{"id":334687,"date":"2025-12-09T14:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T14:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/334687\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T14:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T14:16:10","slug":"aja-wilson-athlete-of-the-year-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/334687\/","title":{"rendered":"A\u2019ja Wilson: Athlete of the Year 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"rich-text mb-6 self-baseline font-graphik text-body-large text-black-coffee focus-visible:outline focus-visible:outline-black-coffee focus-visible:outline-2 focus-visible:outline-offset-2 focus-visible:shadow-focus-color text-left\" data-testid=\"paragraph-content\">Covering Wilson\u2019s left hand is the golden gauntlet worn by Thanos, the Marvel supervillain. Under each of the six Infinity Stones that control the universe, Wilson, the 6-ft., 4-in. superstar, has written one of her season\u2019s honors: Scoring title, her second; 5K\u2014in June she became the fastest player in WNBA history to reach the 5,000-point milestone; DPOY, for defensive player of the year, her third; MVP, her record fourth; Finals MVP, her second; and Champ, her third. She\u2019s the first player, in WNBA or NBA history, to win a championship and be named Finals MVP, league MVP, and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season. And she\u2019s one of just four players in either league to win four MVP trophies before the age of 30, the others being Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/athlete-of-the-year-2020-lebron-james\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">LeBron James<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m waiting on them to call for the Academy Award and the Emmy,\u201d quips her father Roscoe.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rich-text self-baseline font-graphik text-body-large text-black-coffee mb-0 focus-visible:outline focus-visible:outline-black-coffee focus-visible:outline-2 focus-visible:outline-offset-2 focus-visible:shadow-focus-color text-left\" data-testid=\"paragraph-content\">\u201cWhen you\u2019ve collected everything, that\u2019s Thanos,\u201d says Wilson, 29, during an interview in a New York City hotel room, about a month after the parade. \u201cAnd this year, I collected everything. I don\u2019t really talk much sh-t. I mean crap. I kind of let my game do it. This was my biggest moment of doing it, because no one\u2019s ever done what I\u2019ve done. And I think people really needed to understand that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Covering Wilson\u2019s left hand is the golden gauntlet worn by Thanos, the Marvel supervillain. Under each of the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[461,49,48,147163,43606,82,630],"class_list":["post-334687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-basketball","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-person-of-the-year","tag-sponsorshipblock","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}