
Aces center A’ja Wilson is already well on her way to a plaque in the Basketball Hall of Fame, having ended four of her eight WNBA seasons with an MVP award in hand. Her Time Athlete of the Year award Tuesday was a richly deserved one.
However, Wilson is a WNBA star in 2025, so it was probably inevitable in hindsight that she would be asked about the key driver of the league's 2020s-era growth—Fever guard Caitlin Clark. Speaking with TIme's Sean Gregory, Wilson—without slighting Clark—expressed her belief that popular lionization of the 2024 Rookie of the Year's impact on women's basketball overlooked the contributions of the Black women who helped build the WNBA.