WNBA Finals: Sydney Colson’s off-the-court humor makes Aces reserve guard ‘the face of the league’

NEW YORK — The service on the Las Vegas Aces’ charter flight to New York was, by all shared accounts, less than stellar. The flight attendant, a woman named “Amber,” was quick to pull away the snack options and was too busy to respond to any questions or needs of her fliers.

Yet, Sydney Colson had a great time.

The Aces reserve guard unofficially earned her wings by taking over cabin duties as “Amber” when she “found” an extra flight attendant uniform on the plane. It was quintessentially Colson and unsurprising to any who have seen “The Syd + TP Show,” a half-hour weekly series featuring Colson and 2022 Aces champion Theresa Plaisance.

The two 10-year veterans are focused on becoming “the faces of the league” even though, as the show description claims, “no one asked them to.” And they make no qualms in the first minutes of the premiere they might not warrant the attention since they maintained pro basketball careers with “zero stats.”

In their title season with Las Vegas, they combined to average 5.6 points in about 20 minutes per game. Plaisance signed with the Seattle Storm in free agency and was waived on roster cut-down day.

Colson, who enters games at the Aces’ Michelob Ultra Arena to loud cheers, scored 35 total points (1.3 ppg) this season in 135 minutes (4.8 mpg). She has three rebounds and an assist in 20 minutes of playoff action for the Aces. In the three Finals games against the New York Liberty, she’s played about seven minutes total.

That court time will likely increase in the coming days if point guard Chelsea Gray, who left in the final minutes of the New York Liberty’s Game 3 win, is out for the rest of the playoffs.

Head coach Becky Hammon said after the game she had no update on the star, and none was available Monday after the Aces canceled an optional shootaround 20 minutes before it was scheduled to begin. The Aces are already working with a short bench and regularly play the five starters and Sixth Player of the Year Alysha Clark, who would presumably move into a starter role.

Colson, whose career started in New York in 2011, is always ready to jump into a starting role if needed, so it’s not as if she is improvising without preparation. But much like an actor thrown into skits on some of Colson’s favorite shows like “Mad TV,” she and the Aces will need to make do with what they have available.

Guard Kelsey Plum, who is averaging 26 points on 49% shooting in the Finals, will shuffle over to do more ball-handling usually given to Gray. Jackie Young, who averaged 25 points in the first two games before scoring eight on Sunday, will also carry more, Hammon said. They are one win away from a second consecutive championship and have two chances.

“Maybe we see Syd,” Hammon said. “Syd likes to get in there and mix it up every now and then. But we do it by committee. I don’t think there’s any one person that’s going to step up and fill [Gray’s] shoes. It’s going to be a next man up kind of scenario — next woman.”

“Getting in there and mixing it up” could be the tagline on Colson’s actor sheet when she retires from basketball and pursues her next dream of acting. She’s a character when the moment allows and hams it up for team social cameras, plus any reporter in the vicinity.

She credits coming from a family of funny people and her love of comedies. In 2020, she took some acting classes, but had never done improv before even though she had always wanted to do it.

“This is for real going to be my first time with it,” Colson said she remembers thinking when the show became a real entity. “It was really fun. Once the season’s over, I’ll definitely dive into that more.”

Colson and Plaisance, who became fast friends when they joined the Aces ahead of 2022, are so good together because, according to them, they “don’t get embarrassed by anything.” (Although, Colson did seem to show some embarrassment when she thought she was locked out of the Aces’ practice facility during training camp.)

In their quest to become the faces of the league, they end up at a sparsely attended local carnival for press and take lessons on “throwing shade” within the first three episodes. They try to come up with ways to go viral and earn fame, bringing in teammates, WNBA peers, comedians and even Jennifer King, an NFL assistant coach.

“It’s a very fun depiction of two WNBA stars who are climbing the ladder in the WNBA,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said. “I think it’s great fun. Syd Colson literally could be an actress for the rest of her life, but she’s really good on the court, too.”

It’s not so much the setting, but more so the antics the duo each pull playing off of each other.

“They need to see our physical comedy, because everything we say isn’t necessarily funny, but it might be actions,” Colson said. “And so they pitched it as a show and we were like, ‘All right, let’s do it.’”

The show is co-produced by Fubo, actor Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort and Togethxr, the company co-founded by athletes Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel and Sue Bird, who was courtside for Game 3. Colson said Togethxr contacted her and her agent, Gina Paradiso, who makes a cameo in the first minutes of the TV series, about a potential podcast ahead of last season.

“They wanted to do a podcast series to let people know more about my life, how I stuck around in the league, about me pursuing acting, doing stand-up, talk[ing] about my family,” Colson said. “Just talk about a lot of things to give people a perspective on somebody that they don’t know a lot about.”

Then Colson met Plaisance and they clicked. Colson said on an away trip to Phoenix, they spoke for hours in her room and “the time flew by.” They hung out the entire day. Colson told Paradiso she thought her and Plaisance could have something good for a podcast, but it would have to be recorded on video, too.

“She is just hilarious,” Colson said of Plaisance. “It’s her facial expressions, her little comments, the non-verbal stuff. It’s fun. … A lot of stuff will just be hilarious and she doesn’t even really find it funny. She’s just being serious.”

Togethxr pitched it as a show, and though Colson was expecting low budget, “there was actually money in it.” She said this weekend they hope to have a second season.

By then, they both might be true faces of the league. The Aces improvising with more stats from Colson would only help their quest.