Las Vegas Aces

From the Utah Starzz to the Strip

The franchise now based in Paradise, Nevada began in 1997 as the Utah Starzz, one of the WNBA's eight founding teams, owned by Utah Jazz proprietor Larry H. Miller. Six unremarkable seasons ended with a move to San Antonio in 2003, where the club played as the Silver Stars and then, from 2014, simply the Stars, under Spurs owner Peter Holt. MGM Resorts International bought the team in 2017 and relocated it to Las Vegas for the 2018 season. The rebranded Aces used the first pick of that year's draft on a South Carolina forward, A'ja Wilson, which has turned out to be the single most consequential decision in the franchise's history.

Mark Davis, owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, purchased the club in 2021; Tom Brady acquired a minority stake in March 2023. Nikki Fargas serves as president. Bill Laimbeer coached the early Las Vegas years and took the team to the 2020 Finals before Becky Hammon was hired on 31 December 2021, arriving from the San Antonio Spurs bench as the highest-paid coach in the league. In April 2023 the Aces opened a 50,000 sq ft headquarters and training complex in Henderson, the first building constructed solely for the use of a WNBA team rather than borrowed from an NBA tenant.

Three titles in four years

Hammon's first season produced the franchise's first championship, over the Connecticut Sun in 2022. The Aces retained it in 2023 against the New York Liberty. The third came in 2025 and arrived from an unpromising position: the team was a.500 side in early August before a 16-game winning streak carried it to the second seed. In the first best-of-seven Finals the league has staged, Las Vegas swept the Phoenix Mercury — 89-86, 91-78, 90-88 and then 97-86 on 10 October 2025. Wilson closed it out with 31 points, nine rebounds, four assists and three blocks, and took Finals MVP on averages of 28.5 points and 11.8 rebounds.

The spine of that side remains in place. Wilson came in 2018 as the first overall pick; Jackie Young arrived through the 2019 draft; Chelsea Gray has run the offence since the first title run; Jewell Loyd was acquired by trade in February 2025 and functions as the perimeter shooting the others do not provide. Kelsey Plum, drafted in the final San Antonio year of 2017, was part of the group that first made the team competitive.

A fifth MVP, and a stranger record than that

The league named Wilson its 2026 Most Valuable Player on Thursday 8 October, on 65 of 74 first-place votes and 713 points, ahead of Minnesota rookie Olivia Miles, Indiana's Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Mitchell, and New York's Breanna Stewart. It was her third consecutive MVP, making her the first player in WNBA history to win three in a row, and her fifth overall — the fourth player across the WNBA and NBA to reach five, alongside Michael Jordan and Bill Russell.

The season behind the award was the efficient one rather than the loudest. Wilson averaged 26.2 points and 9.4 rebounds, the second-highest scoring average in league history behind only her own 26.9 in 2024, and she now owns four of the seven biggest single-season scoring totals the WNBA has recorded. She also became the first player in the league to average 25 points while shooting 50 per cent from the field and 40 per cent from three — a combination that, until 2026, nobody had managed at that volume.

Wilson declined the customary pre-game presentation ceremony, preferring to warm up with her teammates ahead of the semi-final against Golden State. "This one here is just a little bit different," she said of the fifth award. "As a girl, you dream so big… you just never imagine that you will be able to check them off."

A title defence that ended in three games

The 2026 campaign ran to 44 games, 22 at home. It opened on Saturday 9 May with a 12:30pm tip against Phoenix at T-Mobile Arena, a Finals rematch staged for the championship ring presentation, and closed with a home date against Los Angeles on 22 September and a final trip to Phoenix on 24 September. Two breaks interrupted it: the All-Star Game in Chicago on 25 July and the FIBA World Cup in Berlin from 4 to 13 September. In Commissioner's Cup play the Aces topped the Western Conference at 6-1 and took the tiebreaker over Minnesota, then lost the championship game to the New York Liberty.

The regular season finished 31-13, third in the West and two games behind the Golden State Valkyries. It was done without NaLyssa Smith, who suffered a non-contact left leg injury in the third quarter of an 88-78 win over the Toronto Tempo in late August and was ruled out for the year; she had been averaging 11.8 points and 6.4 rebounds across 37 games and led the league in field-goal percentage at 63.8. Las Vegas still won its last seven, a run that included Gray scoring 29 points with nine three-pointers from 13 attempts in a 105-89 win over the Portland Fire, tying the WNBA single-game record for threes.

The first round went to form: 102-85 over the Indiana Fever on 27 September, a 99-89 defeat on 29 September, then 94-83 on 1 October. The semi-final did not. Golden State won 71-60 on 4 October, 83-81 on 7 October and 87-77 in overtime on 9 October. The rebounding margins tell most of it — 52-25 in the opener, 30-25, then 43-35 — and the third quarter of the closing game was close to unwatchable from a Las Vegas perspective: seven points on 2-for-16 shooting with a single assist. "The ball was not moving," Hammon said. "You have to have ball movement against that team." Wilson went 6-for-19 for 19 points, missed three fourth-quarter free throws and did not score in overtime. Gray's attempt to win it in regulation missed: "I've hit that shot 1,000 times… just didn't go my way." Loyd had hurt her left leg in the third quarter of Game 1, missed Game 2 and returned for Game 3. It was the first time Las Vegas had been swept out of a series since 2020, and the first under Hammon. The Valkyries, in their second season of existence, went on to the Finals against the Atlanta Dream.

A night at Michelob Ultra

The Aces play nineteen of their twenty-two home dates at Michelob Ultra Arena inside Mandalay Bay, a 12,000-seat room, with three moved up the Strip to T-Mobile Arena for the bigger occasions — in 2026, the 9 May opener among them. The smaller building is the one that defines the experience. The club recorded its 68th consecutive sell-out there, a third straight season of full houses, having become in 2024 the first team in league history to sell out its season tickets outright. Even an April exhibition against Japan on 26 April 2026 drew 10,341.

The format is the standard WNBA one: four ten-minute quarters, roughly two hours from the first tip to the final buzzer. There is no support act in the touring sense — the undercard is the warm-up, the in-arena host and the quarter-break promotions, with a theme-night and giveaway calendar published on 19 March for the 2026 season. Reviewers of the venue consistently single out the sightlines, which are good from almost anywhere because of how compact the arena is, and the between-quarter activities. The recurring complaints are the concession prices, high even by arena standards, and congestion at the entrances and exits.

What the off-season has to fix

Hammon was direct about it after the sweep: "We got to make some moves, try to address our weaknesses." The weakness is not subtle — size and rebounding, against a Golden State side that attacked the glass in all three games and did it again with Kalani Brown, at 6ft 7in, in the Las Vegas starting lineup for the decider. The 2026 draft gave the club little help: Janiah Barker of Tennessee in the second round on 13 April, and Kentucky's Jordan Obi in the third, waived on 4 May.

The economics around any rebuild have changed. The WNBA and the players' union agreed a seven-year collective bargaining agreement in March 2026, running through 2032, which set the 2026 salary cap at $7m — rising above $11m by the end of the deal — with a maximum individual salary of $1.4m, an average of $583,000 and minimums of $270,000 to $300,000 depending on service. It also introduced the first revenue-sharing model in women's professional sport, charter flights, and league-provided housing through 2028. Las Vegas now has to spend that money well rather than simply retain.

There are no Aces fixtures on sale at present. The season ended on 9 October 2026, and the next competitive basketball at Michelob Ultra Arena will be in 2027, with Wilson, Young, Gray and Loyd all still in place and a roster that has been told in public what it needs to add.