The Las Vegas Aces are the WNBA's first true superteam — and they have the banners to prove it. The franchise began in 1997 as the Utah Starzz, moved to San Antonio in 2003, and spent a decade and a half as a respectable afterthought. Then Raiders owner Mark Davis bought the team in 2018, moved it to Las Vegas, and everything changed. The Aces became the league's glamour franchise overnight: big market, big money, big ambitions, and a roster built to dominate.
What defines the Aces is the 2022–2023 peak — back-to-back championships that announced a dynasty. The 2022 team, coached by Becky Hammon in her first season on a WNBA sideline, beat the Connecticut Sun for the franchise's first title, giving Las Vegas its first major professional sports championship. The 2023 team went 34–6 and beat the New York Liberty in a Finals billed as a superteam showdown — and won it, cementing the Aces as the team of the era.
The engine is A'ja Wilson, and the superlatives are running out. The three-time WNBA MVP (2020, 2022, 2024 — unanimous in 2024) is the most complete player of her generation: Defensive Player of the Year, Finals MVP, Olympic gold medalist, and the face of the franchise's Vegas identity. The 2026 season may have been her finest regular season yet: a league-best 26.2 points per game to go with 9.4 rebounds and a career-best 3.2 assists, 1,073 total points, and the Associated Press' WNBA Player of the Year award for an unprecedented third consecutive season — her fourth overall, breaking her tie with Breanna Stewart for the most in the award's history. She is bidding to be named WNBA MVP for the third straight season and the fifth time overall, which would stand alone in league history. Around her, Hammon built a juggernaut: Chelsea Gray, the "Point Gawd," whose playoff shot-making became legend; Jackie Young, the two-way star; Jewell Loyd, the veteran scorer; all of them sacrificing touches for the collective. The Aces played beautiful, unselfish, devastating basketball at their peak — and the peak keeps extending.
The 2025 championship — the franchise's third — made the Aces the defending champions entering 2026, and the title defense has been appointment viewing. Las Vegas finished 31-13 and locked up the No. 3 seed, closing the regular season with a 100-82 win over Phoenix and celebrating its 68th consecutive home sellout along the way. The first round brought a rematch with the sixth-seeded Indiana Fever, the team Vegas had eliminated in an overtime Game 5 of the 2025 semifinals — and the series delivered the full Aces experience. Wilson opened with 38 points and 16 rebounds in a 102-85 Game 1 rout. Game 2 in Indianapolis brought the chaos: after a foul on Sophie Cunningham, a fan stood and pointed at Wilson; she took exception, the fan was briefly removed and then allowed back, Wilson took a technical, the league handed down no further punishment, and Cunningham trolled her on TikTok. Wilson's answer came in Game 3: 36 points, 10 rebounds, 11-of-18 shooting in a 94-83 closeout — "I don't want my season to be over. I don't want to go home," she said afterward. "When you got that mindset in these elimination games, every possession counts." Gray added 23, Young 18, and the Aces did it with essentially a seven-player rotation, Gray and Young playing all 40 minutes after Stephanie Talbot was a late scratch and Loyd stepped seamlessly into the starting lineup.
Asked afterward about comparisons between this Fever team and her 2022 champions — both stacked with former No. 1 picks, both leading the league in scoring — Hammon brushed it off with typical bluntness: "It's different." She's right. The 2022 Aces averaged 90.4 points per game; this Fever team averaged 96. The Aces' greatness isn't about the numbers. It's about October.
Vegas embraced the team completely. Michelob Ultra Arena at Mandalay Bay became one of the league's toughest road environments, and the Aces became part of the city's championship fabric alongside the Golden Knights — proof that Las Vegas, once considered too transient for pro sports loyalty, could be a genuine sports town.
Now comes the semifinal: a best-of-five against the second-year Golden State Valkyries, the expansion darlings who just won their first playoff series, opening Sunday at Chase Center on NBC. The Aces are chasing a fourth championship in five years — a run that would put them alongside the early-2000s Sparks and the Comets' four-peat as the greatest dynasties the league has ever seen.
The rivalries are the league's marquee matchups: the Liberty, the superteam foil; the Seattle Storm, the old dynasty; the Phoenix Mercury out west; and now the Fever, the young challengers who keep running into the wall. The Aces' story is about what happens when ambition meets resources meets talent — a franchise that went from afterthought to empire in five years, and set the standard every other team is now chasing. The target is on their back. That's exactly where they want it.
