The Las Vegas Aces are bad. Not “bad by their championship standards"—just kind of bad. Two years ago, they lost six games total. In less than a third of this season, they have lost seven. By the grace of the incredibly forgiving WNBA playoff system, they are, with a 6-7 record, the last team in. So it was actually kind of heartening to see them gut out a win at home on Sunday afternoon, rallying in the fourth quarter to beat the Indiana Fever and avoid their first four-game losing streak since 2018. Ahead of what could be some morale-boosting games against Connecticut and Washington this week, here was proof that the Aces can still lock in.
It was not looking that way at halftime this weekend, after what might have been A’ja Wilson’s worst half of professional basketball. Missed layups, contested pull-ups and battles with Aliyah Boston had kept her to 2-of-12 shooting. “I just want to apologize to everybody that was watching. That was not a normal A’ja Wilson night,” she said in the postgame interview on ESPN. Spinning to the cup and timing up big blocks on the defensive end, she had already played the second half like an apology. At the end of the night, Wilson's line was a sightlier 8-of-21, but she apologized again for good measure. “Sorry if you had to see that, but we got the dub.”
How did the Aces become bad? Pretty simple: They have lost good players over the years and replaced them with worse ones. Jewell Loyd has (as predicted!) not nearly compensated for the loss of Kelsey Plum, a top scorer who hit threes and put pressure on the rim. Though her three-point numbers are good this year, Loyd is shooting a puzzling 31.7 percent from two. Admittedly, this sounds like “the food’s terrible … and such small portions,” but the fact that she only averages 10 shots a game hints at deeper problems here. Loyd feels mostly incidental to the Aces offense. The team’s assist totals and shooting percentages have plummeted. In the Becky Hammon era, this unit has never looked so disconnected. Their outlook on offense now is something like “A’ja will figure it out,” and opponents have caught on, daring the rest of the team to beat them.
Apart from the Plum-to-Loyd downgrade, there’s been some regression for the core itself. The Aces' back-to-back championship run depended on a huge shooting leap from Jackie Young, whose three-point percentages have fallen to earth since the Olympic break last year. With fewer easy looks at the rim, Chelsea Gray’s assist numbers aren’t close to where they were in 2022 and 2023. She's at least still good for some incredible shotmaking displays. (Separately, look at the defense by Dominique Malonga! Storm blog soon?)
Last year, the Vegas offense could compensate for a slipping defense. This year, the defense has nowhere to hide. The three games Wilson missed with a concussion might skew the numbers a bit, but the Aces have the league’s worst paint defense, and the team can seem strangely overwhelmed by simple pick-and-rolls. In the Fever-Aces game, Aliyah Boston said Thank you very much, and put up 26 points on 12-of-19 shooting.
In Alysha Clark, the Aces had the rare player who could defend both Sabrina Ionescu and Breanna Stewart, but the current group of role players is overloaded with much more limited guards. It’s hard to beat Minnesota or New York with a small lineup, and the “big” lineup, with a traditional center, hasn’t fared much better. Starting center Kiah Stokes has scored zero points in two of her last four games. (The number of 0-fers on her 2024 game log is truly something to behold.) The last thing the other Aces need is to be playing four-on-five.
The Aces got good in the easy way teams get good: They had the No. 1 pick in three straight drafts and chose excellent players (Plum, Wilson, Young) in all three. But staying good is harder. Since the Aces selected Young in 2019, the draft hasn’t been a source of talent for them. Some of that is the price of being good: The Aces pick late in the draft anyway. Some is self-inflicted: The Aces lost their 2025 first in the impermissible benefits saga. They used a 2023 first to trade up for Mya Hollingshed in 2022, only to waive her a month later. Second-round pick Kate Martin got a little run last year before Golden State picked her up for free in the expansion draft. Maybe rookie shooter Aaliyah Nye will break the curse; in Sunday’s game, she hit some huge shots off the bench. Watching Phoenix or New York, I can’t exactly feel sorry for Vegas either. Teams in a similar spot, under pressure to find value outside the draft, have adapted by making trades and investing in international scouting. The pressure isn’t letting up. The Aces don’t own their first-round pick next year; it went to Seattle in the trade for Loyd.
It's almost more frustrating that no one on the Aces is blind to the team’s problems. The Aces played the pesky, active defense they've shown they can play in the second half of the game against the Fever. Hammon has spent the better part of two seasons harping on the team’s poor defensive effort, and her every postgame press conference tests the limits of how exhausted a person can look. But at a certain point, the effort problems get a little stale—and maybe damning of the coach, too.
Because Wilson has already won two championships in Vegas, it may not fully register that the Aces have wasted prime years of a three-time MVP. But that’s what’s happening. Two is nice, but there’s no reason she shouldn’t be contending for more. Next year is an even shakier proposition: Wilson, Gray, Young and Loyd will all be free agents in 2026, and the core might scatter. The Aces will at least hold some incumbency advantage in free agency. “If I could retire an Ace, I would love to. I don’t see myself putting on any different jersey,” Wilson told Time Magazine this winter. Keeping Wilson would itself be a huge victory for the Aces front office this offseason. It just can’t be the only one.
