PHOENIX — A’ja Wilson never did get around to watching footage from the Houston Comets dynasty. Life after winning back-to-back championships in 2022 and 2023 was, in her words, “a doozy.”
The film she watched instead was of her and the Las Vegas Aces’ own games. The footage on her mind throughout the season was video compilations that Hammon instructed the staff to create for players. Before Game 1 of the 2025 WNBA Finals, the videos highlighted players winning through high school and college and still wanting to win now.
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That they did, tearing through the Phoenix Mercury in a clean four games. The 97-86 win clinched the Aces’ third title in four years.
Wilson didn’t watch an old dynasty because she was busy building her own.
The day before the clinch opportunity, neither Wilson nor Hammon gave much credence to that. Wilson said at shootaround on Thursday that a championship is “a good stepping stone to put us at a dynasty type of feel.” Hammon left it at they’re “definitely in the conversation.”
Yet, if Wilson declares a dynasty as a team that wins “a lot,” emphasizing it for good measure, then it’s fair to declare the Aces one. No longer is the talk of building a dynasty a la the Comets, as it was when the team became the third in league history to win consecutive championships.
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It’s here. And at the helm is Wilson, the league’s first four-time MVP by winning all in a six-year span. She added a second Finals MVP to her bursting-at-the-seams trophy case by averaging 28.5 points, 11.8 rebounds and 2 blocks per game. Hammon, Jackie Young and Chelsea Gray surrounded her for all of it.
The title that cemented the claim proved the most difficult, and not because they came in with a target on their backs. They replaced multiple major parts, differentiating their run from the Minnesota Lynx’s four titles in seven years. They play in an era of more widespread talent and increasing parity, a leap from the four consecutive titles the Houston Comets won in the league’s nascent seasons. The Detroit Shock, winners of three in six years, might be the most apt.
The Aces did it with a shade of understandable doubt. They used a late-season charge from .500 to the Finals, a circuitous path in sharp contrast to their previous title teams’ more direct route. Not even the postseason allowed for their dominance, as their first two rounds went the full distance.
“We’ve been joking around saying this team likes to go the long way around,” Hammon said. “Just because you’re taking the long way around doesn’t mean it’s the wrong way around.”
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‘Everybody stay on the ship’
Hammon is known to be descriptive and long-winded. A question about Wilson’s greatness is a chance to add more animal metaphors to her arsenal, and jokes are always on the tip of her tongue.
So an air of uncertainty and laughs lingered when she answered with one word, following a long consideration, about whom or what she leaned on to right the Aces’ ship this season. “Jesus,” she said. Nothing else to add or explain. On to the next question.
Days later, in the corner of the Mercury’s bright, 1-year-old practice facility built to keep up with the arms race begun by her Aces franchise, Hammon dove in deeper. After a joke, of course.
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“Who else you gonna call? Not Ghostbusters,” Hammon quipped.
Faith is a part of her DNA, having grown up going to church in South Dakota, a weekly ritual for many players on the team. She leaned heavily on it in what she called her most challenging season as a head coach.
It wasn’t the X’s and O’s that gave her difficulty. It was the mental, emotional, empowerment and leadership aspects. There were times Hammon felt as though all her team needed was hugs, and she provided. (Her sons, she said, were there when she needed a hug.) Hammon began telling her players how great they were, showing them film as reminders over and over and over again.
“This was a lot,” Hammon said. “This went beyond coaching. This was trying to etch out an identity for a team that was struggling.”
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The Aces lost five of six in June, were “throttled,” in Hammon’s description, by Golden State, Indiana and then the pivotal, 53-point drubbing by Minnesota. For the first time under Hammon’s guidance, they sat below .500 at the turn of the season when the playoff race began to solidify. They had “plenty of embarrassing moments this year,” Hammon said the morning of the WNBA semifinals.
From the outside, critics considered the Aces down and out. In a recently impatient league, Hammon’s job stability seemed fragile. Wilson, sitting on the outside of the MVP conversation, faced constant questions on what was wrong and how to fix it.
Hammon tapped into her faith and shared it using an analogy. Yes, it included animals, in a way.
“When it was rough, it wasn’t looking good, [I told them] everybody stay on the ship,” Hammon said. “Nobody gets to jump overboard. Everybody stay on the ship, and we just keep moving this thing in the right direction. And believe me, it’s better to be Noah’s Ark than the Titanic.”
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The big three of Wilson, Young and Gray stood at the bow. They won their previous titles with a core that included Kelsey Plum, one of the Aces’ three consecutive No. 1 draft picks with Wilson and Young. Now, they were three of six returners facing the most change they had ever experienced in Hammon’s tenure.
