Midway through the third quarter of Game 4 of the 2023 WNBA Finals, with her team down by eight, A’ja Wilson took over.
If ever there were a situation for a team to simply bail on a Finals game, this would have been it. Wilson’s Aces had a 2–1 lead in the best-of-five series against the Liberty. But Las Vegas was battered by injuries: After spending the second half of the season without generational talent Candace Parker, the Aces were now also missing point guard Chelsea Gray and center Kiah Stokes, both of whom had suffered recent injuries, forcing the team to field a starting lineup in Game 4 that it had never used before and that included center Cayla George making her first WNBA start since 2018. Las Vegas had trailed since the first quarter, and, by the third, it wasn’t hard to see a case for packing it up and trying to close it out at home in Game 5.
Wilson felt otherwise.
