The Las Vegas Aces are WNBA champions for the first time, beating the Connecticut Sun 78-71 in Game 4 of the Finals. Chelsea Gray was named WNBA Finals MVP.
UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Nearly a year ago, the Las Vegas Aces suffered a season-ending loss that burned within them throughout the winter months all the way into this season. But that feeling was eclipsed Sunday, as the Aces beat the Connecticut Sun 78-71 in Game 4 and won the WNBA Finals 3-1, giving the city of Las Vegas its first major professional sports championship.
“We didn’t like that feeling we had last year,” said Aces guard Chelsea Gray, who was named the WNBA Finals MVP.
It is also a first for the Aces franchise, which started as the Utah Starzz in 1997 when the WNBA made its debut as a league. The team moved to San Antonio in 2003 and appeared in its only previous WNBA Finals in 2008, getting swept. Becky Hammon was a player for San Antonio then; she is head coach for Las Vegas now.
Hammon, 45, is the first in WNBA history to win a title in her first season as a head coach. Van Chancellor won the inaugural WNBA championship in 1997, when all the coaches were in their first seasons with their teams, but he had been a college and high school head coach for more than 30 years before that.
Five NBA rookie head coaches in the past 60 years have won that league’s title. The most recent was Nick Nurse with Toronto in 2019, although he also had been a head coach for several years previously at other levels of basketball.
Hammon was an assistant to Gregg Popovich with the San Antonio Spurs for eight seasons before Aces owner Mark Davis hired her last December to take over the WNBA team. She finished out the season with the Spurs in April, then immediately joined the Aces, who had a preseason game May 1 and their opener May 6.
The Aces tied for the league’s best regular-season record at 26-10 and got the No. 1 seed for the playoffs. They also won the in-season Commissioner’s Cup trophy, and A’ja Wilson was the MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and a first-team All-WNBA performer, along with Aces guard Kelsey Plum.
