LAS VEGAS — A’ja Wilson was deep in thought as she left Michelob ULTRA Arena after the worst loss in franchise history. The Minnesota Lynx had demolished her Las Vegas Aces by 53 points in front of an ABC television audience that Saturday afternoon on Aug. 2. The Aces, 14-14 at the time with less than six weeks left in the regular season, had to pull themselves together for another game at home the next day.
And Wilson knew they needed a gut check.
“At first I thought, ‘I don’t want my teammates to feel everything I’m feeling right now,'” Wilson told ESPN. “Then I realized: How can I help them understand that this is the last time we’re going to feel this way?
“I was dissecting the game in my head: What did [the Lynx] do that we could not do? It was just that they played harder. That’s when I decided to send the infamous text message.”
But not just any text message. It needed to be firm, no punches pulled. And Wilson knew she couldn’t be impulsive in writing it.
“I took time, because I’m an emotional person and I love to wear my emotions on my sleeve,” Wilson said. “There were some lessons in the X’s and O’s of it, but mostly it was just the heart and the feel of the game. People lose, and sometimes even get their ass kicked. But that loss was something we can’t do.”
As Wilson crafted the text, she bounced ideas off boyfriend Bam Adebayo. A two-time Olympic gold medalist and team captain of the NBA’s Miami Heat, he provided the valuable perspective of a fellow pro athlete.
“He’s seen different locker rooms, different situations,” Wilson said. “If he thinks, ‘No, that’s not the right thing to say,’ he’ll definitely tell me. I respect his view a lot. So we kind of go back and forth, and I’m like, ‘Well, how would you handle this situation? What would you feel like?’
“Then that’s when I was like, ‘All right, now I can talk to my teammates and let them know. It’s OK to feel embarrassed. We really should be embarrassed. But this is how we’re moving forward.'”
She sent the text to the group chat with her teammates.
“If you weren’t embarrassed from yesterday, then don’t come into this gym. You’re not needed or wanted here. We need the mindset to shift, because that was embarrassing.”
Wilson smiled as she recalled it all. Now, nearly nine weeks later, the text looks ingenious.
The Aces rebounded Aug. 3 with a 101-77 win over Golden State. They didn’t lose again in the regular season, a 16-game winning streak that propelled Wilson to a record fourth MVP and Las Vegas to the No. 2 seed for the playoffs. After beating Seattle in the first round and Indiana in the semifinals, the Aces will host the Phoenix Mercury in Game 1 of the WNBA Finals on Friday (8:30 p.m. ET, ESPN), seeking a third championship in four years.
“We knew things had to change because what we were doing wasn’t the Aces’ standard at all,” Las Vegas guard Jackie Young told ESPN. “When A’ja says something in the group [text] important like that, everybody responds because everybody respects her. That loss and that message shifted our season.”
Wilson, the WNBA’s No. 1 draft pick in 2018 when a failing franchise in San Antonio found new life in Las Vegas, is the Aces’ bedrock player. Leadership requires her to sometimes say difficult things her teammates need to hear.
And her teammates were a willing audience — none of them felt good about how the Lynx game had gone.
“It’s like that feeling when your parents are really disappointed in you,” Aces point guard Chelsea Gray said. “You’re just ashamed.”
Las Vegas coach Becky Hammon said she knew Wilson’s message would light a fire under the Aces emotionally, so she decided to give them a hands-on approach. Hammon told them they had to start making their own scouting reports for games.
“I needed some way to create accountability and some chatter between them before I ever walked in the room,” Hammon told the media during the Aces’ semifinal series win over Indiana. “Because I felt like I was just repeating myself.”
Hammon joked it was like “convincing your 5-year-old to eat broccoli” by telling them it would make them grow stronger. “Then they’re shoveling in the broccoli,” she said.
Initially, Hammon said she believed the player game plans would be a short-term thing to help unlock the potential she was sure the Aces still had. But like the text, the move worked.
“They were so locked in, they were having team meetings and discussions without me being there,” said Hammon, who played 16 years in the WNBA before going into coaching. “A’ja comes in with a laptop, they’ll kick the coaches out and do their thing, and then we come back in.
“A couple of their game plans, I was like, ‘Alright! I like it. It’s outside the box.’ Tell me why. They have to know their why. I’ll counter some stuff. It’s created a dialogue between them I couldn’t get on my own.”
Despite a season of inconsistency as their core group of five — Wilson, Young, Gray, Kiah Stokes and Kierstan Bell — from both past Las Vegas championship teams adjusted to new players around them, Hammon and Wilson always believed the Aces would get it together.
They didn’t think they would have to hit rock bottom first. But Hammon, in her fourth season as Aces coach, said teams can reach points where they break and stay broken — or break and reassemble even stronger.
Wilson’s leadership and text helped put the pieces back together.
“That’s huge from your leader to always be able to check on every single person,” Aces forward NaLyssa Smith said. “Winning is the standard here, and without accountability, there ain’t going to be winning.
“You would think a person that’s a four-time MVP, with all these accomplishments, would really care just about moving themselves to the top. But [she] pours so much into other people.”
The Aces looked shattered in the immediate aftermath of their blowout loss at home two months ago. Now Las Vegas is playing for another championship.
“In that moment, you see how our character is, you see where our leadership comes from,” Jewell Loyd said. “It was a gut check for us to find our rhythm, find out who we are. Even with games before when we were losing, we couldn’t figure it out or see what was missing.
“That loss and how everybody responded revealed a lot of things beyond just basketball. It was kind of like a mirror for us that allowed us to get going.”