By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
The injury that put Lexi Held’s first season in the WNBA on hold five weeks ago made her appreciate being on a team that has been supportive during her painstaking recovery.
When the Phoenix Mercury resumed practice Monday after the WNBA All-Star Game, the Cooper High School graduate expressed her gratitude during an interview with Desert Wave Media that was posted online.
“If anything, it made me more grateful to be here because you really see an organization’s true colors when you’re hurt because you can’t be super useful to them in the moment when you’re not playing,” Held said.
“You really get to get a good idea of who they are and what they really are about, and nothing changed with the people here regarding how they treated me and how they viewed me. It was all the same as when I was playing my best.”
Held, 25, got off to an impressive start as an undrafted WNBA rookie after playing women’s professional basketball overseas. The 5-foot-10 guard was a double-figure scorer in five of the Mercury’s first seven games in June. In one of those games, she netted a season-high 24 points, the most by a rookie player at that point in the 2025 WNBA season.
Held was averaging 8.7 points, 1.7 rebounds, 1.5 steals and 1.4 assists off the bench for Phoenix when she suffered a partially collapsed lung in a collision with another player during an away game against the New York Liberty on June 19.
She had to return to Phoenix by train with a team physical therapist because doctors didn’t want her injured lung subjected to changing air pressure and high altitude in an airplane. She said it took several weeks for the pain to subside and she recently resumed training.
“We started pretty gradual about a week and a half, two weeks ago,” she said in the online interview. “I just started really slow, monitoring everything, and then we got to ramp it up the last couple days and it feels good, I feel really good physically so I’m super excited.”
Held is not expected to play Wednesday when Phoenix starts the second half of its schedule at home against the Atlanta Dream. That will be the eighth consecutive game she has missed.
Despite injuries to Held and some of her teammates, Phoenix has the third-best record in the WNBA at 15-7 and is second in the Western Conference standings behind Minnesota (20-4).
The Mercury have a game against the Indiana Fever on July 30 in Indianapolis. If Held is back in action by then, it would give her family and friends in Northern Kentucky a chance to see her play in a WNBA venue that’s not too far from home.
When Phoenix visits the Chicago Sky on Aug. 3, Held would be a draw for DePaul University fans in that city. She started 89 consecutive games over three seasons for the Blue Demons. Those teams compiled a 64-26 record with her in the lineup.
A 2018 graduate of Cooper High School, Held scored more than 2,430 points during her varsity career and finished her senior season with the state’s second highest scoring average at 28.3 points per game.