SI:AM | The Aces’ Historic First Half

Plus, Jake Paul’s serious approach to boxing.

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. With MLB and the WNBA both on their All-Star breaks, I recommend going out and seeing a movie tonight.

In today’s SI:AM:

👑 The 50 most influential people in sports

🗺️ Big 12 expansion talks

🤹 MLB players’ hidden talents

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The Aces are historically great

The WNBA season has reached the halfway point—and one team is head and shoulders above the rest.

With a win last night over the Sparks on the final day of action before the All-Star break, the Aces improved to 19–2. That’s a .905 winning percentage, which would be the highest in WNBA history if they can keep it up by season’s end.

Las Vegas has been whupping its opponents. Only six of its 19 wins were by fewer than 13 points. Its average point differential of 15.4 is by far the best in the league. (The Liberty are second at 6.6.) That’s because the Aces have both the league’s most prolific offense (94.0 points per game) and its stingiest defense (78.6 points per game).

Not only is the Aces’ offense the best, it’s among the best in the history of the league. The team record for points per game in a season is 93.9 by the 2010 Mercury. But that Phoenix team also had the worst defense in the league (93.8 points per game allowed) and finished 15–19. The Aces are elite on both ends of the floor, and hardly anyone can stop them.

Las Vegas’s success starts with star forward A’ja Wilson, the reigning MVP. She’s averaging 19.9 points and 9.3 rebounds per game (fifth best in the league in both categories) and has the seventh-best field goal percentage at 53.4%. She also leads the league with 144 two-point shots made. In last night’s win over Los Angeles, Wilson had 25 points and 12 rebounds, including 23 and 7, respectively, in the first half alone.

But Wilson isn’t doing it alone. The Aces have a balanced offense with two other players—Kelsey Plum and Jackie Young—averaging more than 19 points per game. Chelsea Gray is averaging 14.8 points per game and a league-best 6.5 assists.

The Aces are already the defending champions but have gotten even better this year in Becky Hammon’s second season as coach and have a chance to become the first repeat WNBA champion since the Sparks in 2002. Their main challenger is another superteam, the Liberty, who are 14–4 at the break, second in the league behind Las Vegas. New York hasn’t had a winning season since ’17 but went through a massive overhaul this offseason, adding Breanna Stewart, Courtney Vandersloot and Jonquel Jones to a roster that already included burgeoning star Sabrina Ionescu. Vandersloot is leading the league with 8.7 assists per game, and Stewart is second in scoring (23.1 points per game).

The Aces will be the focus of Saturday’s All-Star Game. They’re hosting the festivities in Las Vegas and have four players (Wilson, Gray, Plum and Young) participating in the game. It’ll be a fun celebration. However, then it’ll be up to them to keep it rolling over the final two months of the season.

The best of Sports Illustrated

Clay Patrick McBride/Sports Illustrated

• Today’s Daily Cover is Chris Mannix’s story on Jake Paul, from the August issue of Sports Illustrated. That issue is built around The Power List, our list of the 50 most influential people in sports.
• Pat Forde reports on the ground from Big 12 media days in Texas, where commissioner Brett Yormark’s expansion plans are the biggest story line.
• Tom Verducci isn’t surprised that, with an unprecedented free agency looming, Shohei Ohtani became the focus of the MLB All-Star Game without even putting a ball in play.
• Stephanie Apstein spoke with several MLB players about their hidden talents, like Bo Bichette’s tennis game and Spencer Strider’s penchant for impressions.
• Chris Herring breaks down the trade market for Raptors forward Pascal Siakam.
• LeBron James used his speech at the ESPYs to address speculation about when he might retire.
• The Aces played in front of their third sellout crowd of the season Tuesday ahead of hosting this weekend’s WNBA All-Star Game. Seats to the marquee event are still available on SI Tickets starting at $47.

The top five...

… things I saw yesterday:

5. Robert Griffin III’s video of Barry Sanders napping while filming a commercial.

4. Ozzie Albies’s phone taped to the plane window so he could film a time lapse.

3. Kansas State March Madness hero Markquis Nowell’s overly confident three-point attempt for the Raptors in NBA Summer League action.

2. Giants prospect Hayden Cantrelle’s diving catch.

1. Jeremy Rafanello’s stunning volley for Philadelphia Union II.

SIQ

WWE Hall of Famer Sean Waltman, who turns 51 today, was best known under the ring name X-Pac. But he first rose to prominence as The 1-2-3 Kid, a name he earned after a 1993 win on Raw against which prominent wrestler?

• Diesel
• Shawn Michaels
• Bret Hart
• Razor Ramon

Yesterday’s SIQ: On this day in 1931, with a record crowd at St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park that exceeded the number of seats in the stadium by more than 10,000, the Cubs and Cardinals combined to set which MLB record?

• Most doubles in a game
• Slowest nine-inning game
• Fastest nine-inning game
• Most home runs in a game

Answer: Most doubles in a game. In the second game of the day’s doubleheader, the two teams hit a combined 23 doubles. After hitting a total of nine in the first game, the teams combined for 32 doubles over the course of the two games—a record for a doubleheader.

The bustling crowd was the reason for the preposterous number of doubles as fans far exceeded the confines of the stadium. With a recorded 45,715 fans at a stadium that had only about 34,000 seats, the excess fans crowded into the aisles and, eventually, onto the outfield grass, according to a 2017 SABR article by John J. Watkins. Ropes set up to corral the crowd didn’t help much, and spectators raced to pick up any ball hit near them to take home as a souvenir. Any ball hit into the part of the field overtaken by the fans was ruled a ground rule double, so routine fly balls became extra-base hits.

The situation was especially farcical for the second game of the doubleheader. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the fans in left field began the game about 50 to 75 feet behind third base and inched closer as the game wore on, until they were so close in the later innings that “a ball that dropped over the third baseman’s head was gobbled up by the insatiable mob.”

The overflow crowd helped Cardinals outfielder Chick Hafey with the 1931 batting title. As Watkins points out, Hafey, the Giants’ Bill Terry and the Cardinals’ Jim Bottomley finished the season separated by a mere .000721 in the batting race. One of the three hits Hafey picked up in the second game of the doubleheader was a double into the crowd that likely would have been caught if not for the intruders on the grass. That one out would have been enough to drop his batting average from .349 to .347 and give the crown to Terry.