Three Straight, Five Total: A’ja Wilson Rewrites the WNBA’s MVP Ledger

Thirty seasons in, no WNBA player had won MVP three years running. On Oct. 8, A’ja Wilson did, and pushed the league’s career record to five.

The 2026 award reached A’ja Wilson by phone. At a Las Vegas Aces practice on Thursday afternoon, commissioner Cathy Engelbert handed her a call carrying a message from former Vice President Kamala Harris, and the room took care of the rest: teammates crowding in, recorded video tributes from Dawn Staley, Lisa Leslie, Sylvia Fowles and her partner Bam Adebayo, and her mother, Eva, walking through the door holding the silver trophy. The league’s official release went out from New York the same day, naming the Aces center-forward Most Valuable Player for the fifth time, after wins in 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025.

The headline number is five. The historic one is three. No player in the WNBA‘s 30-year history had ever won the award in three consecutive seasons, and before Wilson’s current run the only back-to-back winner was Cynthia Cooper, who took the league’s first two MVPs for Houston in 1997 and 1998.

Signal. What happened: the WNBA named A’ja Wilson its 2026 Most Valuable Player, her fifth career MVP and her third straight, a streak no player had assembled before. Exact object: the league’s 2026 regular-season MVP award, decided by 65 of 74 first-place votes and 713 total points from a national panel of sportswriters and broadcasters, and carrying a $60,000 prize plus a trophy that Tiffany & Co. designed for the honor. When and where: announced Oct. 8, 2026, from the league office in New York, with the trophy presented to Wilson at an Aces practice in Las Vegas the same afternoon. Source: the WNBA’s official award release, plus on-the-record comments Wilson gave reporters after accepting it. Why it matters: five MVPs puts Wilson level with Michael Jordan and Bill Russell, and only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has more across the NBA and the WNBA combined.

 

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For most of the league’s history, three was as high as anyone went. Sheryl Swoopes reached it in 2005, Lisa Leslie matched her a year later, and Lauren Jackson joined them in 2010. That three-way tie stood for fifteen more seasons, until Wilson broke it with her fourth in 2025. One year later she has opened a two-award gap on every other player who has ever won it.

Her rate is the stranger part. The 2026 season was Wilson’s ninth in the league, which means she has been named MVP in more than half the seasons she has played. Five also pushes the conversation across leagues. In NBA history, only Abdul-Jabbar, with six, has won more regular-season MVPs, while Jordan and Russell, two players whose careers Wilson has said she wants to emulate, also finished with five.

There is one gap in the run. In 2023, the season Breanna Stewart won the award, Staley said publicly that the MVP was one of the things Wilson had wanted and didn’t get. Wilson has not lost the vote since.

This year’s ballot was not close. Wilson collected 65 of the 74 first-place votes and was second on the other nine ballots. Rookie guard Olivia Miles finished a distant second with 442 points and six first-place votes, followed by Kelsey Mitchell, Caitlin Clark and Stewart.

Wilson, who turned 30 in August, said the fifth hit her differently from the first four, and that she cried harder accepting it. The teenage version of herself, she explained, was never dreaming about MVP trophies or championship rings, only about getting through the world. The trophy case has not dulled her appetite. Speaking to ESPN and other reporters, she called the award solidifying in a lot of ways, “but I am not satisfied.”

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Volume and efficiency arrived together this year. In 41 games, Wilson averaged 26.2 points, 9.4 rebounds, 3.2 assists, 1.9 blocks and 1.4 steals in 32 minutes a night, missing only three of the team’s 44 regular-season games. That scoring average is the second-highest in league history, behind only her own 26.9 from 2024. She led the WNBA in scoring for the third straight season, in blocks for the fifth straight season and sixth time overall, and in efficiency rating at 30.4.

She also stretched her range. Wilson shot 52.7 percent from the field, 40.4 percent from three and 86.4 percent at the line, each the second-best mark of her career, while setting career highs with 38 made threes and 279 made free throws. Her career scoring average now sits at 22.1 points, the highest figure in WNBA history.

The big nights piled up. Thirteen games of 30 or more points tied her own single-season record from 2025. A 45-point game on May 15 made her the first player in league history with more than one 45-point performance. She posted seven games of at least 30 points and 10 rebounds, lifting her career total in that category to a league-record 33, and climbed from 21st to 11th on the all-time scoring list, finishing the regular season 12 points behind Sue Bird.

Month by month, the honors were just as lopsided. Wilson swept all four Western Conference Player of the Month awards, becoming the first player to sweep a conference’s monthly honors twice after first doing it in 2020, and was named Western Conference Player of the Week a league-high five times. Las Vegas finished 31-13 and entered the playoffs as the No. 3 seed.

 

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Wilson was born in Hopkins, South Carolina, in August 1996, and played her high school basketball at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School in nearby Columbia. When it came time to pick a college, she stayed home.

