The Las Vegas Aces prove a worthy villain as the first repeat WNBA champion in 21 years

NEW YORK — The Las Vegas Aces started the WNBA season as a superteam and finished it as something even stronger.

It’s one thing to win a title in a given year, and to spend the previous years building toward it. It’s another to start a season as the reigning champion, then go 34-6 in the regular season, finish first by two games, win your first seven playoff games, and then lose not just the game after that, but two starters to injuries.

And while you’re at it, be down by 12 points early in the third quarter of Game 4 of the Finals, in a building where you’d lost all three of your previous games this year. With a near-sellout of 16,851 Big Apple hoopheads roaring at you, from courtside celebrities to the upper deck.

Obviously, it helps when you still have superstars like A’ja Wilson, Jackie Young, and Kelsey Plum and can elevate now-three-time WNBA champion Alysha Clark from the bench to the starting lineup. And it helps when your opponent shoots 36.1% and commits 13 turnovers in an elimination game, capped by Courtney Vandersloot’s airballed, open-look three-pointer just before the buzzer.

But the Aces had one more card to play against the New York Liberty. They had a chip on their shoulders the size of the Champagne bottle Wilson savored at her postgame news conference after piling up 24 points and 16 rebounds in Game 4 to clinch the title and Finals MVP.

» READ MORE: Las Vegas Aces win second straight WNBA title with Game 4 triumph over New York Liberty

“This is a moment that we need to celebrate,” Wilson said. “Not a lot of people get a chance to do it, and for us to do it and be shorthanded is truly amazing. It just makes the win that much more, that much better.”

Not long after Wilson and Clark sat down at the podium, their teammates, coaches, and staff colleagues burst through the door, music blaring. They had pent up a lot while putting in the work and were ready to let it all out.

“This [stuff] wasn’t easy at all, and a lot of people counted us out,” Wilson said. “From jump. A lot of people in here said Liberty in five [games]. We know. … We read it, we see it, and it fueled us, so thank you.”

Clark was asked about Wilson making the best kind of response to finishing third in the MVP vote, which New York’s Breanna Stewart won in a tight race. Connecticut’s Alyssa Thomas, a Harrisburg-area native, finished second despite winning more first-place votes. Wilson finished third with more second-place votes than either of the others, but also got a fourth-place vote — which left her teammates irate.

“For her to continuously show up, even in a spot where she felt like that was something she was really working toward and deserved, she still showed up,” Clark said. “She was vulnerable with us. She talked with us, she cried with us, and then was like, ‘Listen, I’m putting my armor back on, and we goin’ to work.’ And when you have your best player, your franchise player, that can do that, that can show up and be like that, it makes everybody want to rally around her even more.”

Wilson shouted out the women’s hoops legends in her support system: Sheryl Swoopes, Cynthia Cooper, and Dawn Staley, the last of whom coached Wilson to titles with the University of South Carolina and the U.S. Olympic team. Staley was courtside Wednesday, and exulted when Wilson hit a big shot in the game’s closing stages. The two then embraced after the buzzer.

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“Everyone knows in this room, Coach Staley is like my second mom,” Wilson said. “It was just a true moment, and I knew I had to find her because she has really molded me into the player that I am today. She spent countless hours just telling me what I need to do at the pro level, and I thought that relationship was kind of going to disappear as I got into pro [life], but we still stayed together.”

Clark also opened up about the uneven road of her career.

“I’ve been the last person on the bench, I’ve been a starter, I’ve been left open, I’ve been a go-to,” she said. “I don’t take any moment in this league for granted, because I know how hard it is to make a roster spot. To be surrounded by an amazing group like this that welcomed me, and to do it with them in the way that we did, I wouldn’t have had it any other way to go for my third.”

Not everything about the Aces’ year was sunshine and roses. The team was shrouded in multiple scandals: punishments for impermissible benefits, an accusation of trading Dearica Hamby in January as retaliation for becoming pregnant, and a domestic violence charge against guard Riquna Williams that was later dropped.

Earlier this month, Hamby filed a gender and pregnancy discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She also claimed to the Washington Post that “the league didn’t do a good job of protecting me and protecting other players.”

In May, the league suspended coach Becky Hammon for two games for comments toward Hamby, a punishment many outsiders thought was too light, and docked a first-round draft pick for the impermissible benefits.

Now Hammon had the microphone, and she didn’t hold back.

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“We went from darling to villain real quick,” she said. “We had our names, our good names, slandered. And all these women did was lock in together. … This is probably the tightest group I’ve ever been around, and they’re a special group — I don’t know what else you could throw at ‘em.”

Wilson then interjected: “We’ve been through some stuff this year, man.”

Hammon continued: “And they didn’t say nothing. And it’s hard to not say nothing when people are lying about you. And all we did is buckle down and keep playing, and that was our mantra.”

The postgame Champagne showers won’t chase the scandals’ clouds. Far from it, especially in the Hamby case. We’ll see whether her accusations or Hammon’s are the truth.

But when it comes to a basketball court, the Aces’ triumph needs no further questions. Hammon is a world-class coach with world-class players, in an organization that gives them world-class support to win titles.

» READ MORE: How the New York Liberty staved off a sweep in Game 3

They’ve now done so twice in a row, the first time since the Los Angeles Sparks in 2001 and ‘02 that the WNBA has a repeat champion. And if it helped to have a chip on the shoulder along the way, fine. There’s nothing new about that in sports, from basketball to soccer (just ask the U.S. women’s national team) and everything else.

In fact, it might even sound familiar in Staley’s hometown — which happens to be just a few miles from commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s. Just in case they’d like to some day see a title celebration in … well …

Ah, let’s save that for another day, The Aces deserve to have this one, and a few more, to themselves.