Five Out: An Undeniable Aces Dynasty, A'ja's GOAT Era Begins and The Uncertain Future of the WNBA

The WNBA season has come to an end and the Monday column is taking a look at one last week of women's basketball before we turn our attention towards the NCAA season.

Man, what a summer that was. A dynasty rose, a GOAT staked her claim to the title of best ever, franchises nearly fell apart while a major labor fight is still on the horizon. It’s honestly more content than one mere Five Out column can encapsulate so here at No Cap Space we’ll be spending the next week bringing back some of our favorite stories, underdiscussed narratives and best moments of the year to you.

If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter, now is the time. We’ll be moving straight into our NCAA women’s basketball coverage while still keeping an eye on the CBA, free agency, coaching carousels and so much more in the W. For better or worse, the news never stops especially in the world of women’s hoops.

So, one last time for this WNBA season, onto the column…

1. The Aces Are A Dynasty

I had a semi-controversial take for a bit that the Aces might have served the same historical purpose to the WNBA that the Detroit Pistons of the late 1980’s/early 1990’s did for the NBA. A short-lived dynasty that sort of served as this bridge between eras of basketball. The reality is that the Aces are so much more than a bridge and, by maximizing A’ja Wilson’s window via a third WNBA championship in four years, they’re now on pace to be one of the great dynasties in the history of the league.

For now, let’s assume that a collective bargaining agreement is reached and we walk into next season with no true delay….

Las Vegas has the best player in the world, A’ja Wilson, who is already known as an extremely loyal individual that is now more likely than ever to re-sign with the team in free agency. As long as you have #22, the title window is open. That allows you to not only try and entice one (or even two) more superstars to come to Vegas and bolster a roster that proved they still have the goods, it is likely to keep a lot of bench contributors like Jewell Loyd interested in staying. If the Aces bring back a core of A’ja, Jackie Young and Chelsea Gray, there is more than enough talent available in free agency to build another title team around them. Head coach Becky Hammon proved this postseason that her clipboard acumen is as good as ever.

To win three titles in four years is no small feat. But to win the third one this way, given how this year ended, proves to me that the Aces are special team that deserve pantheon status in the WNBA. We often understate just how hard it is to win multiple championships. There’s the physical exhaustion, the mental blocks, the target on a team’s back. Throughout the course of this season, there were so many moments in which Vegas could have folded. Stars could have asked for trades or Wilson could have started to sow the seeds of doubt about her return in the offseason. Instead, as we’ve heard reported multiple times, Becky Hammon instilled ownership and accountability in her players, specifically her stars, and the team built itself back better from the ground up.

That is the kind of discipline, chemistry and experience that only greats have. I’m not sure what happens with Vegas from here, especially considering the amount of uncertainty around the league itself. But I know this: when we go back and look at the dynasties that have sprung up in the first 30 years of the W’s history, you have to put the Aces in the same conversation as the Minnesota Lynx of the 2010’s or the Houston Comets of the late 1990’s. A dynasty is a dynasty and Vegas, on the heels of this playoff run, deserves that moniker at last.

2. A’ja Wilson Is In Her GOAT Era

I wrote and discussed this a lot last week but it really does feel like A’ja Wilson turned a corner this postseason. In hitting that game winner over Alyssa Thomas and DeWanna Bonner in game three, the Aces superstar planted the flag that she is the standard now. For the past couple of years, there’s been plenty of debate when it comes to who the top player in the WNBA is. A’ja’s fans and proponents would say that if you’re finally coming around on her now, you’re late to the party. But I think, especially given where the Aces were as recently as July of this year, that there were legitimate challengers for the belt. A healthy Caitlin Clark, Napheesa Collier, Alyssa Thomas or even Breanna Stewart (who I’m still not counting as washed just yet).

Then, over the course of the next three and a half months, A’ja silenced everyone. By the end of the regular season, she had clearly pulled ahead in the MVP race and then, throughout the postseason, slammed the door shut on any debate over top player in the league.

WNBA coverage walks a tightrope sometimes. Obsessing and amplifying the failures of players to try and craft or cultivate storylines is a failing of mainstream sports media. Society’s worship of celebrity requires coverage that swings hard in one direction and then another. We’re as liable to build you up as we are to tear you down and typically the minute an athlete slips, we’re quick to apply labels that are algorithm friendly and eyeball attracting. It’s that type of cannibalistic and inhumane ecosystem around athletes that WNBA (and women’s basketball media) has tried to avoid with some unintended consequences of its own.

