Culture
How the Las Vegas Aces guards came to life to stave off elimination
LAS VEGAS — Becky Hammon has said all season that she has been waiting for the game when all of her Las Vegas guards click on all cylinders.
In 2023, the three-headed monster of Chelsea Gray, Jackie Young and Kelsey Plum was an unstoppable unit most nights, culminating in a WNBA Finals series when the perimeter trio convincingly outplayed its New York Liberty counterparts, even without Gray in the closeout win.
Fast forward a season, and Las Vegas has been mixing and matching. Despite the addition of Tiffany Hayes to an already talented guard group, the Aces have been lucky to get two of their quartet to pop off in any given game. If Young is scoring well, that often portends an off night for Plum, as was the case in Game 2 of the WNBA semifinals series against the Liberty when she notched 17 points and 6 points, respectively. Plum was on her A-game in the series opener with 24 points, but then Gray stumbled to four points and one assist in the loss.
“We’ve had two on a night have good nights,” Hammon said. “A’ja (Wilson has) been ridiculous, is ridiculous, she will continue to be ridiculous. But then after that, it’s all those other little pieces.”
On Friday, Hammon was finally dealt her long-awaited hand with four Aces delivering peak performances. Five players scored double digits in Friday night’s 95-81 Aces’ victory to stave off elimination and ensure Game 4 on Sunday to keep their three-peat championship quest alive.
Aces NOT done yet ♠️
After facing elimination for the first time since 2021, the Las Vegas Aces force a Game 4 against the Liberty in the Semi-Finals! Jackie Young led the charge with 24 points 🔥
Final Score: 95-81#WelcometotheW | #WNBAPlayoffs presented by @Google pic.twitter.com/fDGNmr66M1
— WNBA (@WNBA) October 5, 2024
“Everything was just on point really with everybody,” Hammon said. “I thought that was probably our most complete game of the season. It’s the game I’ve been waiting for and believing in.”
The effort for the Las Vegas guard group started on defense. Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu had been the best perimeter player in the series, dicing up the Aces’ pick-and-roll coverages and scoring at will from all levels in addition to setting up her teammates for open shots.
Hammon said after Game 2 that she wanted to get to a C-plus effort defending Ionescu because the defense hadn’t even been average in the first two games at Barclays Center. What that meant was simplifying the scheme and making it exceedingly clear what the principles were on Ionescu and which Liberty players to help off of.
Ionescu broke free of the defense on a couple occasions in the first quarter to get to her floater, but she wasn’t able to convert. Once the Aces tightened up coverages, Ionescu was repeatedly trapped far from the basket, unable to turn the corner or find outlets in the half court. She had as many assists as turnovers (five) and submitted the lowest-scoring playoff output of her career with four points on 1-of-7 shooting.
Hammon’s grade Friday? A-plus, no notes.
“She’s been playing great, so of course, they want to make it hard for her,” Liberty coach Sandy Brondello said. “They put her in action down the other end, they were being really aggressive in the pick-and-rolls this time. She wasn’t able to get downhill. It was more of a hard hedge and very active with their hands getting deflections.”
Without Ionescu running the show, the Liberty devolved into isolation basketball, a style of play incongruous with the movement and screening that defined them during the regular season, when they had the league’s best record.
Meanwhile, the Aces’ defense propelled them into the offensive rhythm that was lacking earlier in the series.
“We always say our defense drives our offense,” Hayes said. “We know that we thrive on the defensive end, and even though we’re a little bit smaller, we got some dogs out there, and we’re able to get a lot done.”
New York’s starting perimeter trio of Ionescu, Leonie Fiebich and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton combined for 21 points. Young exceeded that on her own with 24. Plum added 20, Gray chipped in 10, and Hayes provided 11 off the bench.
Their collective might was on full display during a game-defining 16-0 run in the third quarter, as the Aces extended a four-point lead to 20. Plum got things started with a drive to the hoop off the dribble, then found Gray for the next score in early offense on a trailing 3-pointer. Gray followed that with a beautiful lob over the top to Wilson as Breanna Stewart fronted her in the post to push the lead to double digits.
Then it was Hayes’ turn. She faked left and drove to her weak hand, leaving Nyara Sabally in the dust. Plum had a 3-pointer off an offensive rebound, hit a technical free throw, and then added another 3-pointer off a drive-and-kick from Hayes. Fourteen points and three assists came from the guard group, while the Liberty missed nine shots and committed seven turnovers in that stretch.
“I think our attention to detail defensively was super sharp,” Gray said. “They’re a good team but you want to make them take tough looks, and it was the same with Sabrina. We were just attentive to detail coming off the pick-and-roll, making sure she’s not comfortable. And it all starts in the defensive end so we can flow into our offense a little bit better.”
The Aces know that their advantage has to come in the backcourt, given the Liberty have two frontcourt MVPs in Stewart and Jonquel Jones. Wilson’s excellence is consistent, but the perimeter has been the separating factor during the last two title runs.
Wilson was confident that the desperation of the situation would bring out the best in her teammates. “One thing I know for sure is that sometimes when our backs are against the wall, that’s when we really break loose and shine the brightest,” she said.
A 14-point victory that was more lopsided than the margin would suggest, validating Wilson’s belief. The Aces finally executed defensively and set the tone. Their pace was infectious on offense, involving their guard quartet for the first time this season, enabling Las Vegas to play at least one more game and remain in pursuit of a three-peat.
“We’re the Aces,” Hammon said. “We’re not going to fold.”
(Photo, from left, of Chelsea Gray, Jonquel Jones and Kelsey Plum: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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