Around the W: Dynasty It Is!

The Las Vegas Aces repeat as back-to-back WNBA Champions

For the first time in 21 years, a WNBA team has successfully repeated as champions. The Las Vegas Aces closed out the New York Liberty in Game 4 of the 2023 WNBA Finals. It was an epic game that went right down to the buzzer.

The New York Liberty led by as many as 12 points early in the 3rd period before the Aces came storming back. Las Vegas outscored New York 23-12 in the third quarter and 40-30 in the 2nd half. That was just enough to walk away with a 70-69 victory and claim the franchise’s second WNBA title.

The Liberty had a chance to win on the game’s final possession but Alysha Clark was able to prevent Breanna Stewart from getting to the rim or getting a shot off. Clark received help defense from Jackie Young forcing Stewart to pass the ball back out to the perimeter. Betnijah Laney swung a pass to Courtney Vandersloot who had to rush the corner three before time expired. The shot went far right. Jonquel Jones grabbed the rebound and put the ball back in but time had already expired in the game and on the Liberty’s season.

I had the opportunity to interview A’ja Wilson after Game 2 on how the team’s previous Finals appearances in 2020 and 2022 helped them in this series.

“Just the mental approach. I think in my first Finals I was like ‘Oh my god, I’m here, wow. Yay!’ And then I got swept. It knocked me on my ass. Then the second time that I made it, I’m like ‘I’m not just happy to be here.’ Yes, I’m grateful to be here. A lot of people wish they could be here, so I’m not going to take that for granted. But it’s just the mental approach and mindset that is switching for me,” A’ja stated.

“When it came to this series, this one is going to be a dog fight. We all knew it was. For me to come in and relay everything, I just try to project that onto my teammates and help them understand that this isn’t going to be easy. We’ve all been in championship lockerrooms before and we understand how hard it is. That was just the biggest thing when approaching this series, to be mentally tough. The game is going to go in a lot of different ways. The team that does big on the little things is the team that comes up with the win. I think the biggest thing for us is to be mentally tough,” Wilson added.

Looking Back

When this WNBA season started up, the Aces certainly looked like the best overall team in the league. Through the first month, it felt premature to call the New York Liberty an actual Super Team. They hadn’t quite gelled together enough and Jonquel Jones really struggled through the first portion of the season. Meanwhile, the Aces were crushing just about everybody. Early on, Las Vegas appeared to be the favorite to repeat as champions.

But then some things happened that gave us pause. Candace Parker went out with a season-ending foot injury/surgery. That didn’t help the Aces especially with their perceived depth being the team’s only legitimate weakness.

That combined with the fact that the New York Liberty really hit their stride as the season went on, started to change the perception. Jonquel Jones began playing like the 2021 MVP again, Breanna Stewart was playing like the MVP that she would eventually win, and Sabrina Ionescu was shooting lights out from deep.

New York made their claim as legitimate WNBA title contenders when they beat the Las Vegas Aces three separate times in the month of August. One of those victories was a dominant 38-point win and another by nearly 20 points.

The Liberty had the posts in Jonquel Jones and Breanna Stewart to compete with A’ja Wilson. And the perimeter players in Sabrina Ionescu and Betnijah Laney, who could compete with Kelsey Plum and Jackie Young.

Their bench also looked stronger, occasionally getting big games from Marine Johannès, Kayla Thornton, or Stefanie Dolson.

Once the WNBA playoffs came around in September, it felt inevitable that these two powerhouses would meet up in the WNBA Finals. And that’s exactly what happened. The Las Vegas Aces swept their way to the championship series past the Chicago Sky and Dallas Wings. The Liberty swept the Washington Mystics and took out the Connecticut Sun in four games.

By the time the WNBA Finals began, I felt a little better about the New York Liberty than the Las Vegas Aces, despite the Aces not losing a single playoff game and winning more games than any other team in WNBA history. Last year, I predicted the Aces would beat the Connecticut Sun in four games and that’s exactly what they did.

This year, I mistakenly picked the New York Liberty to win in four games. But it was the defending champs that took the crown in four games instead.

Well, What Happened?

It’s not that I didn’t give Las Vegas a chance. But I did pick the Liberty to win in four because I thought they’d win the series and I also felt it was much more likely for them to steal one of the first two games on the road as opposed to winning a decisive Game 5 back in Las Vegas.

There were some things I predicted would happen in this series that did come true. And other matchups that I was way off on.

Things I Got Right

I expected Jonquel Jones to dominate her matchup against Kiah Stokes and she did. JJ averaged 17.8 PPG and 9.8 RPG in these Finals. Stokes, known more for her defense, averaged 2.7 PPG and 6.7 RPG. Going into the series, I thought this was one of the areas New York would have a significant advantage, and that came true.

I also correctly predicted that the New York Liberty bench would outplay the Las Vegas Aces’s reserves overall. The Liberty bench averaged 9.8 PPG to the Aces’s bench at 7.0 PPG. While I did think their advantage would be worth a little more than 3.0 PPG I did correctly state that the WNBA Finals would be won or lost by each team’s group of starters.

I also said that Chelsea Gray would likely outplay Courtney Vandersloot and that was true; but to Vandersloot’s credit the battle between the two was very close to being called “Even”. Gray, obviously got badly injured at the end of Game 3 and did not play in the decisive Game 4. Gray averaged 15.0 PPG and 7.3 APG in her three games of the Finals. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Vandersloot’s best game was the game that Chelsea Gray didn’t play in (Game 4).