It’s understandable to be reticent to highlight A’ja Wilson’s experience coming up short over the years because it can potentially open her up to unique levels of criticism from fans or bad faith actors. Whatever layer of racism male athletes can face as a result of critique levied there way, there’s an extra layer of sexism to pile on that for women’s basketball stars like Wilson. In a sport where the humanity and dignity of its athletes are prized and defended above all, writers and media can have an understandably hard time figuring out where the line is on reasonable critique and pile-on. Erring on the side of caution over the years has allowed Wilson the space to grow into her role as best-in-the-league but it’s also taken away some of the pay-off of her ascent.

The fact of the matter is that Wilson has come up short before on the floor. She or her team have failed, as everyone and everything is liable to do from time to time. It isn’t an indictment on her character, her work ethic or her attitude towards the game. But in trying to shield Wilson (and themselves) from criticism on either end of the fan spectrum, we’ve had to memory hole some of the seminal moments of her career that make this victory so important. Those losses, blocks and shortcomings are the *why* of her current GOAT case and argument as the undisputed best player in the league. While she’s statistically always been one of the best, there was a reasonable question in her mid-20’s about having the ‘killer mentality’ that we associate with the greats of their game. This entire postseason, you saw Wilson exhibit the real clutch gene. Not the ability to pull up with time winding down and hit a midrange jumper but the awareness to understand which possessions over the course of the game were pivotal and when she needed to post up, demand the ball and make a big play. When you see those moments play out, with the full knowledge of how she’s grown mentally to get to that place, it is a lot easier to sit there and go, “Yeah, there’s no one better right now”.

The rise to the top of the mountain is over. Now we get to see the fun of her having the belt, being the elder stateswoman of the WNBA and the person that everyone in the league is in awe of. There will be challengers and plenty of talented hoopers who will want to knock her off the pedestal. There are fans that will want the same. But the task for us, as women’s basketball media, going forward is to not fear the most extreme factions of fandoms (which means a lot of us have to be a bit less online and concerned with the opinions of W Twitter’s mainstay cast of characters) and tell these stories for what they are. Because when we get the payoff, it becomes all the more meaningful and lets us appreciate the history that we’re seeing play out as it happens.

That’s what made Wilson’s run this year so special to me and why it should be special to anyone who is a fan of the game and its growth in general.

3. What Were Some of the Best Stories To Remember This Year?

How do we assess this year in the WNBA? What do we define as successful? In a lot of ways, this season felt like a perfect encapsulation of where the sport currently is.

In spite of injury problems, ref discussions and a labor fight about to escalate into a labor war (more on that in a minute), we had some incredible stories that shouldn’t be forgotten as we head into the offseason.

For starters, the Indiana Fever nearly made the WNBA Finals with Aliyah Boston, Kelsey Mitchell and a supporting cast that included a backcourt comprised of hardship contract players. Even without Caitlin Clark, head coach Stephanie White managed to get her team into the mindset of playing fearlessly. Boston stood toe-to-toe with A’ja Wilson and there’s a fair argument that if Kelsey Mitchell doesn’t leave the floor (with what ended up being Rhabdomyolysis) late in the final matchup, Indy may have made the Finals. Not only did it keep a majority of fans interested and engaged late into the season, it also allowed fans that came in with Caitlin Clark to love the team and the other stars on it. Kelsey Mitchell and AB are now household names in a way they weren’t even last year. So while we did miss out on a season of one of the most electric players the league has ever seen, the rising tide did still lift all boats.

In Golden State, we got one of the best stories in sports this summer. A brand new expansion franchise, made up of WNBA castoffs and European league mainstays, made the playoffs in their first year of operation. Ballhalla was a smash-hit and is easily one of the best environments in the game (provided they’re able to keep up the energy of the inaugural season). Natalie Nakase won Coach of the Year and it feels as though the Golden State ownership group is committed to being champions in the long term. Much like Las Vegas, New York and Phoenix, it displayed that owners willing to invest in their team are likelier to find success on the floor. While the labor discussion is being fueled (on the league side) by the idea that the league doesn’t make enough revenue to trigger a share to the players, the actual choices of owners has shown that, in this era of the sport, investment begets larger returns.

