Happy Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. It’s Jackie Powell here with some final thoughts about the 2025 WNBA season before the most fascinating offseason in the league’s almost 30-year history.
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Basketball Wednesday
A day before the Las Vegas Aces were letting the confetti fall and celebrating winning a third title on yet another opponent’s home floor, head coach Becky Hammon told reporters a story, one of many she told throughout the finals and the playoffs.
She took reporters back in time to spring of 2022, her first year back in the league after eight years away. There was a day during her first training camp as a head coach where the Aces couldn’t get a gym to practice.
This was before the Aces had their 64,000-square-foot practice facility in Henderson, Nevada, so Hammon had to get creative to be productive and not waste a day before the start of the regular season.
“I ended up playing games with them,” Hammon said. “Jeopardy with our play calls. I think I had WNBA history. Just did a whole thing.”
She asked them league trivia. Who’s a three-time MVP? She had a category where her players had to draw up plays that she would run during the season.
If she were to tell that same story to the legions of new fans that have entered the league in the past three years since her Jeopardy stunt, they would have been stunned. It would have been inconceivable to them that the best athletes in the world didn’t have a place where they could practice.
That story represents part of the legacy of the Las Vegas Aces, now the fourth team in WNBA history to have three titles and the first team to invest in a full-fledged practice facility that was meant only for the Aces. The idea was that never again would Hammon have to look for a gym during training camp.
In just under a decade of existence, the Las Vegas Aces, a team that went through three previous iterations in two different locations before the current one, have left an indelible legacy on the WNBA. It’s a legacy that started with Bill Laimbeer and continues with Mark Davis and Hammon. It’s a legacy that is overwhelmingly complex amid a culture that aims to treat its players like the professionals that they are.
The complexity of their legacy also represents the greater growing pains that the WNBA continues to endure today as it makes the jump from niche pro league into an everlasting mainstream entertainment property.
“They’re fearless,” Jewell Loyd, a first-year Aces player, said about the franchise’s innovation. “They’re not scared to push the needle of what players need. They’re very vocal and how they want the league to look from our ownership as well. I think [Davis] does a great job of standing up for us as players and standing up for what he believes in as well as every single person is in this organization. The things that we do here is not for not for the banners, not for the show. He’s not for the accolades. It’s literally for the people. They put people first, and that’s really hard to do when you’re trying to run a business as well.”
As ever, the reality is more complex: just ask Dearica Hamby, whose lawsuit against the Aces for for pregnancy-related discrimination and retaliation is still ongoing. Hamby’s bombshell, paired with our Howard Megdal’s reporting on an investigation into salary cap circumvention, led to punishment for both.
This element of the team’s identity carried over into 2024, when the league opened another investigation into the Aces after the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) announced a plan to pay each Aces player $100,000. Our Howard Megdal has reported, among other aspects of this story, the email documentation that shows the Aces coordinating with the LVCVA to facilitate these agreements.
The LVCVA continues to slow-walk turning over documents to The IX, in violation of its legal obligations under Nevada state law. As Engelbert told The IX last month, “No update ongoing outside council doing their work. So we’ll let you know when we have something wrapped there.” The league did not respond to a request for an update this week.
Notably, Fox 5 Las Vegas reports that this two-year deal the LVCVA has with the Aces is set to expire. President Steve Hill said it’s “not our plan to” renew the deal. “But we haven’t completely made a decision and we haven’t had the conversation yet.”
Some people look at the Aces through the lens of breaking league rules and a public lawsuit. Others see them through their basketball success only. But the Aces’ greatest acclaim comes beyond the roster itself, and specifically the ways Hammon and her staff have redefined how they succeed on the court.
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Emily Adler was correct in 2023 when she wrote that Hammon will go down in WNBA history as one of most revered basketball innovators. “That many WNBA teams had stopped innovating at the dawn of the League Pass Era presented Hammon with a significant competitive edge from the moment she joined the Aces,” Adler wrote.
And after Hammon outcoached second year head coach Nate Tibbetts with her variety of junk defenses to start games, it is clear this still remains true.
“Yeah, Chelsea [Gray] kept saying, she’s not been in her bag yet,” Loyd said about Hammon. “She’s not in her bag yet. Just wait till playoffs. And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, what more she could do? She’s been in her bag all season.’
“And playoffs come around, you’re like, wow. She is really taking chances. She’s trusting us to change defenses without practicing them. She’s trusting us to go over scouts, her ability to just execute. The thing I always trust is that we’re not going to get outcoached. We might get outhustled here and there, but we’re not going to get outcoached. She has too much, literally, in her bag of all her notebooks and her plays and our analytics, she has too much.”
