The Las Vegas Aces Have Lost Their Edge

A second straight loss to the Liberty has the back-to-back WNBA champions on the verge of playoff elimination—and much of it is their own doing.

The Liberty stifled the Aces on Tuesday to take a 2–0 series lead. / Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images

Of all the reasons to call a timeout, all those potential emergency brakes pulled in the name of rest or clarification or discussion, Becky Hammon has one that she particularly hates. This is not a kind of timeout she has needed very often in her three seasons coaching the reigning champion Las Vegas Aces. But it was one that she needed in the WNBA semifinals against the New York Liberty on Tuesday.

That would be a timeout called simply because she is so frustrated with her players that she has no other choice.

In the middle of the second quarter, Hammon called for time after watching the Aces allow an easy layup, commit a turnover and then allow one more layup, a tangle of mistakes bleeding into one another. She laid into her group. But it did nothing to change their course: The next three baskets they allowed were all more layups. And it was just one among dozens of similarly frustrating sequences throughout the evening. The Aces lost to the Liberty, 88–84, to fall behind in the series 0–2. A frenzied comeback attempt fell short. That put their season on the brink: No WNBA team has ever come back from such a deficit in a best-of-five. It also came with a withering assessment of their performance from Hammon.

“We just can’t have those lulls,” Hammon said. “I can't call enough timeouts.”

She kept going.

“Nor do I want to call timeouts because I’m livid with my own team for”—she made the next word into a production all its own, stretched and stressed and suffused with an intense, palpable disgust —“layups.”

She was not wrong to treat the concept with such disdain. Las Vegas did, in fact, have a major problem allowing layups to New York on Tuesday. The Liberty scored 44 points in the paint to the Aces’ 24. And that was just one of their self-inflicted wounds. They also missed seven free throws. They gave up 20 points off turnovers in the first half alone. (While they did a much better job of protecting the ball in the second half, at that point, the damage had already been done.) There was no one to be frustrated at but each other. 

“Let me be mad at the refs. Let me be mad at the New York Liberty. Like, I don't want to be mad at us,” Hammon said. “And that's what it was. It was Aces versus Aces tonight. We were beating ourselves.”

For all of the Aces’ self-imposed problems in Game 2, of course, there was also the issue of facing a squad as deep and talented as the Liberty. The No. 1 seed has been playing some of its most complete basketball of the year during this series. New York guard Sabrina Ionescu is on a star-hanging run. (She scored 24 with nine rebounds and five assists on Tuesday.) She’s complemented by former MVP bigs Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones, as well as a remarkably strong bench, which offers the ability to switch up and present different looks. It should be hard right now for anyone to beat New York. It looks all but impossible for Las Vegas.

This continues a maddening few months for the Aces. Last season saw them become the first WNBA team in 20 years to repeat as champions. It set Las Vegas up as heavy favorites to go back-to-back-to-back. It returned its entire core for this year while making some modest upgrades to its bench. There was no reason to doubt the chances for continued dominance. Yet the season has instead been a slog. The Aces stumbled their way into a No. 4 seed. While MVP forward A’ja Wilson played some of the most impressive basketball of her career this season, it could feel like she was doing so out of sheer necessity, with her teammates struggling to cohere around her. Every aspect of their game has seemed disjointed. Hammon doesn’t appear to trust the bench much beyond veteran Tiffany Hayes. For all the obvious talent on this roster, there is now consistent, intractable frustration.  

Wilson's 24 points were not enough for Las Vegas to even the series. / Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images

Hammon was candid on Tuesday: While the personnel was largely the same, this group had always seemed very different from last year, both in play and in temperament. 

“The feel was different from the jump,” Hammon said. “This is why three-peating is hard. Let's be real—like, the whole league has been pissed off for the last eight months, and my players are in commercials and this and that, being freaking celebrities, and you get distracted. That's why it's hard. Because human nature is distracting.”

The players in the room did not say much to dispute that damning characterization. They did say they believed they all could individually relocate that edge for Game 3 on Friday. 

“If you don't understand what's at stake come Friday, there's nothing we could say,” said Alysha Clark. “Just leaning into that, our veteran presence, understanding what is at stake, and it's either we win and continue the series, or we don't. And that in and of itself is enough to find your own edge.”