At the University of South Carolina, playing for Staley, she helped deliver the Gamecocks’ first national championship in 2017 and was named Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA tournament. Her senior season in 2018 brought a sweep of the national player of the year awards, a record third straight conference Player of the Year honor, and the program’s all-time scoring lead. The school later dedicated a statue of her near the main entrance to Colonial Life Arena in January 2021.

The Aces took her first overall in the 2018 draft, the franchise’s first season in Las Vegas after relocating from San Antonio, and she was named Rookie of the Year. Her first MVP came in 2020. The second arrived in 2022 alongside her first championship and first Defensive Player of the Year award, and a second straight title followed in 2023, with her first Finals MVP and a second Defensive Player of the Year honor. Along the way she added two Olympic gold medals with the U.S. national team, the second in Paris in 2024, where she was named tournament MVP as the Americans won an eighth straight gold.

The current streak began in 2024, when she won the award unanimously while averaging a league-record 26.9 points. Then came 2025, when she became the first player to win a championship, Finals MVP, league MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and the scoring title in a single season. She now counts three titles, two Finals MVPs, three Defensive Player of the Year awards and eight All-Star selections.

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Nike named Wilson to its roster of sig athletes in spring 2024. She announced it her own way, arriving at the arena in a sweatshirt that read “Of Course I Have A Shoe Dot Com,” an address that redirected to Nike’s site. At the time, ESPN counted her as only the 13th WNBA player to get a signature shoe, on a list that had only recently started growing again after more than a decade without a new name.

The A’One took more than two years to build and reached shelves in May 2025. On court, it paired a Cushlon 3.0 foam midsole with a firmer base, a breathable mesh upper and a reworked traction pattern. The details were where it got personal. Pearl motifs nod to a necklace her grandmother gave her as a child. Celtic symbols represent her parents’ names. Her postgame refrain about having no time for weakness is printed on the heel, and the star logo comes from the star she draws inside the A of her autograph.

Lead footwear designer Ben Nethongkome described the shoe as something girls could lace up and picture themselves in her place, which is why it came in kids’ sizes as small as 1Y. The launch colorway, Pink A’ura, leaned into her favorite color. The apparel side had its own origin story: her asymmetric one-legged tight began as a comfort fix after an injury in her rookie season and turned into a look other players now wear.

The outsole carries the most personal line of all, a message from her grandmother that also appears in Wilson’s book: “As a matter of fact, the best is yet to come.”

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Her second shoe arrived this spring with more inside it. Nike unveiled the A’Two in March, debuting it in Paris during Wilson’s first global tour with Nike Basketball before a worldwide release on May 2. The build adds a forefoot Air Zoom unit and a midfoot shank to a returning Cushlon 3.0 midsole, wraps the foot in a molded upper drawn from her pearl motif, and adds a reinforced external heel counter for hard plants and pivots. An embroidered star sits on the toe.

Wilson called the shoe “a level up of that strong foundation.” The A’Pink launch colorway uses color-shifting iridescent finishes on the Swoosh, shank, heel clip and tongue badge, and it arrived alongside a seven-piece apparel line anchored by a reversible single-leg tight. Nike’s own A’ja Wilson page lists the A’Two at $145 for adults and $112 for big kids, with a customizable By You version at $170.

As of this weekend, that page leads with a banner congratulating her on No. 5, and its shop grid includes a 2026 A’ja Wilson MVP Tee at $45. Nike Basketball’s account on X marked the award with its own post, pairing its congratulations with a clip of Wilson addressing the critics who had plenty to say about her first four.

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The celebration had a short shelf life. Las Vegas was already down 2-0 to the Golden State Valkyries in the semifinals when the award was announced, and Wilson told reporters she would pass on a pregame trophy ceremony to keep her focus on Game 3. The team had history with that kind of moment: the Aces dropped Game 1 of last year’s semifinals right after her fourth MVP presentation, and lost this season’s opener on the night they received their championship rings.

Friday night went to overtime anyway. Golden State trailed for most of the first three quarters before a 17-0 run in the third handed it the lead. Las Vegas answered and was up six late in regulation before Gabby Williams stripped Wilson and Kayla Thornton finished in transition to tie the game at 69 with 1:50 left. Golden State pulled away in the extra period and closed out an 87-77 win inside Michelob ULTRA Arena to finish a three-game sweep.

Wilson finished with 21 points and 10 rebounds on 6-of-19 shooting. Jackie Young added 18 and Chelsea Gray 17 for Las Vegas, which had won three of the previous four championships. Two former Aces did damage on the other side, with Kiah Stokes and Tiffany Hayes scoring 11 apiece and Stokes grabbing 10 rebounds. The Valkyries, in only their second season, became the quickest expansion team in league history to reach the WNBA Finals, which open Oct. 17 without the Aces.

Friday’s double-double still added one more line to Wilson’s file. With it, she joined DeWanna Bonner as the only players in WNBA history with 1,300 points and 600 rebounds in the postseason.