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Source: Ali Gradischer \/ Getty<\/p>\nSource: Ali Gradischer \/ Getty<\/p>\n
Thirty seasons in, the WNBA still has no face on its logo, and A\u2019ja Wilson<\/a>\u2019s four MVPs, three championships, and a successful business empire make her the most obvious choice.<\/p>\n As the WNBA continues to celebrate its 30th season, the league looks almost unrecognizable from the one that tipped off for the first time last century.\u00a0A landmark collective bargaining agreement has delivered the highest salaries<\/a>\u00a0in league history.\u00a0Media deals with Amazon, NBC, and ESPN<\/a>\u00a0have brought the game to new audiences and on a scale unimaginable even half a decade ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n RELATED CONTENT: Caitlin Clark\u2019s Cult Is Unraveling & Now The World Sees What Black Women Peeped From Jump: White Mediocrity [Op-Ed]<\/a><\/p>\n Expansion teams are landing in parts of the country\u00a0<\/a>that have competed aggressively for the right to bring women\u2019s basketball to their cities. By nearly every available measure, the league is entering a new renaissance.\u00a0<\/p>\n The one area where the WNBA hasn\u2019t quite kept pace with its own growth is its logo, which still features an anonymous silhouette.\u00a0<\/p>\n A logo is a company\u2019s clearest visual declaration of what it believes represents its identity, chosen around the figure or symbol that communicates those values without requiring explanation.\u00a0<\/p>\n A woman without a name or a face increasingly feels like a placeholder from an era where the league itself was still figuring out its identity and finding its footing in a sports ecosystem that was fine to malign women\u2019s basketball, if not ignore it altogether.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The WNBA now has an opportunity to replace the anonymous figure that served it well as it was building its voice with the silhouette of a player that represents the best of who it\u2019s been and the clearest sign of who it\u2019s becoming.\u00a0<\/p>\n That player is A\u2019ja Wilson.\u00a0<\/p>\n She has become the answer the WNBA has been building toward for thirty seasons, the choice that makes every other name on the table look like a hedge.<\/p>\n Four MVP awards, more than any woman in WNBA history.<\/a>\u00a0Two-time Olympian. Three championships. Two Finals MVP honors. In 2025, Wilson won the MVP, the scoring title, a championship, Finals MVP and Defensive Player of the year all in the same season, a\u00a0sweep no player in WNBA or NBA history<\/a>\u00a0had ever managed\u00a0before her<\/a>.<\/p>\n She holds the record for the most 30-point games in a single postseason<\/a>, a mark she set, broke, and then reset again.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then there is her natural form. At 6-foot-4, Wilson moves with an ease that makes clear how dogged the work behind it has been; hours spent mastering footwork, approaching a shot from every angle, anticipating how she\u2019ll be defended before the ball arrives in her hands.\u00a0<\/p>\n She\u2019s fluid through her cuts, graceful in the post, statuesque the moment she plants her feet and then again when she rises towards the basket.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In Game 3 of the 2025 playoffs, with seconds winding down on the game clock,\u00a0Wilson rose over Phoenix Mercury stars Alyssa Thomas and DeWanna Bonner<\/a>, her body fully extended above both of them at the peak of the jump, for a shot that stopped time. It was a moment so geometrically perfect that it was easy to imagine, before the ball finished falling through the net, that a\u00a0still image\u00a0<\/a>of that moment was sure to go viral.\u00a0<\/p>\n That picture of Wilson clinching the victory for her team<\/a>\u00a0with that shot has become so iconic that if we were living in the nineties right now, a poster version would have ended up taped to bedroom walls all across America next to the iconic poster of Michael Jordan soaring towards the basket from the free throw line.\u00a0<\/p>\n That iconic moment exemplifies all that makes Wilson\u2019s game and form visually distinctive and a draw even to people who have never watched a WNBA game. It\u2019s the exact response the WNBA\u2019s logo should be eliciting at a glance.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s also the same instinct that produced the NBA\u2019s logo in the first place: a designer recognizing one player\u2019s defining image instead of inventing a generic one from scratch.<\/p>\n In 1969,\u00a0Alan Siegel, after being handed the seemingly impossible task of designing the NBA\u2019s logo, went digging through old issues of Sport magazine.