A’ja Wilson’s one-of-one season didn’t end merely with confetti so much as a deeper confirmation. When her Las Vegas Aces finished off a four-game sweep of the Phoenix Mercury on Friday night to become only the second team in WNBA history to win three titles in a four-year span, the final horn felt less like a climax than a verdict: the best team of the era led by the best player of the era. When the dust settled the 29-year-old from Columbia, South Carolina, had achieved a quadrafecta no player in the NBA or WNBA had ever managed: winning the scoring title, the Most Valuable Player award, Defensive Player of the Year honors and MVP of the finals in the same year.
Thanks to Wilson, a team who’d looked like the next great American sports dynasty before slipping from their perch a year ago was back at the mountaintop. But anyone who watched the front half of the season knows this was the least expected of Aces’ three banners. For most of the year Las Vegas didn’t give the appearance of a playoff team let alone a champion. They staggered through injuries and misfires, dropped coin-flip games and wore the tightness of a group playing beneath its standard. If dynasties are supposed to hum, this one coughed and sputtered.
Asked to redefine greatness now that she’s stacking championships at a historic clip, Wilson widened the lens. “Obviously I would still [say] banners, but I think greatness is … it’s who you’re around. This is greatness. This group here, we were battle-tested, top to bottom battle-tested. We showed up every single day with a mind of being great,” she said in Friday’s aftermath. “You’ve got to be great when the lights aren’t on you. You’ve got to be great when nobody’s in the gym with you. You’ve got to be great when you may not get anything on the end. That is what greatness is to me because that is consistency and that is just you doing the right things because it’s right.”
Hammon’s appraisal supplied a blunt epigraph to the season: you can debate basketball’s Mount Rushmore if you want, but Wilson is “alone on Everest”. That sounds like flattery until you try to explain Wilson’s 2025 without resorting to the obvious truth that she controlled both ends of the court more completely than any of her peers. The Aces’ stars toggled roles without complaint – Young from flamethrower to rebounding guard; Gray from closer to organizer; free-agent addition Jewell Loyd (now 10-0 in WNBA finals games, by the way) from gunner to grit – and the bench minutes that once felt like a liability turned into leverage thanks to Dana Evans and company. But it all orbited the same gravitational pull of their 6ft 4in talisman. The closer a series got to wobble-time, the calmer Wilson seemed to breathe.
Where it goes from here is business as much as basketball. Much of the WNBA’s workforce, including key Aces, approach free agency as the deadline for a new collective bargaining agreement ticks louder. That uncertainty hovered even as the confetti fell. It also hovered over a fortnight of renewed friction between the league office and locker rooms. Reports of comments attributed to commissioner Cathy Engelbert about players being “on their knees” in gratitude – which the Englebert has partially disputed – landed like a cymbal crash against the reality on the floor: the players are the product. The Mortgage Matchup Center crowd underscored that point with a cacophony of boos during Englebert’s trophy presentation, while Gray did it from the dais. “When you have great players, you need to treat them like that. That’s payment. That’s treatment. That’s revenue share,” she said. “There’s no league without the players.”
In the end, two scenes bookend the truth of this season: an August text on the night of a 53-point embarrassment, and an October fadeaway that hushed a cauldron in the desert. The improbable midseason swerve into inevitability – the choice to recommit, then the refusal to blink – turned both into canon. The Aces rediscovered their standard at rock bottom and rode it back to the summit. Perhaps the verdict, delivered by the player who just authored a season like no other, was in from the start.
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