A’ja Wilson and the Las Vegas Aces are in rarefied air.
The franchise won its third WNBA championship in four seasons Friday night, when the second-seeded Aces completed a sweep of the fourth-seeded Phoenix in the first WNBA Finals with a best-of-seven format. Only Houston has done better over a four-season span, winning the first four titles in league history from 1997 to 2000.
The 6-foot-4 Wilson was a huge reason why the Aces were champions again after falling in the semifinals last season to the New York Liberty, who went on to beat the Minnesota Lynx in five games and earn their first league title despite being one of the WNBA’s founding franchises.
Wilson is now the first player to win the league’s regular-season MVP, defensive player of the year and WNBA Finals MVP awards in the same season. The 29-year-old forward was the best player on the court this year — again — and is already in the conversation for the greatest in league history.
The No. 1 pick of the 2018 draft after being a three-time All-American at South Carolina, where she helped the Gamecocks win the 2017 NCAA Division I women’s basketball tournament title, she is a four-time league MVP, three-time defensive player of the year and two-time WNBA Finals MVP. Wilson averaged 28.5 points, 11.8 rebounds and two blocks in the title series.
“You have your Mount Rushmore; she’s alone on Everest,” Aces fourth-year head coach Becky Hammon said. “There’s no one around.”
Whether Las Vegas can keep its run going depends a lot on how negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players go. Most of the players who were on the Las Vegas roster this season, like a majority of players in the league, are about to be free agents.
The team could look very different next season if players decide to go elsewhere, but f Wilson, Chelsea Gray, Jewell Loyd and Jackie Young decide to stay, there could be more success in store for the Aces. With a fourth title, Las Vegas would match the Comets — who folded after the 2008 season — the Lynx and the Seattle Storm for the most in league history.
“Vegas is the standard. We’re here for a reason. Took a little bit to get here,” said Young, who was selected by the Aces with the No. 1 pick of the 2019 draft. “Proud to put on a Aces uniform every night.”
This was the 11th sweep in the WNBA Finals, not counting the inaugural season that used a single-game championship format. It was a best-of-three series from 1998 to 2004 — there were three sweeps in that stretch — before switching to a best-of-five format the following year.
Still, this might have been the most difficult of the franchise’s championships despite Las Vegas sweeping the title series. The Aces had a 14-14 record in early August and were coming off a 53-point loss to the Lynx, who set the WNBA record for margin of victory on the road. That defeat could have torn the team apart, but instead it grew closer, and Las Vegas didn’t lose a game during the rest of the regular season, winning 16 straight. Including the playoffs, the Aces went 25-3 after that loss.
“This team has been through hell and back,” Gray said. “What a run!”
The team was pushed to the brink in the first two rounds of the playoffs. The Aces needed a late putback basket by Young in the decisive Game 3 to advance past the seventh-seeded Storm, then an overtime victory over the sixth-seeded Indiana Fever in the decisive Game 5 of the semifinals.
“This one hits different because it was different,” said Hammon, who is 10-2 in the WNBA Finals. “There was a lot more adversity then any of us anticipated. At the end of day, we’re all humans. We wanted to get it right and get it right together.”
Even the title series was a bit more competitive than the sweep would indicate as Phoenix had a chance in Game 1, missing two late free throws. Wilson hit a winner with three-tenths of a second left in Game 3.
Now the WNBA and the Aces go into an offseason of uncertainty, with CBA negotiations the major topic of conversation.