Aces Bench A'ja Wilson and Two Other Starters for Nationally Televised Game, Coach Blames WNBA Scheduling

The Las Vegas Aces walked into Barclays Center on Sunday for a nationally televised showdown with the New York Liberty and left three of their best players on the bench for the whole game. Not just the start. The whole thing.

A'ja Wilson, the league's four-time MVP. Chelsea Gray, a six-time All-Star. Jackie Young, a five-time All-Star. All three sat out entirely as head coach Becky Hammon rolled out Jewell Loyd, Dana Evans and Brianna Turner instead, according to Fox News. The Liberty responded by dismantling the reigning champs 111-71.

The schedule is the actual problem here

This wasn't a random tanking stunt. The Aces played the Minnesota Lynx in Minneapolis on Saturday, losing 98-87 with Wilson, Gray and Young all playing heavy minutes, according to larrybrownsports. Then they flew roughly 1,200 miles to New York and arrived at their hotel less than 12 hours before a 12:30 p.m. ABC tip-off, per ground.news.

Hammon didn't hold back.

"Everybody has a brutal schedule at some point," Hammon said, per WNBA reporter Myles Ehrlich, as reported by larrybrownsports. "I don't even think they do this in the NBA though, where it's less than 24 hours. You can check, and I'm pretty sure that's not even legal on the NBA side."

She kept going during her pregame media session. "We're going to always err on the side of health and safety for our players," Hammon said. "Not going to put them in any kind of jeopardy to get hurt when we've been expending a lot of energy and traveling a lot of miles back and forth, criss-crossing the country. So it is what it is. I know these are big matchups, and these are what people want to see. But you should ensure that it's fair."

Is this actually against the rules?

Hammon's comparison to the NBA is more complicated than a clean gotcha. Awfulannouncing pointed out that former NBA scheduling architect Patrick Harrel told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in February 2024 that the NBA works to guarantee 22 hours between games and tries to avoid two-time-zone travel between matchups. That's a real, documented internal standard on the NBA side.

Fox News noted the WNBA's new collective bargaining agreement, reached before this season, includes language committing the league to "make reasonable and good faith efforts" to provide at least 20 hours between scheduled start times. If the gap here really was under 24 hours coast to coast, Hammon has a point about whether the league lived up to its own standard.

Where this gets fair to the league office: nobody is accusing the WNBA of deliberately screwing the Aces to sabotage a marquee ABC broadcast. Scheduling a 168-game, cross-country season with a fraction of the NBA's infrastructure and private jets is difficult. Awfulannouncing's Brendon Kleen wrote that "the WNBA does not have a problem with stars and teams punting on the regular season" but that "scheduling has consistently been an issue for years" for commissioner Cathy Engelbert's office.

This isn't load management as tanking

Fox News framed the benching as "what looks like" a scheduling protest. Entering Sunday, Gray and Young hadn't missed a single game all season, and Wilson had only missed two. This wasn't a pattern of stars ducking big games. It was one specific back-to-back that happened to fall on a national broadcast.

What ESPN and ABC actually got

The irony is real. ESPN's broadcast team had already been bracing for a depleted marquee matchup this week, after Caitlin Clark drew an automatic one-game suspension from her eighth technical foul of the season, a suspension the league later rescinded, according to awfulannouncing. Clark ended up playing. The Aces stars didn't.

The Liberty, now sitting at 19-13 in the Eastern Conference with a three-game home winning streak, didn't need the gift. New York coach Sandy Brondello reportedly warned her team not to take the shorthanded Aces lightly regardless, per ground.news. They blew Las Vegas out anyway.

The open question is whether the league changes anything. The CBA language on rest windows is described as a "reasonable and good faith effort," not a hard guarantee, which gives Engelbert's office room to call this an isolated scheduling collision rather than a violation. Whether the Aces or the players' union push for a firmer, enforceable rest-window rule before next season's schedule gets built is the thing to watch.