A’ja Wilson’s college coach, the legendary Dawn Staley, once told her that great teams have a certain vibe. The best ones have a certain sound.
After the Aces swept the -Mercury for their third championship in four years, they brought a new sound to the news conference: the jingle of Wilson’s pink tambourine.
When asked about it, Wilson smiled.
“You know me,” she said. “I’m a Southern girl. And in the Baptist church, when you heard the tambourine, you knew the word was powerful.”
She shook it to demonstrate.
“This is letting everyone know that the word was powerful for us today and this whole season.”
Her timing was perfect. Through the news conference, Wilson rattled the tambourine for comedic effect — punctuating key points from her teammates, Chelsea Gray, Jackie Young, and Jewell Loyd.
Wilson knew the tambourine was funny. But she also believed it meant something — a symbol of the joy they felt in that moment.
And it captured a truth that had rung throughout the series. The Mercury were -serious, worthy opponents. But the Aces had a more memorable sound.
Becky Hammon’s bunch arrived at the Finals brimming with stories from their winding season — one that started flat and then caught fire at the right time. To build trust, Hammon put them through blindfolded egg exercises, showed them slideshows of their younger selves, even prescribed movies about fighter pilots.
It sounded like they’d been to a transformative sleepaway camp — the kind that could inspire both awe and a little snark.
The snark came from their excess of talent: did a team with the best post player (Wilson), the best guard (Young) and an all-time great point guard (Gray) really need trust falls and egg races to succeed?
But the awe, which ultimately won out, came from the nature of their bond.
Hammon cried talking about how much she loved being their coach and their friend. Gray, Wilson and Young all bowed their heads. Wilson, ever the comedian, held up a towel so she wouldn’t have to see Hammon cry — but their giggling and whispering stopped completely. You could see they loved their coach, too.
These were the Aces. They knew each other so well it could fool you into thinking the sweep was inevitable.
Before Game 4, during warmups, Wilson and Gray danced together to ‘‘Not Like Us,’’ giving the night a kind of predetermined feel. Were these best friends, loose and laughing with a 3-0 lead, really about to let one slip?
And though most of the recaps will make it sound inevitable, it wasn’t. The only game the Aces won convincingly was Game 2. Every other one, the Mercury hung around within a possession. Even in Game 4, down their leading scorer, Satou Sabally, they cut it to six in the final minutes.
When the buzzer sounded, Mercury star Kahleah Copper gathered her team and told them to take note of the moment — to notice how it felt to hear the Aces celebrating on their home floor and to let that sound fuel them.
After they left the floor, another sound emerged — the reverberation of Lynx star Napheesa Collier’s words from a week earlier.
Locked in tense labor negotiations and fed up with years of what she called tone-deaf leadership that ignored key issues like officiating, Collier had publicly roasted commissioner Cathy Engelbert.
That frustration had been simmering all season, waiting for a stage this big.
As the trophy ceremony began, boos rained down on the commissioner. Yikes flashed across the Aces’ faces.
The commissioner mustered a few smiles at the appropriate times, but she looked genuinely solemn in her pajama-style suit. Her “stakeholders,” as she might call them — Aces owner Mark Davis and his star, Wilson — barely acknowledged her. When she handed Wilson the Finals MVP trophy, Wilson grabbed it and ran it back to her team without so much as a glance in her direction.
The shots at the league kept coming.
After the game, Mercury coach Nate Tibbetts, a longtime NBA assistant finally said what many others had been circling: WNBA officiating is worse than the NBA’s.
“I came from a league where there was real direction and growth and continuity with the [officiating] staff,” Tibbetts, who’d been ejected from Game 4, said. “There’s change in [the WNBA]. The product is continuing to get better. The officiating has to grow with the league.”
And as if that weren’t enough, before tipoff the league’s latest negotiating position had leaked. The offer still capped the players’ maximum salary below $1 million — in a structure the players insist is not true revenue sharing.
There they were, all the dramatic elements of the season laid bare.
The officiating mess.
The commissioner walking the plank.
The lowball from the league.
A reckoning of biblical proportions felt near.
To close the news conference, players were asked about the commissioner — and about the season’s biggest theme: their value.
The room rumbled with anticipation, and Gray chose her words carefully.
“When you have great players, you need to treat ’em like that,” she said. “When you have players at the forefront of change, you have to pay them like that. Because there’s no league without the players.”
The word was powerful.
The tambourine shook.
The 2025 WNBA season was over. God only knows when another will begin.