Becky Hammon left three of the most recognizable names in women's basketball on the bench Sunday as the Las Vegas Aces faced the New York Liberty in a WNBA Court Origins matchup on ABC. A'ja Wilson, Jackie Young and Chelsea Gray were all inactive. The reason was blunt: the Aces played the Minnesota Lynx at 1 p.m. Saturday, then faced a 12:30 p.m. ET tip in New York the next day.
The gap between the two games was less than 24 hours. Factor in travel across time zones and the window shrinks further. Hammon held her three highest-minute players and did not apologize for it.
"Everybody has a brutal schedule at some point," Hammon said before the game. "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. "We're going to always err on the side of health and safety for our players. 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, crisscrossing 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."
The scheduling decision drew added scrutiny because the Liberty had not played in four days heading into Sunday. Las Vegas was operating on a back-to-back. The league put the game on national television anyway, on ABC, a platform meant to showcase the sport at its best. Without Wilson, Young and Gray, viewers did not get the matchup they were sold.
Hammon's point about the NBA holds up against the record. The NBA's collective bargaining agreement restricts scheduling teams in back-to-backs with fewer than 24 hours between games in certain circumstances. The WNBA operates under a different framework, and the league's schedule-makers applied a different standard here. Hammon's argument is that the standard should be the same.
Sunday's game was billed as a Court Origins matchup—a league-designated event tied to the history and culture of the game. For Hammon, the setting carried personal weight. She spent time with the Liberty early in her playing career, signing with New York in May 1999 after going undrafted. She backed up starting point guard Teresa Weatherspoon in her rookie season and eventually took over as the team's starting point guard after the 2003 season, serving as co-captain alongside Vickie Johnson and Crystal Robinson in 2004.
Hammon's WNBA career ran 16 seasons in total, split between the Liberty and the San Antonio Silver Stars. She earned six WNBA All-Star selections and four All-WNBA selections. She was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2023.
She moved into coaching with the San Antonio Spurs in 2014, becoming the first female full-time assistant coach in a major American sports league. She became the first woman to serve as head coach in the NBA Summer League and the first to serve as acting head coach during an NBA regular-season game. She left San Antonio in 2021 to take the Aces job and became the first WNBA coach to earn over $1 million per year.
Since arriving in Las Vegas, Hammon has built the Aces into one of the most dominant programs in WNBA history, winning three championships in her first four seasons and earning WNBA Coach of the Year in her first season.
Sunday put two threads of her career in the same building—the Liberty franchise where she started and the Aces franchise she has defined. The game carried history. The schedule made it smaller than it needed to be, and Hammon said so clearly before tip-off.
