PHOENIX — Now they were just showing off, treating the crowd to an encore. Jackie Young zigged and zagged to the rim. Chelsea Gray’s strange-looking heaves swished in. NaLyssa Smith pulled down all the right boards. Jewell Loyd popped into open threes from screens. The universe can sometimes be indelicate with its symbolism: A’ja Wilson slid across the paint to block DeWanna Bonner. The ball spun in the air and fell on Bonner’s head. Through it all, the Las Vegas Aces led, and led, and led, and led.
With a 97-86 Game 4 win over the Mercury in Phoenix on Friday night, the Aces won their third WNBA championship in four years to finish a Finals sweep and an unthinkable in-season turnaround. After beginning the regular season 14-14, they finished it on a 16-game win streak. Including the postseason, they won 25 of their last 28 games.
No team dreams of guarding A’ja Wilson, but for the undersized Mercury, she proved a recurring nightmare. Phoenix’s defense, its heavy ball pressure with high pickup points, couldn’t crack an offense run through a transcendent post player and her cast of stone-cold killers. (Fittingly, the Finals MVP spent the finale taking 19 free throws.) One team’s central problem so clear and uncorrectable, the series was coated in a kind of helplessness; you were just watching the same cruelty unfold over and over. Phoenix began to emotionally unravel early in the series, and by the end, the unraveling got more corporeal. Satou Sabally missed Game 4 with a concussion. Late in the third quarter, head coach Nate Tibbetts was assessed a double technical foul and ejected. (Per the officiating pool report, the double techs were because he told a ref “That’s fucking terrible,” and then stepped forward to say “That’s fucking terrible” again.) Alyssa Thomas briefly left with a busted shoulder. The late-game Mercury rally happened, as per usual, courtesy of Kahleah Copper whirling downhill. But by the third time around, the shtick gets less convincing. We know how this ends. The show’s already over.
The last time the Aces won a championship, in 2023, after a gutsy Game 4 in New York, the whole team piled into the press conference room with a lot to say. To them, it was Aces vs. everyone; as they celebrated, they brought up the voter who put Wilson fourth on the MVP ballot that year. “A lot of people counted us out. A lot of people counted us out from jump,” Wilson said, though the team had the top playoff seed and was the betting favorite to win. The Aces locked in, Becky Hammon said, after the world made them out to be villains: “We had our names, our good names slandered.” They would not be the first athletes to inflate and mine perceived slights for fuel. But it felt, frankly, a little mean-spirited, or at least disillusioning. Why were champions so obsessed with what other people think?
This title was occasion for crowing. Nobody believed in them. I certainly didn’t. That disbelief survived deep into the postseason, even after the winning streak. To get to the Finals, the Aces had eked out an overtime win against a team whose star’s skeletal muscle dissolved mid-game. They were a missed Gabby Williams putback from being knocked out in the round before that. Battle-tested by the Lynx and Liberty, the Mercury seemed capable of anything.
And yet, there was no crowing from the Aces on Friday night. In the tunnels and in the press room, the mood was subdued but for the pink tambourine in Wilson’s hand and a cameo from owner Mark Davis. He snacked on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as he lolled into the room. If the Aces were trying to prove something this year, it was not to the haters and doubters, but to themselves and to each other. The team was broken, so they came together to fix it. They knew they could be better, and they were.
Teams with scuffling talent are said to “flip the switch,” but the metaphor belies the work. As the Aces leaned into small ball, Chelsea Gray had to get comfortable guarding up the lineup. “I’ve watched a ton of post film, the most post film I’ve watched in my career this year,” she said at practice earlier this week. “Sometimes you’re called to do something that you haven’t done or that’s a little bit different.” Jewell Loyd, accustomed to taking 20 shots a night in Seattle, instead became a steely bench piece with a couple dozen big hustle plays to her name. Though Hammon’s defensive philosophy has left the Aces dead last or close to it in offensive rebounding rate, her team clutched up on the offensive glass in this series. To confuse the Mercury offense, she experimented with zones and junk, always trying to add a new wrinkle. “There was probably a lot more adversity than any of us anticipated, and at the end of the day, we’re all human,” Hammon said. “But we’re humans that wanted to get it right and get it right together.” If this destination is now a familiar place for the pillars of the Aces dynasty, there can still be some thrill in the journey.
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