Seventh Straight Win, 88-68

For one quarter, Seattle looked like the team on the winning streak. Then Natasha Howard started finishing everything around the rim, Olivia Miles started running the show, and the Minnesota Lynx reminded everybody at Target Center why nobody has beaten them since May 17.

Minnesota's 88-68 win over the Seattle Storm on Saturday was its seventh in a row. Howard made 12 of her 16 shots on the way to a season-high 27, Miles added 19 points, six rebounds and six assists, and a Storm team that led by 12 early ended up coughing the ball up 21 times and losing its fifth straight.

Seattle's Best Moment Came Way Too Early

The Storm came out firing. They took a 24-16 lead after one, pushed their advantage as high as 12, and for a little while it looked like Minnesota might have to work for this on a quick turnaround after playing Thursday. The Lynx needed barely more than a minute to fix it. Between the 8:38 and 7:26 marks of the second quarter, they scored nine straight to erase a 27-18 hole and tie the game.

From there it was a tight half. Nia Brodie's 3 with 3:09 left before the break made it 39-38, and Minnesota would not trail again. The Lynx took a 45-43 lead into the locker room having won the second quarter 29-19, and anyone who had watched this team lately had a pretty good idea what was coming next.

What came next was ugly. Seattle scored 10 points in the entire third quarter while Minnesota dropped 26. It was 71-53 going to the fourth, the lead grew to as many as 21, and Howard's layup off a Courtney Williams feed with 4:53 left made it 82-62. The rest was time for the reserves to pad their lines.

Howard Would Like a Word With the Paint

Howard's day was brutally simple. She took 16 shots, only one of them a 3, and made 12. She grabbed four offensive rebounds out of her five total, had three steals and two blocks, and finished plus-22, the best number in the game. Her 27 topped the 26 she had already posted twice this season, at Dallas on May 14 and at Chicago on May 23, and Seattle never found an answer for her.

Miles was the other engine. She shot 9-of-14, played a team-high 33 minutes, turned it over just once and kept Minnesota's offense organized through every run. Watching her and Howard work together was like watching a very good magic trick after someone tells you how it is done: you know exactly what is coming, and it still gets you.

Courtney Williams finished with 11 points, seven assists, five rebounds and two steals, and Kayla McBride also scored 11 despite a 3-of-12 shooting day. Brodie might have had the most Minnesota line of all, with six points, eight rebounds, five assists, three steals and two blocks in 27 minutes. That is an entire scouting report's worth of problems coming from one player whose scoring line you would otherwise skip right past.

Natisha Hiedeman and Jade Melbourne each scored 14 to pace Seattle, with Hiedeman adding five assists and three steals and Melbourne going a perfect 5-of-5 at the line off the bench. Flau'jae Johnson scored 10 but needed 15 shots to do it. The one genuinely nice development for the Storm was Dominique Malonga, who came back from an eight-game absence in the concussion protocol and scored seven in 14 minutes.

The Third-Quarter Avalanche

If you want the exact moment this went from a game to a Lynx highlight reel, it came straight out of halftime. Minnesota led by two with 9:18 left in the third. Less than three minutes later it led by 12, thanks to a 10-0 run built on two Howard layups and 3s from Brodie and Maya Caldwell.

That run mattered for more than the score. It came against a Seattle team that had just spent a full half proving it could hang, and it flipped the whole personality of the game. The Storm started pressing, the turnovers kept coming, and their offense turned into a series of hopeful looks from the perimeter. Seattle took 36 of its 63 shots from 3, and that is what a team does when it can no longer get anything near the basket. The margin never fell below nine again.

Stats That Matter

• 50-20: Minnesota's edge in paint points, the most lopsided number on the sheet.
• 25-14: Lynx advantage in points off turnovers.
• 21: Seattle's turnovers, a season high for the Storm.
• 13-7: The steals battle, with Minnesota's 13 tying its season high. Howard and Brodie each had three.
• 27-16: Assists, a fair summary of which offense was moving and which was scrambling.

Where Everybody Stands

Minnesota is now 9-2 and 4-2 at home, and the streak deserves a closer look. Six of the seven wins have come by double figures. The lone exception was an 87-84 escape against Golden State on Thursday, so Saturday's result was a useful reminder that the close one was the outlier. The Lynx host Dallas on Tuesday, and the Wings will arrive on a four-game winning streak of their own at 7-3.

Seattle drops to 3-9 and 1-5 on the road. The Storm have not won since beating Washington 97-85 on May 24, and the schedule offers no sympathy, with a Monday game at Las Vegas up next. There is real talent on this roster, and Malonga's return should help. But a team cannot give away 21 possessions against anybody in this league and expect to stay close, and against this particular Minnesota group, it cannot even expect to stay interested.

The Crew Already Knows Where the Cameras Are

Winning streaks usually carry some drama, a wild finish here, a late escape there. This Lynx run mostly feels like a heist movie in the part where the crew has already cased the building, knows where every camera sits and is just walking the plan through in nice suits. Seattle got a fun first quarter out of it, about what the casino gets in the opening act. By the end, Howard had 27, Miles had the keys and Minnesota had added another win to a pile that keeps getting harder to ignore.

Stats from the official box score via ESPN. Game details as reported by the Associated Press.