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Just when there’s nothing else A’ja Wilson can accomplish and all that’s left for her to do is to stack titles, MVPs, Olympic medals and All-Star selections, she shows that more can be done.
On Tuesday, TIME Magazine named her the 2025 Athlete of the Year. This is the second-consecutive year a WNBA players has been named the TIME Athlete of the Year; in 2024, the award went to rookie phenom Caitlin Clark.
This caps off a historic 2025 for Wilson, who won her third WNBA title, was named Finals MVP for the second time, captured her fourth WNBA MVP and earned her third overall, and second straight, Defensive Player of the Year award. No player in the WNBA or NBA had ever accomplished all four feats in the same season.
Wilson spoke with TIME regarding her historic year, saying:
When you’ve collected everything, that’s Thanos…And this year, I collected everything. I don’t 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’s ever done what I’ve done. And I think people really needed to understand that.
Being considered the GOAT takes more than winning a bunch; you have to play the part as well. In that aspect, Wilson has been a trailblazer for women’s basketball.
Wilson is one of the few WNBA players with her own signature shoe. Her A’One sneaker dropped back in May and has been a massive hit with fans. We still aren’t in a position where every WNBA star has a sneaker, much less one with Nike, so seeing Wilson finally get this launch off the ground was a big moment for her, the Las Vegas Aces and the basketball world as a whole.
Wilson spoke to TIME about what being the first black WNBA player with a signature shoe since 2011 meant not just to herself, but to the culture, asserting, “We, as Black women, get shaken…We get swept underneath the rug. Was it overdue? Absolutely.”
With the WNBA in the middle of a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) negotiations, Wilson isn’t going to sit on the sidelines and listen idly to potentially unconstructive conversations. Speaking with TIME’s Sean Gregory, Wilson is as clear as can be that she wants a better deal for the players, insisting, “All of us are going to be at the table…and we’re not moving until we get exactly what we want.”
If Wilson were done now, she’d already be a legend. Her statue is already up at South Carolina. Wilson won the national title for the Gamecocks back in 2017 and was recently inducted into the South Carolina Athletics Hall of Fame.
When she is done, Wilson will be a shoo-in for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, and her jersey will undoubtedly hang in the rafters of Michelob ULTRA Arena.
However, before her jersey is up there, she told TIME how many more banners she can add to those rafters, positing, “I think I can do three more.”
That might seem like a tough goal to accomplish, but as Wilson has proven, putting a ceiling on her ability is a fool’s errand. Wilson’s TIME Athlete of the Year honor is the cherry on top of the historic sundae of a season she made in 2025—and now we get to see what she achieves in 2026 to make her GOAT argument even louder.
