The peerless A’ja Wilson may already be the WNBA’s greatest ever player | Bryan Armen Graham

A’ja Wilson’s one-of-one season didn’t end merely with confetti so much as a deeper confirmation. When her Las Vegas Aces finished off a four-game sweep of the Phoenix Mercury on Friday night to become only the second team in WNBA history to win three titles in a four-year span, the final horn felt less like a climax than a verdict: the best team of the era led by the best player of the era. When the dust settled the 29-year-old from Columbia, South Carolina, had achieved a quadrafecta no player in the NBA or WNBA had ever managed: winning the scoring title, the Most Valuable Player award, Defensive Player of the Year honors and MVP of the finals in the same year. Thanks to Wilson, a team who’d looked like the next great American sports dynasty before slipping from their perch a year ago was back at the mountaintop. But anyone who watched the front half of the season knows this was the least expected of Aces’ three banners. For most of the year Las Vegas didn’t give the appearance of a playoff team let alone a champion. They staggered through injuries and misfires, dropped coin-flip games and wore the tightness of a group playing beneath its standard. If dynasties are supposed to hum, this one coughed and sputtered. Schedule Best-of-seven series. Fri 3 Oct Game 1: Las Vegas 89, Phoenix 86 Sun 5 Oct Game 2: Las Vegas 91, Phoenix 78 Wed 8 Oct Game 3: Las Vegas 90, Phoenix 88 Fri 10 Oct Game 4: Las Vegas 97, Phoenix 86 To understand how we got here, flash back to 2 August, when the Aces were boat-raced by 53 points by the Minnesota Lynx on national television, the worst loss in franchise history and the ultimate stress test of the culture Becky Hammon has spent four seasons building. Las Vegas were a moribund 14–14 then, six weeks from the finish line and barely in the postseason frame. Wilson walked out of Michelob Ultra Arena replaying the wreckage, drafting and redrafting a message she knew had to cut through without burning down what morale remained. She workshopped it with her partner Bam Adebayo, the two-time Olympic gold medallist and Miami Heat captain and then hit send to the team chat: If you weren’t embarrassed from yesterday, don’t come into this gym. You’re not needed or wanted here. We need the mindset to shift, because that was embarrassing. The next day, Vegas routed Golden State and never lost again in the regular season, ripping off 16 straight wins to nail down the No 2 seed while Wilson sprinted past history to a record fourth MVP trophy. Hammon matched the tone with a structural tweak that mattered: players would build and present their own scouting reports before coaches weighed in. Accountability stopped being a slogan and became the operating system. “A’ja comes in with a laptop,” Hammon told ESPN. “They’ll kick the coaches out and do their thing.” Only then does the image that will live on come into focus – two nights before the sweep, before a sold-out Phoenix crowd of 17,071 at full boil – Wilson rising, spinning and feathering home an eight-footer with 0.3 seconds left in Game 3 as DeWanna Bonner and Alyssa Thomas crowded her airspace. That shot – thought to be the first buzzer-beater over a married couple in basketball history – didn’t just win a game. It effectively sealed the Aces’ place in WNBA lore. The sweep will be the headline, but the spine of this title is that midseason decision to choose standards over excuses. It carried through an edgy playoff run that tried to jar them loose: Seattle forced a decisive Game 3 that needed Jackie Young’s late put-back; Indiana dragged them into an overtime Game 5 that would have cracked lesser champions. “There were a lot of doubts besides in that locker room,” Aces point guard Chelsea Gray said. “We stayed the course and trusted the process the entire time.” Interactive And always, there was Wilson: shrinking options at the rim and expanding them at the elbow, the league’s most terrifying deterrent and its cleanest late-clock answer in the same body. There’s a special joy in watching her go about her work. If her Game 3 winner was the cinematic flourish, her Game 4 closeout was the masterclass in control when the jumpers weren’t falling. On a night where she missed 14 of her 21 attempts from the floor, Wilson changed the terms instead – owning the glass, spiking shots, jumping passing lanes, making a home at the stripe and going 17-for-19 there. Possession by possession, she bent the game back to her will. This year pushes past tidy résumé-building and into something rarer. Wilson wasn’t just the best player in this series; she was the best player in the sport, shouldering into a GOAT conversation that has long begun with Cheryl Miller’s legend and Maya Moore’s incandescent peak. She bears the weight lightly, which is part of the spell. The tambourine bit at the podium during the post-game presser – equal parts Baptist church joke and credo on patience and faith – landed because it sounded like her: unguarded, joyful, before quietly matter-of-fact and clear-eyed in expounding on the work it takes to win. Asked to redefine greatness now that she’s stacking championships at a historic clip, Wilson widened the lens. “Obviously I would still [say] banners, but I think greatness is … it’s who you’re around. This is greatness. This group here, we were battle-tested, top to bottom battle-tested. We showed up every single day with a mind of being great,” she said in Friday’s aftermath. “You’ve got to be great when the lights aren’t on you. You’ve got to be great when nobody’s in the gym with you. You’ve got to be great when you may not get anything on the end. That is what greatness is to me because that is consistency and that is just you doing the right things because it’s right.” Hammon’s appraisal supplied a blunt epigraph to the season: you can debate basketball’s Mount Rushmore if you want, but Wilson is “alone on Everest”. That sounds like flattery until you try to explain Wilson’s 2025 without resorting to the obvious truth that she controlled both ends of the court more completely than any of her peers. The Aces’ stars toggled roles without complaint – Young from flamethrower to rebounding guard; Gray from closer to organizer; free-agent addition Jewell Loyd (now 10-0 in WNBA finals games, by the way) from gunner to grit – and the bench minutes that once felt like a liability turned into leverage thanks to Dana Evans and company. But it all orbited the same gravitational pull of their 6ft 4in talisman. The closer a series got to wobble-time, the calmer Wilson seemed to breathe. Where it goes from here is business as much as basketball. Much of the WNBA’s workforce, including key Aces, approach free agency as the deadline for a new collective bargaining agreement ticks louder. That uncertainty hovered even as the confetti fell. It also hovered over a fortnight of renewed friction between the league office and locker rooms. Reports of comments attributed to commissioner Cathy Engelbert about players being “on their knees” in gratitude – which the Englebert has partially disputed – landed like a cymbal crash against the reality on the floor: the players are the product. The Mortgage Matchup Center crowd underscored that point with a cacophony of boos during Englebert’s trophy presentation, while Gray did it from the dais. “When you have great players, you need to treat them like that. That’s payment. That’s treatment. That’s revenue share,” she said. “There’s no league without the players.” In the end, two scenes bookend the truth of this season: an August text on the night of a 53-point embarrassment, and an October fadeaway that hushed a cauldron in the desert. The improbable midseason swerve into inevitability – the choice to recommit, then the refusal to blink – turned both into canon. The Aces rediscovered their standard at rock bottom and rode it back to the summit. Perhaps the verdict, delivered by the player who just authored a season like no other, was in from the start.