But besides Hammon’s knowledge of the game itself and ability to use her instincts and creativity to win high-stakes basketball games, I was struck by her growth as a head coach since she won her last title in 2023.
A common criticism of Hammon early in her Las Vegas tenure was her reluctance to use her bench. The 2025 Aces proved that Hammon learned these lessons. The Aces’ bench won them Game 1 of the WNBA Finals and Hammon made sure to be careful with Jackie Young‘s bandwidth in between off-days when Young didn’t participate in practice in between Games 1 and 2.
The way Hammon talks about her own players has changed, too.
The situation with Hamby that turned into a two-game suspension at the beginning of 2023 came from her interaction with her former player. Contrast that with the way she spoke about Cheyenne Parker-Tyus, a player whose storyline became tied to her pregnancy.
And then came Hammon’s growth as not just a coach about accountability, but one who needed to be a little bit more emotionally aware of what her players needed, as A’ja Wilson explained it.
“And I think this year, she’s been very, you know, nitpicky on how she spoke to us and how she poured into us individually,” Wilson said. “And I think that is the next that was a big step for [Hammon], because she’s kind of like, ‘Hey, y’all are pros. Go do it. I’m gonna give you the blueprint. Do it yourself.’ But I think now she understands that sometimes we may need that hug, sometimes we may need that pinch, and she’s done a great job of maneuvering like reading the room and feeling us out and knowing exactly how to approach us.”
The results are undeniable: Hammon turned underperforming team into a champion through buy-in and trusting one another. Between having the Aces watch a Netflix Documentary about Air Force Thunderbirds to having her team complete a blind trust exercise that involved players guiding each other so they didn’t crush any raw eggs, Hammon’s ability to meet her players where they are emotionally was incredibly impressive.
Heading into 2026, should they keep their core, the Aces will be the league’s on-court standard bearer. But off the court, despite their head start in the modern WNBA era, there’s work to do.
I had a conversation with a league source about why the Aces remain stuck in Michelob ULTRA Arena, a venue that allowed the Aces to average around 10,500 fans for each of their seven home playoff games in the past month. WNBA teams like the New York Liberty, Indiana Fever and Golden State Valkyries all led attendance averages and could regularly reach over 17,000 fans.
So why can’t the Aces move full-time to a more professional arena like T-Mobile Arena, home of the NHL’s Las Vegas Golden Knights? A handful of Aces games have been played there already, primarily to account for additional fans expected to see Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
The source explained that the Aces have no ownership stake in T-Mobile Arena, and therefore it costs much more to play games there than at Michelob ULTRA Arena. This led directly to the Aces sitting just fourth overall in Sportico’s 2025 WNBA franchise valuations rankings.
Other challenges for the Aces include instability on the business side and a struggle to fully put the franchise on a national platform with such a limited media market. According to the 2024-2025 Nielsen DMA ranking, Las Vegas is the 40th media market in the country, above cities like New Orleans, Memphis and Buffalo. Vegas’ size ranks below WNBA markets including Seattle, Phoenix, San Fransisco/ the Bay Area, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.
And anecdotally, there were significantly fewer media present at the WNBA Finals this year after what had felt like massive jumps in the past two seasons. While some of that is due to the Liberty and their mammoth of a media market being involved in 2023 and 2024, it wasn’t encouraging that the media attendance for the 2025 WNBA Finals felt like it did back in 2022. After all, back then, Hammon and her team were playing Jeopardy instead of practicing on a court.
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This week in women’s basketball
Abigail Segel writes about the relationship between the NWSLPA and the WNBPA.
Alexa Phillipou traces A’ja Wilson’s journey becoming a 3X champion.
Katie Barnes spoke to Bill Laimbeer for a story about the Aces’ big three.
Cassandra Negley provides an excellent explainer on the status of the CBA negotiations.
Don’t miss Emma Baccellieri on the Aces’ bumpy road to their third title.
Emily Adler, Hunter Cruse and Lincoln Shafer’s first 2026 WNBA Draft board is a must-click.
Natalie Esquire explains how the Aces content team works with Becky Hammon to motivate her players.
The Wall Street Journal tells the story of Esther Wallace and her fashion brand Playa Society.
Ben Pickman writes about how young boys have embraced the WNBA in recent years.
Sabreena Merchant tells the story of the Becky Hammon impersonator.
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