<\/a>\u00a0He happened upon a picture of Lakers star Jerry West, mid-dribble. That picture was what he built the NBA logo around.\u00a0<\/p>\n Decades later, fans and players still look at West and the logo that contains his silhouette as measures of greatness in men\u2019s basketball. They invoke his name and the logo when they argue about who the greatest players of all time are.\u00a0<\/p>\n The NBA had never formally introduced West as the inspiration for the logo. For decades, it was basketball\u2019s worst-kept secret. Siegel later said the league wanted to institutionalize the mark instead of individualizing it.\u00a0West himself called the whole thing flattering but embarrassing and said he wished they\u2019d remove his silhouette.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n The NBA has kept it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The WNBA has an opportunity to choose differently, by openly naming someone who is already a bright beacon for a league segueing into its next chapter.\u00a0<\/p>\n While other players might make a case for themselves, Wilson makes the case for the entire league. She\u2019s the embodiment of one of one.\u00a0<\/p>\n There is quite simply no one else in her stratosphere. There\u2019s no other player in the W whose r\u00e9sum\u00e9, business reach, and cultural weight converge the way Wilson\u2019s do, which leaves the league with a single name to choose for its logo.<\/p>\n Ask anyone who has played alongside Wilson and the same word comes up. Leader. Her coach, Becky Hammon, has said that Wilson wants everyone in their locker room to feel loved and cared for, and she puts in the work to make sure of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Decorating her teammates\u2019 lockers for their birthdays.<\/a>\u00a0Every June,\u00a0she shows up with an elaborate and humorous Pride cake for her LGBTQ teammates,<\/a>\u00a0a tradition that the entire team and the internet look forward to. Her teammates have openly\u00a0said that wherever Wilson goes, they will always follow.<\/a>\u00a0She\u2019s passionate on the court and oftentimes humble off of it, focused on identifying where she can be in service to her community.<\/p>\n I know. I know. I could spend forever and a day going on and on waxing poetic about Ms. Wilson as a player and as a person, but the W is also, and there\u2019s no pretending otherwise, a business.\u00a0<\/p>\n In that realm, Wilson has proven Jay-Z\u2019s infamous line to be true: \u201cI\u2019m not a businessman, I\u2019m a business, man.\u201d She is one of the savviest and most marketable athletes-turned-businesswomen on the planet, and most of us Wilson fans have the receipts to prove it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The A\u2019One,\u00a0her first signature sneaker with Nike,\u00a0<\/a>was touted as one of the most anticipated shoe lines in history and sold out in minutes when it dropped last year, making Wilson the first Black woman to headline a Nike signature shoe since Candace Parker a decade and a half earlier.\u00a0<\/p>\n She has since\u00a0debuted two versions of a Susie Carmichael player exclusive,<\/a>\u00a0an homage to the Rugrats character she loved growing up. Neither pair is available for purchase, which has not stopped me from checking Nike\u2019s website each time she wears them in a game, just in case she\u2019s changed her mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n Burnt Wax, the candle company Wilson launched with her mother, Eva, in 2021,<\/a>\u00a0sold out within hours of its debut.\u00a0Each unique scent\u00a0<\/a>carries the name of one of her accomplishments: National Champion, All-Star, MVP.\u00a0<\/p>\n While most celebrities write memoirs hoping their readers, especially the younger ones, might glean something from their story, Wilson pointed hers directly to the audience she meant it for.\u00a0Dear Black Girls: How to be True to You<\/a>\u00a0traces the WNBA star\u2019s path as a daughter of the South who came to love basketball relatively late in her youth, and who was shaped by her late grandmother Hattie, whose presence in her life still anchors how she navigates and understands herself and the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wilson also writes with real candor about her struggles with dyslexia, and the crippling anxiety and, at times, debilitating depression that took hold of her during the isolation of the WNBA\u2019s pandemic bubble. She shares her journey in therapy and how she\u2019s navigated grief, leading readers through both with refreshing vulnerability. It\u2019s no surprise the book\u00a0became a NY Times bestseller.<\/a><\/p>\n