Chelsea Gray, A’ja Wilson and Jackie Young have been at the center of the Aces’ championship teams. (Photo by Ian Maule/Getty Images)
(Ian Maule via Getty Images)
Stockpiling solutions
No champion is ever built on one solution. Hammon gave scouting report duties to the players initially to engage them, prompting them to focus on the game plan before coaches mentioned it. She never intended to do it long-term, but it was working. Players designed accountability charts and held their teammates to them throughout games and in the aftermath, from the top of the scouting report in Wilson to the rookie Aaliyah Nye.
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The front office traded for NaLyssa Smith on June 30, inserting the former lottery pick in the starting lineup in place of their two-time champion center Kiah Stokes. Stokes played sparingly in the playoffs, mostly used in late-game defensive stands that came in clutch twice in the Finals.
A month later, Jewell Loyd, a two-time champion starting guard with the Seattle Storm, asked to be moved to the bench. Loyd, acquired in the multi-team deal that sent Plum to Los Angeles, became an early sixth player sub for former deep bench reserve Kierstan Bell.
In a workplace that can be full of ego takeovers, Hammon experienced none of it.
“I got one of the healthiest benches mentally,” Hammon said. “You know how huge that is in situations like this? Because when those really hard times come, those little cracks can become gaping holes in your foundation. We just haven’t had that and I think that’s a large part to do with just the character and type of people they are.”
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By the backend of the expanded 44-game season, everyone found their places around Wilson’s league-best 23.4 points per game, Young’s expanded guard role and Gray’s consistently eye-popping no-look assists. The Aces began a 16-game winning streak and finished the regular season as the No. 2 seed. Ahead of the postseason, forward Megan Gustafson returned from a leg injury sustained in training camp, and forward Cheyenne Parker-Tyus from the birth of her second child.
“That was the biggest challenge was being able to adjust to what the new faces look like for us and making it work for our starters and making that kind of fit for us,” assistant coach Charlene Thomas-Swinson told Yahoo Sports.
It wasn’t merely an uphill climb for the new roster. It was one for the coaching staff. Natalie Nakase (Golden State) and Tyler Marsh (Chicago) both took head-coaching jobs in the offseason, splitting up the coaching quad that won back-to-back titles.
Head coach Becky Hammon had to revamp her staff this year. They’re on the same page, in basketball and in gameday fits. (Photo by Ian Maule/Getty Images)
(Ian Maule via Getty Images)
Hammon hired Ty Ellis and Larry Lewis to fill out the staff. Neither brought experience from the women’s side. While that wasn’t a problem, it was a challenge. Hammon stayed on them early to learn the league inside and out.
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“You need to know these players, names, tendencies,” Hammon said. “Start watching games as quick as I hired them, as well as start learning me.”
The timeline helped. Hammon and Thomas-Swinson invested in them from the time of their hiring in February. Thomas-Swinson walked them through Hammon’s likes and dislikes when it came to building scouting reports and prepped them with information on returning players. The biggest thing they had to adjust to was how hands-off Hammon was as a coach who “never wants to take my legs out” from her assistants or players.
“She’s not a micro manager,” Thomas-Swinson told Yahoo Sports. “A lot of assistants are used to being directed to do specific things. She expects you to know your craft.”
By the time they were the last left standing, everyone knew it and lived it.
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Lining up dynasties
Encyclopedic lists of champions don’t include the context. Years from now, all that will be seen is “Las Vegas Aces” written next to 2022, 2023 and 2025. But how they reached it matters more in the argument of where they fall in the dynasty rankings.
The only team with more consecutive titles is the defunct Comets, the gold standard of WNBA dynasties that won the league’s first four titles. To Thomas-Swinson, they’re legendary.
“The realities of being able to live up to that, it’s a heck of a bar, but it’s a wonderful one to reach and strive,” Thomas-Swinson said.
Hammon stood on the opposite side of that dynasty. Her Liberty teams lost to the Comets in three of the four. But it’s difficult to compare when the entire structure of the league is different, she said.
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“The league is just so much better,” she said. “There’s so much parity. … Each team basically has a big three or four. … Nobody back in the day had that big three or big four.”
Does that make the Aces’ stretch of success more impressive? That they could still win, despite a league of parity and their own turnover? That they’ve found different ways to keep bringing home trophies?
It’s difficult to say when one is in it, and the Aces are still very much there. Wilson and Hammon certainly aren’t going to give teams any more of a reason to target the Aces, a favorite pastime of this decade. It’s revisionist history, but they could have won four straight had the pesky New York Liberty, built to push them off the peak, not gotten in the way.
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During the Aces’ 2023 championship, Wilson tapped into the Comets’ three-time MVP Sheryl Swoopes. She said at the time the Comets cracked the glass ceiling.
“Now it’s our turn to shatter that glass ceiling,” said Wilson, who last month passed Swoopes in MVP awards.
Which is likely why declaring her own dynasty isn’t top of mind this week. More are still in play for the 29-year-old, despite heading into what should be the wildest free agency window in league history.
“Obviously, you want to win more to really solidify it,” Wilson said. “But I think that is something you can never take away from us.”
