WNBA Finals: Champion Las Vegas Aces have their moment in the sun after season of growth, adversity

PHOENIX — The noise of a bright pink tambourine rattled into the hallway from a locker room draped in plastic. The instrument was a constant in A’ja Wilson’s hands, a cute gift from trainer Jerrica Thomas.

She cradled her Finals MVP trophy on the Mortgage Matchup Arena court, shaking the tambourine to it. She carried it through the hallway and into the press conference room. She raised it to the heavens, praising comments of which she approved.

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It was constant. Much like Wilson and the Las Vegas Aces.

The Aces solidified a dynasty in rather anticlimactic fashion by sweeping the Phoenix Mercury in the league’s first seven-game Finals series on Friday night. It’s their third title in four years, all helmed by a four-time MVP consistently leveling up her game. She earned her second Finals MVP by averaging 28.5 points, 11.8 rebounds, 4 assists, 2 blocks and 1 steal in four games.

Cue the tambourine accompaniment.

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Wilson and fourth-year head coach Becky Hammon demurred on dynasty talk the day before the clinch. Hammon maintained that line after the win, calling their success incomparable to the Houston Comets because of the game’s evolution. Chelsea Gray let Hammon give the history lesson before keeping it brief.

“Yes,” she said, the Aces are a dynasty.

It showed all week, facing an overmatched, underexperienced Mercury squad. And it showed after the final buzzer of the season from everyone involved.

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The Aces know how to do this, and it always follows a predictable, but no less emotionally wide-ranging scene. When the closed locker room celebration died down, Gray led the group out of the locker room as she does onto the court every game. This time, rather than the no-look passes she delivers to shooters, she looked directly at the group lingering outside, asking for the whereabouts of Jackie Young.

“We can’t start without Jackie,” Gray bellowed. “Did you see Jackie come by here?”

Young could have easily won her first Finals MVP, joining Gray and Wilson with the honor. The shooting guard is second on the Aces’ scouting report as a steadily improving force. It was the 3-point shot in recent title runs. This week, it was her facilitating that Wilson praised. She averaged 20.3 points shooting 41%, along with 5 rebounds, 6 assists and 1.5 steals per game in the Finals.

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Wilson trailed behind them with the tambourine, trophy and champagne bottle, her goggles on and giggles ready. Her favorite Olympian from out of town, boyfriend Bam Adebayo, was ready in the press room with his phone lifted, ever present on her left side, capturing his first WNBA championship.

Hammon, her two sons in tow, walked down the hallway with the trio who helped her keep everyone from jumping ship. They joined their mom at the packed podium, forever in a front-row seat to one of the league’s greatest coaches and players.

“I’m invested in their greatness and getting that out of them every day, and I know I’ve shared tears with all of them along this journey, especially this year,” Hammon said at the podium, her voice cracking as players jested her it wasn’t the time. “So it’s different because it was different. There was probably a lot more adversity than any of us anticipated.”

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The Aces charged from an improbable .500 season in July to a Finals sweep, a sharp contrast from their back-to-back seasons of dominance. Even last season, they stayed near the top before falling in the semifinals to the eventual champion New York Liberty, the franchise built to topple them.

Wilson, Young and Gray carried over, but they lost former core four member Kelsey Plum. The bench faces also changed.

Hammon made clear throughout the postseason that it was her most difficult coaching season in her four years in Las Vegas. She found ways to engage players and boost their confidence. In the preseason, before adversity hit hard, she gave each player a plant as a metaphor for accountability. Every day, it required levels of sunlight and watering.

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“It seemed like nothing was growing, but underneath the root system was going,” Hammon said on the eve of Game 1. “And I kept telling them, like, I don’t know when this lid is gonna come off, but when it does, it’s gonna rain. And that lid finally came off, and that’s when you saw us really kind of take off, but you had to keep watering.”

After the season, when adversity had cleared, it was clear how meaningful that became to players.

“Mine’s alive, mine’s alive, mine’s alive,” Gray, Young and Jewell Loyd chimed in quickly at the presser as if children pleading their case.

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“I’m trying to be good right now,” Wilson, in eldest daughter mode, scolded them on the podium as she continued her thought on the definition of greatness.

It’s patience, she said, waiting your turn, waiting your moment, working in the dark and staying consistent in that. It may not result in anything by the end, but sometimes, it may.

And it has for the Aces, the first team to invest in a team-specific practice facility when Mark Davis purchased the team in 2021. Davis took questions before Hammon and the players entered the press conference room in standard raucous fashion. Wilson sat in the press seats, listening. The dynasty is in the desert because players felt cared for and continued to re-sign, and free agents desired the same type of destination.

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When Hammon exited the celebratory locker room, she embraced Phoenix Mercury head coach Nate Tibbetts, a good friend she spoke with frequently when he came into the league from the NBA, including about their new facility and investment.

“Vegas is the standard,” Young said in the on-court celebration.

Four seasons ago, in the hour following the first championship victory, Plum searched for her teammates in the tricky tunnels of Mohegan Sun Arena. She found them in the curtained press room, hauling her boombox into the affair.

It was the loud, sharp introduction of a franchise on the rise. The tambourine is the unrelenting ringing of sustained success.