Short answer: no one yet. Chennedy Carter has been everything the Las Vegas Aces imagined she could be when they signed the 27-year-old guard to a one-year deal this offseason, a signing that marked her return to the WNBA after a 2025 spent playing in China and Mexico. In Carter's first five games of the year, she’s scored 97 points, a league record for a player coming off the bench. She wrecks whole defenses with what Aces head coach Becky Hammon called “eye-popping” speed, “especially if you haven't really seen it or you haven't seen it in a while.”
That is indeed the experience of watching Carter for the first time in a long time. At points in Sunday's Aces-Dream game, an 85-84 Vegas win in Atlanta, even the camera seemed like it was struggling to keep pace. Speed aside, there may not be a deeper bag than Carter's in the WNBA. She can pull up on a dime, snake her way through clusters of defenders on her way downhill, or cross over the very athletic Allisha Gray (see above). The depths of that bag have been tested by some of the gnarliest spacing situations the WNBA can offer a young downhill scorer. In Chicago, she’d managed 17.5 points per game despite sharing the paint with two non-shooting bigs. She simply doesn’t need much help. In a 20-point game on 7-of-13 shooting in her 21 minutes, only two of her buckets were assisted.
Pardon some nitpicking. The Aces won the WNBA Finals in a sweep last year, their third title in four seasons. They’re afforded the great margins of having A'ja Wilson on their team. But they came together so magically in the Finals, and benefitted so much from a forgiving Phoenix matchup, that it can be easy to forget there was a frustrating version of Aces basketball last year, one that showed up as late as the second round of the playoffs. It could look like Dana Evans dribbling for 15 minutes straight, or like the team being run past by quicker guards. The latter was a real problem in the Fever series, in which the speedy Kelsey Mitchell shined. “We had no answer for Mitchell,” Hammon said after the first game of the series, a 34-point game for Mitchell. “Couldn't even attempt to slow her down a little bit.”
Eventually, Mitchell’s own body would do that for them; she left Game 5 early with cramping that was later found to be rhabdomyolysis, a serious muscle condition, and the Fever lost in OT. But Carter looks a lot like the belated answer for Mitchell, the player who can’t be slowed down on offense and who might, with some coaching, be able to keep up with her athletic guard counterparts on defense. The ghost of another Kelsey lurks, too: Since Hammon started coaching the Aces, they've been among the lowest in rim frequency, or percentage of field goals taken at the rim. And Vegas lost one of their best sources of rim pressure when Kelsey Plum left for Los Angeles before the 2025 season.
There are reasons this could be the perfect situation for Carter. The Aces team around her is a jump-shooting team that won’t clog the paint and can play five-out. There are reasons this might be an awkward fit; they are related to the reasons “you haven't seen it in a while” and the reasons the defending WNBA champions were able to get a 20-ppg scorer to come off the bench on a bargain contract. Just as Carter’s success is not so reliant on her teammates, they have historically not found her reliable either. In her career, she has been suspended by the Dream after getting into a fight with teammates, traded to the Sparks, waived from the Sparks after being benched in a “coach's decision,” signed by the Sky, and then unsigned by the Sky in restricted free agency amid reports of locker-room drama.
Had it begun already on Sunday? In crunch time, Hammon went with a bigger lineup geared to get stops, and Carter watched it all from the bench. She seemed frustrated by this fact at her postgame press conference, which clocked in at less than two minutes. “Obviously I want to help the team close in the fourth quarter, if possible, but I think it was a good game,” Carter said. A couple questions later, she was asked to reflect on her own performance in the game. “I’m still going through it. A little bit disappointed. Happy we won, but yeah,” she said, trailing off and then ending the presser.
Later, she posted online that she had “family stuff” she was dealing with, so perhaps it was nothing. The pleasant part of the Chennedy Carter Experience is still happening right now in Vegas, however prone it is to sudden shifts.
