Aces still trying to find 'another gear' as playoffs approach with three-peat on the line

Las Vegas head coach Becky Hammon is a believer in obeying the basketball gods. For two seasons, the Aces were rewarded with back-to-back championships as the WNBA’s most consistent, dominant team. They were inevitable. Otherworldly.

This 2024 Aces iteration isn't that.

“I feel like a lot of our frustration comes from being average,” Hammon said following the Aces' 90-71 win over Chicago on Tuesday. “We had a point where I just told it to them how it is and kind of since that point, it’s been just a different gear.”

Las Vegas, accustomed to going full throttle, has been all over the gearbox this season. Inconsistency and average play won’t plow a path to a three-peat in October. The Aces' issues throughout the season have varied, from missing a key starter to a middling defense and the rest of the league specifically building up to take them down. The month-long Olympic break that wasn’t much of a breather for their superstars didn’t help.

The Aces have been better of late. The 19-point victory over Chicago tied for their second-largest margin of the season. It was their best back-to-back winning margins (37) since the first days of July (40) that included the team's highest winning margin of the season (21 vs. Washington). In 2023, the Aces won by 21 or more in 12 of 40 games.

The “but” is that their current three-game winning streak has come against fellow average-or-worse teams (Atlanta, Phoenix, Chicago). The upcoming stretch will tell us more about their postseason outlook with a four-game road trip through the East: at Connecticut (24-9), at New York (28-6) and two games in Indiana (18-16). The Aces finish out their difficult season-ending schedule at Seattle (20-14) and at home against Connecticut and Dallas (9-24).

“I think we’re trending in the right direction, but, I don't know, maybe it’s just my utter stubborn belief in these women that I just think we’re getting there,” Hammon said. “But I still know we’ve got another gear.”

Is it enough to speed past the rest of the league again?

Besides A'ja Wilson, starters haven't hit their stride

Las Vegas entered the season as overwhelming Finals favorites because of their core four. A’ja Wilson, Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young and Chelsea Gray are focused on building a legacy in the desert. Kiah Stokes, the starting center for the last two championships, also returned.

The play of Wilson in 2024? Phenomenal. Historic, actually. She’s on pace for the league’s first 1,000-point season, averaging a record-breaking double-double of 27.5 points and 12.1 rebounds per game. The two-time MVP dropped a 40-piece twice. Both times she shot north of 70%. In one, she also brought down 17 rebounds. But in the other, the Aces lost to one of the worst teams in the league.

The remarkable play of one does not a championship bring. And while Wilson is exceeding career marks, the rest of the team hasn't been playing up to the statistical levels that dominated the league last season with a 15.3 net rating. Though the Aces rank a close second in offensive rating (106.4) this season, it’s nearly seven points lower than 2023. And their defense is, well, overall average (100.7 ranks sixth) after throttling most of the league last year (97.7).

Gray, who missed the first 12 games (the Aces went 6-6) rehabbing the foot injury she sustained in Game 3 of the Finals, has shown bright spots since her pre-Olympics return, but isn’t reaching her 2023 or 2022 level. She’s averaging 7.8 ppg in 21 games, down from 15.3 in 2023, and shooting at lower clips in all areas. The veteran point guard still looks hampered by the injury and said she’s focused on being the best version of herself in September, “not in May and June.”

Plum and Young carried more ball-handling duties in Gray’s absence, impacting the team's early offensive output. Plum’s shooting percentages are near career-lows and Young’s have also dipped. She’s shooting 34.2% from 3, down from 44.9% and 43.1% the previous two years as she improved her game from beyond the arc. Stokes has never been a key offensive weapon for Las Vegas and even her subdued numbers are lower this year (1.4 points and 4.7 rebounds).

Hammon began playing with the starting lineup last month, inserting reigning Sixth Player of the Year Alysha Clark, leading Sixth Player candidate Tiffany Hayes and center Megan Gustafson for better matchups over the last six games. She’s always relied heavily on her starters, but when they aren’t at otherworldly levels together, depth is paramount. If there were a time to shake it up and send a jolt through the entire roster, it’s now with a playoff spot clinched and seven games to play around against the league’s best.