Generally, the theme of this season was “return on investment”. TV ratings are up, even without Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese for large swaths of the year. Owners that pushed their chips in on-and-off the floor were rewarded. Teams that committed to visions of the present and future gave their fans something to cheer for. While one could argue that the WNBA season was a mixed bag in terms of player availability, distractions pertaining to the CBA fight and the general problems of physicality/officiating, I tend to believe this was a transformational year in the W. While I’m of the mindset that Clark is a force multiplier who deserves to be placed front and center in many of the conversations around the league, it was heartening to see just how much the WNBA was able to stand on its own without her star power. Not only does it lay to rest a lot of the bad faith critiques around the sport but it also sets the table for the growth to be even higher when she returns.

4. What Comes Next In the WNBA’s Labor Fight?

A work stoppage.

I could glibly end it there but the reality is that the fight is only going to get more interesting as players are able to fully devote time to the battle. There is a chance that the negotiating window can be extended to try and find some common ground but the release of the league’s first offer tells me that the players are genuinely ready to go to the mattresses, so to speak.

$300,000 as a league minimum is a legitimately good start. I would make the argument that that dollar figure is more than enough to get anyone in their early 20’s off to a good start financially regardless of where they live. But the lack of space between a league-minimum and supermax contract ($850,000, according to Front Office Sports), is where the sticking point is, to me. At the end of the day, this still comes down to a lack of trust between the players and the league. In our interview with former NBPA Executive Director Tamika Tremaglio, who helped the WNBPA with their 2020 CBA, she explained how the men calculate their basketball related income (which is the money that is then cut up as part of the revenue sharing agreement). Effectively, the union and league audits the books every year, fights over what is and isn’t considered BRI, and then calculates the revenue share to players based on that. What does that mean? In short, the players union knows what money is being made and lost.

Without the ability to audit the books annually, the players union is effectively being told that the arbitrary revenue number the WNBA needs to reach is never reached, so discussions over a rev share are never triggered. That’s before you get into all the carve outs that see the players walk away with a paltry percentage (9% when all is said and done) compared to their male counterparts (who have a 51-49 split with NBA owners).

What’s more, the WNBA’s brand equity simply isn’t on the same level as men’s leagues. Owners are trying to make the argument to players that if they were to walk away, they wouldn’t be able to succeed the same way but there simply isn’t the same kind of fan allegiance to the Indiana Fever, the brand, the way there is to Caitlin Clark, the individual. It’s a miscalculation that Cathy Engelbert has made via her comments to Napheesa Collier and that the owners are making by not immediately trying to do everything possible to appease the players. It can be hard to wrap one’s head around but we simply haven’t had a labor dispute in pro sports in which the players legitimately have more leverage than a league and its billionaire owners.

Engelbert could fired as the commissioner of the league, for a number of reasons up to and including giving away 16% of the league to a private equity faction that sees this all as another business rather than sports, but it might not change much of the dynamics at play. Ultimately, you’re looking at players who understand what is at stake and it wouldn’t surprise me if everything, from the expansion draft to free agency to the 2026 pro draft, could be at risk of being delayed or stopped completely. For those of you that have read this column and No Cap Space for awhile, you know where I stand on it as a columnist.

The best situation for women’s basketball, in my opinion, is to be totally free of the NBA and their draconian ownership of the W. Every financial metric has shown that the sport can stand on its own and, in order to fully unlock the growth of the game in the long term, there has to be a desire to take a risk and not rely on the safety net once provided (though not necessary, it can be argued) by the NBA. If the players decide that it is a path they’re willing to take, it could change everything about professional women’s sports in this country. We’ll see what the union’s appetite is for that.

5. Another College Season Is On The Horizon…

With all that in mind, we’ve got a big NCAA season ahead. While the injury bug has already started to hit some teams (USC is without JuJu Watkins and, just this morning, South Carolina star Chloe Kitts announced she’s out for the year with an ACL injury), this year promises a whole lot of excitement.

UCLA is back and loaded for bear, as is UConn. South Carolina now has a premier perimeter threat in Ta’Niya Latson, Oklahoma has the number one recruit in the country leading their high flying offense and LSU may have the most electric backcourt in America. That’s before you touch on USC, Notre Dame, Tennessee and the other so-called ‘Tiffany’ brands of women’s college basketball that will be out to prove something this year.

While Five Out will take a break for the next week or two as we re-orient some business/back-end things, stay with us because we’ll be breaking down and previewing every power conference team, the best mid-majors and the players that you need to know heading into November.

The storylines here are as strong as they’ve ever been with a particularly special crop of guards leading the way this season. I’ll have more in the newsletter soon but, if there’s anything to close on in the column, it’s that the basketball never stops. And that’s a damn good thing.