Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wilson is in a class by herself after winning the WNBA MVP award for an unprecedented fourth time.
The league announced the honor for the 2025 season Sunday.
The 6-foot-4 former University of South Carolina star was honored as the unanimous choice last season, as well as in 2022 and 2020. Lauren Jackson, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes all won the award three times.
“It’s not going to hit me until the end of the season, honestly; it is truly a blessing to be where I am. I don’t think I could ever put into words how special this moment is,” Wilson said hours before second-seeded Las Vegas lost Game 1 of its best-of-five WNBA semifinals series to the sixth-seeded Indiana Fever. “My name is in the history books forever.”
Wilson and former Houston Comets star Cynthia Cooper are the only players to win the award unanimously. Cooper was the only other player to win it in consecutive years, doing so in the first two seasons of the WNBA (1997, 98).
The 29-year-old Wilson, who was the No. 1 pick of the 2018 draft and that season’s rookie of the year, again led the league in scoring (23.4 points per game) as well as blocked shots (2.3) and helped the Aces win their last 16 regular-season games as they surged into the postseason. For the second consecutive year, Wilson averaged at least 20 points, 10 rebounds, two assists, two blocks and a steal per game. She is the only WNBA player to reach these averages in a season while playing at least 15 games.
“The fact she’s not even 30 yet is crazy,” Las Vegas coach Becky Hammon said. “She still has a lot left in the tank. There’s still areas that she knows she can improve in, and she will. Every year she’s coming back and adding something different to her game. Everyone talks about the Mount Rushmore of basketball faces. … There’s no Mount Rushmore, you’re the only one, you’re Everest.”
The league surprised Wilson on Friday, with WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert and Wilson’s boyfriend, three-time NBA All-Star selection Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat, presenting the trophy to her at the end of practice.
“It hasn’t been easy for us, they counted us out,” an emotional Wilson said to her teammates after receiving the award. “They wrote us all off, but we showed up every single day. We worked our asses off. … It has my name on it, but it’s all of us.”
Wilson also was honored as the league’s co-defensive player of the year — she shared the honor, which was announced last week with Alanna Smith of the Minnesota Lynx — as she received that award for the third time in four seasons.
Minnesota forward Napheesa Collier (534 points) finished as the runner-up for MVP for the second consecutive season. She received 18 first-place votes. Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas was third (291 points) and garnered the other three top votes. Atlanta Dream guard Allisha Gray (180) and Indiana Fever guard Kelsey Mitchell (93 points) rounded out the top five vote recipients.
Players were awarded 10 points for a first-place vote, seven points for a second-place vote, five points for a third-place vote, three points for a fourth-place vote and one point for a fifth-place vote.
Wilson was honored as the AP player of the year earlier this month.