Olympic ‘break’ doesn’t do much for the Aces

A full month after the All-Star game, and with an Olympic gold medal secured, Wilson sent out a tweet: “Woohooo let all star/ Olympic break begin.”

The between-the-lines message: there was no All-Star/Olympic break for the MVP contender, nor for the rest of the core four. Wilson, Gray, Plum and Young jetted directly from Phoenix to Paris to play six games alongside their most talented WNBA opponents, such as Liberty forward and reigning MVP Breanna Stewart.

That in itself is a major adjustment within a season. The roles they played for the Aces weren’t going to be the same for Team USA and vice versa.

“As athletes, we have to kind of perfect compartmentalizing, like, all the time,” Gray said on a video call days before the Aces opened the second half of their season. “We have to put our [WNBA] season on hold and like, 'OK, now how do I get the best shot for Stewie?' OK, put that on hold. 'How do I take away the best shot for Stewie?' So I think it’s just in our nature to compartmentalize and going to the next thing. That’s what an Olympic season looks like.”

In their first game back, the Aces lost to Stewart and Finals runner-up New York despite opening the post-break schedule later than others, and went 2-4 to restart. It served as the official shift and shake-up of league supremacy. The league-leading Liberty have been the most consistent team throughout the entire season, even while key starters missed various games with injury. Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu were the only starters to play in the Olympics.

Neither the Sun nor the Lynx, both above the Aces in the standings, missed a large number of starting players. They could also practice together during the break, which is what has made the Fever and Caitlin Clark so dangerous despite their current No. 6 seeding.

Instead, the Aces are pushing through a long season full of draining expectations and fatigue. In 2021, the most recent Olympic season, the Storm led the league at the break (16-5), one game ahead of Las Vegas. They finished 5-6 — the worst run of any pre-Olympic playoff team except the Liberty — and fell to fourth.

Out of this year's break, Gray called it a “pedal to the metal” type feeling in the run to the postseason. But the Aces have had trouble doing that all year.

'Playing your best basketball at the right time'

Are the Aces a lock to reach the Finals? No. But should they be counted out yet? Also, no.

The Olympian-level core four are still here and it’s easy to forget because of their sheer domination last year that this group didn’t bulldoze teams in 2022, either. The 2022 Aces went 26-10 with the league’s best offensive rating, seventh-best defense and third-ranked net rating. That season and this are more comparable.

It was tight at the top in 2022 with the Aces (who won the tiebreaker), Sky (26-10) and Sun (25-11). Their semifinal series against No. 4 Seattle was tied 1-1 when Young’s buzzer-beater sent Game 3 into overtime. The Aces pulled it out and won the series. The Finals against the Sun was also closer than most may remember. Connecticut led by two with 2:22 left in Game 4 and the sides stayed within a possession until the Aces pulled away in the final minute.

New York built its superteam to take out the Aces and nearly did last season, but squandered away the opportunity at Barclays Center in Brooklyn when Gray and Stokes missed Game 4. Playing the first two games of a best-of-three series in Las Vegas, where the Aces were 19-1 in the regular season, put them in a hole early.

Now the Aces are fighting to have any home-court advantage. They’re 1.5 games up on Seattle (20-14) for the No. 4 seed. The top four seeds host the first round.

“I think I’m beyond a little bit of the host spot this year,” Hammon said. “I think we can beat anyone anywhere, and we can lose to anyone anywhere. Vegas or somewhere else. It hasn’t been the home cooking that it was last year.”

The Aces are 11-7 at home and 10-5 on the road. If the season ended Friday morning, Las Vegas would host the No. 5 Storm rather than play two on the road in Seattle. Hammon isn’t concerned with where they’re at record-wise. She's focused on reaching that 2023 dominant gear she knows is there.

“For me, it’s been my experience that when you try to play with the basketball gods and manipulate the situation and you want to land here so that this doesn’t happen, or you want to land here — it’s whatever,” Hammon said. “I think you just want to be playing your best basketball at the right time of the year and that’s more of my focus than where we may end up in the standings.”