It’s unfortunate, that most New York Liberty and WNBA fans will remember that it was Courtney Vandersloot who took and missed what would have been the game-winning shot to conclude the series. In her final game, she scored a team-high 19 points, dished out a team-high six assists, and grabbed seven rebounds. Overall, Vandersloot averaged 12.5 PPG and 5.5 APG in the Finals. That was a solid performance but it wasn’t as good as Chelsea Gray’s.

Things I Got Wrong

I allowed Betnijah Laney’s playoff performance in the earlier rounds to sway my opinion of the matchup between Laney and the Aces’s Jackie Young. Young had a much better regular season than Laney but their stats were extremely comparable when just looking at the playoffs. I should have realized that the regular season was a much larger sample size compared to what we’ve seen in the playoffs.

Jackie Young was a much better player in the WNBA Finals outscoring Betnijah Laney in three of the four games. While Games 3 and 4 were relatively close for each player, Young outscored Laney 50-23 in Games 1 and 2, which resulted in big Las Vegas victories.

I did correctly state that if the Aces were going to win the championship then Jackie Young would have to play better than Betnijah Laney. She did and they did.

Next up, is the battle of the MVPs. I said that A’ja Wilson might have a slight edge but I felt that overall the battle would be even between the two throughout the series. I didn’t feel either player would significantly outplay the other. I was wrong. While Stewart and Wilson were fairly evenly matched in Games 1 and 3, A’ja significantly outplayed Stewie in Games 2 and 4. Wilson outscored Stewart 50-24 in those two games.

Overall, Wilson averaged 21.3 PPG and 12.5 RPG to Stewart’s 16.3 PPG and 12 RPG. Those stats don’t tell the whole story. Wilson shot the ball with great efficiency connecting on 50% of her shots (32-64 FG). Meanwhile, Stewart struggled with her shot making 36% (25-69 FG) of her field goal attempts. None worse than her Game 4 performance with the Championship on the line, where she had the worst shooting game of her playoff career at 17.6% (3-17 FG).

What really hurt the Liberty in this series was Stewart’s inability to connect on her three-point shot. That is her #1 advantage over A’ja Wilson. If you want to make the claim that Breanna Stewart is better than A’ja Wilson, you would talk about her ability to stretch the floor and knock down three-pointers with ease. In the WNBA Finals, Stewart shot 3-17 FG from beyond the arc throughout the four games.

After their performances, I think it’s fair to say that A’ja Wilson is currently the best basketball player in the WNBA right now.

But we aren’t done just yet.

If I’m willing to sit here and write about the things I got wrong about this WNBA Finals matchup, there is one thing that stands far above the rest. I was so off on this prediction that I think we could arguably say that this was the biggest reason the New York Liberty lost the Finals and why the Las Vegas Aces are Champions once again.

I wrote that Sabrina Ionescu would outplay Kelsey Plum and boy was I ever wrong about that. As someone who covered Plum at the University of Washington during her senior season, I honestly should have known better than to count her out.

With the way Sabrina had been shooting the ball lately and the fact that she had played extremely well against the Aces during the regular season, I felt very confident that Ionescu would give Plum some problems. She’s a little more physical and in general, is a better rebounder and probably a better passer. But we didn’t see any of that in this series.

If you are a New York Liberty fan, I don’t know how you wouldn’t point the finger at Sabrina Ionescu’s dreadful performance as the primary reason the team didn’t win the WNBA Championship this season.

Ionescu averaged just 9.8 PPG in the Finals after averaging 17.0 PPG in the regular season and 16.3 PPG during the first two rounds of the playoffs. Sabrina scored in single digits in two of the four Finals games. She never scored more than 13 points.

Meanwhile, Kelsey Plum averaged 21.3 PPG and scored 26, 23, and 29 points in the first three games of the championship series. I thought Ionescu would outplay Plum and KP more than doubled Ionescu’s scoring average.

Kelsey Plum’s excellent scoring played a huge factor in the Aces’s back-to-back championships. Even in the final game, where she didn’t score as much and had to take on more of the point guard role due to the injury absence of Chelsea Gray, Plum found other ways to contribute, pulling down eight rebounds and dishing out five assists.

Final Thoughts

The 2023 WNBA season is officially over. We learned that a WNBA team that puts itself together like one of those overseas Russian Super Teams can get really, really far in this league but it may not be the best way to build a champion.

The Las Vegas Aces absolutely have a super team but it is one that was mostly built through the WNBA Draft who then added key pieces in Free Agency over the course of a couple of years. While the Aces are the WNBA’s Juggernaut today, they struggled for multiple seasons before they got to this point. They had to suffer through multiple losing seasons, they even missed the playoffs in A’ja Wilson’s rookie year.

Even once the Aces started making their playoff run, they dealt with multiple heartbreaks before reaching the mountaintop. They reached the Semi-Finals in 2019 before being eliminated in four games by the eventual champions, the Washington Mystics. In 2020, they made it to the WNBA Finals but were swept by a Seattle Storm team that had significantly more championship experience. Then in 2021, they were favored to go back to the Finals but were upset in the Semi-Finals losing the decisive Game 5 on their home floor to the Phoenix Mercury.

Through all of that, they sit here today the two-time WNBA Champions!

And their time in the spotlight is just getting started.