The Aces-Liberty Rivalry Is Getting Spicy and It’s Glorious

Keeping women’s sports tame for the “good of the game” is tiresome. New York and Las Vegas are still chirping and that’s what the WNBA really needs.

The WNBA Finals ended on Wednesday night with the Aces taking down the Liberty in Game 4. But the competition between the two teams is still going.

On Friday, there was plenty of chirping and back-and-forth, both in press conferences and on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The Liberty were holding their end-of-season media availability. The Aces—at home and waiting for their parade—were on social media ready to respond. 

The intensity that New York and Las Vegas showed on the court has continued after the WNBA Finals in the media.  :: John Locher/AP

New York had been asked to answer a quote from Aces guard Kelsey Plum about the make-up of New York’s roster: “As much as they’re a team, they’re not a team, if that makes sense,” she told Yahoo! Sports. “They’re really good individual players, but they don’t care about each other. And you can tell in those moments. They revert back to individual basketball.” Liberty Jonquel Jones called the comment “classless.” Plum first said she had been taken out of context and then acknowledged that she understood how the quote came off. Her teammates jumped in the fray—bringing up hard fouls, trash talk and more from the series.

Welcome! let me catch you up 😂😂 KP made ppl mad (per usual 🤭) and Syd been lighting ppl up 🧨 anddd KB prolly taking shots 🥃 😇 https://t.co/4py7w3XA0r

— A'ja Wilson (@_ajawilson22) October 20, 2023

The details of the various frustrations here are beyond the scope of this column. (If you want a taste, however, you’re best off scrolling through the feed of veteran guard and comic relief Sydney Colson.) But the heart of the matter is clear: This isn’t a budding rivalry between the Aces and Liberty. It’s in full bloom.

Good.

It can be tiresome to litigate everything in the WNBA through the lens of whether or not it’s good for the game. (Imagine if it were allowed to proceed on its own terms without hand-wringing over what every step means for women in sports.) But if the league wants to grow and continue to find new audiences—this is great. Rivalries are good. Story lines are good. Letting the players talk is good. Letting them play to back up their talk is even better. (WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert would be wise to schedule an Aces-Liberty rematch to kick off 2024 right now.) There are stars on both sides. There’s East versus West. There are team owners deeply invested in the success of the product and ready to open their wallets to ensure that. This has all the ingredients of an iconic, long-lasting, intense rivalry.

Which itself pushes back on a cultural standard that positions female athletes primarily as role models for little girls and not as… athletes. Yes, many of them are fantastic role models, too. (And the categories aren’t mutually exclusive!) But there’s a pernicious idea that players should be gracious first and foremost, that they should all get along for the good of the game, that they exist more to encourage future generations rather than to win in their current one. These are professional athletes—highly competitive by nature. These women are going to talk some trash. They can be brash when they win and mad when they lose. They can be intense either way. It’s patronizing to assume otherwise.

This conversation isn’t new. (Have we really forgotten the NCAA championship game from April so soon?) Yet sports media seems to keep getting tangled up in it. There are crucial nuances around race and sexuality and which players are given the benefit of the doubt. But the game ends up worse off when the entire discourse is shunted to the side.

The Aces won the championship—which comes both with bragging rights and with a target on their back. They have a case for being the best team the league has ever seen. They’re the WNBA’s first back-to-back champs in two decades and are anchored by a generational talent in A’ja Wilson. And there’s a chance the roster gets even better from here. Their core is relatively young and will stay intact for next season. The Liberty, meanwhile, will have some choices to make. New York said Friday it will designate reigning MVP Breanna Stewart as a core player so she does not become an unrestricted free agent. But the front office must figure out if it can retain Jones, a key two-way player this season who averaged 11 points and 8 rebounds, who was named MVP in 2021. Both New York and Las Vegas were dubbed “superteams” this year. But they were constructed very differently. This Aces roster has had years to develop and jell. The Liberty came together last offseason in many ways specifically to beat them. (Stewart, Jones and five-time All-Star Courtney Vandersloot were all in their first season with the Liberty.) With another year for New York to potentially catch up? The rivalry should deepen, and there’s a good chance we see these teams battling for a title again next season, which is fantastic.

Just go back to how Plum finished one of her posts Friday on X:

“Our game grew immensely from this series,” she ended her post. “Don’t let this bulls— distract from the biggest win here.”