LAS VEGAS — “There’s a lot of options, right?” Becky Hammon said. “And I only can play five at a time.”
This is not the sort of comment the Aces head coach would have made about either of the previous two rosters that she took to the WNBA Finals. Although the 2022 and ’23 championship Las Vegas teams had plenty of virtues, “depth” was never really among them, and no one would have ever believed otherwise. That was a tradeoff worth making then: If those squads were notably top-heavy, it meant they could generally win by sheer force, and that worked for them often enough. But the rate of change has sped up in the WNBA. The game shifted enough in the last few years to prompt some alterations for Hammon and the Aces. They needed to give themselves more options.
