PHOENIX \u2014\u00a0Now they were just showing off, treating the crowd to an encore. Jackie Young zigged and zagged to the rim. Chelsea Gray\u2019s 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\u2019ja Wilson slid across the paint to block DeWanna Bonner. The ball spun in the air and fell on Bonner\u2019s head. Through it all, the Las Vegas Aces led, and led, and led, and led.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No team dreams of guarding A\u2019ja Wilson, but for the undersized Mercury, she proved a recurring nightmare. Phoenix\u2019s defense, its heavy ball pressure with high pickup points, couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u201cThat\u2019s fucking terrible,\u201d and then stepped forward to say \u201cThat\u2019s fucking terrible\u201d 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\u2019s already over.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cA lot of people counted us out. A lot of people counted us out from jump,\u201d 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: \u201cWe had our names, our good names slandered.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n