“Good news is, we played like a** and only lost by 10.” Those were Becky Hammon’s words after the Aces’ 71-60 loss to the Golden State Valkyries in Game 1. She openly admitted that her team delivered a poor performance, but the way she sees it, even that poor a showing was still close enough to the Valkyries to suggest that a better version of the Aces will be capable of winning this series.
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For WNBA broadcaster Robin Lundberg, however, the roster situation makes him far less convinced that Las Vegas has what it takes to turn this series around.
“Becky Hammon is basically saying we can play so much better,” Lundberg said in his postgame reaction video. “But I don’t know if the Aces have enough to beat the Valkyries, considering Stephanie Talbot missed this game after she missed the last game against the Indiana Fever. Jewell Loyd stepped in big against the Fever in Game 3, and she leaves this one with an injury.”
“The Aces are running out of bodies. If they can’t get Talbot back, and if Jewell Loyd is going to miss any extended period of time, they are already relying very heavily on A’ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray, and Jackie Young — while the Valkyries come at you in waves. They come at you with players you’ve never even heard of or seen before,” he added.
The confidence behind Hammon’s statement is entirely understandable. The Aces are defending champions with a roster that includes some of the most accomplished players in the league, particularly A’ja Wilson, and they proved throughout the regular season how capable they are of controlling games. In fact, all three of their meetings against the Valkyries in the regular season ended in Las Vegas victories.
But Lundberg’s concern is because of what the Aces’ current roster looks like heading into Game 2. Stephanie Talbot was already ruled out before the series even began. And then Jewell Loyd, who had stepped up to score 11 points in the Fever series to help compensate for Talbot’s absence, suffered a left leg injury early in the third quarter of Game 1 and was ruled out for the remainder of the night. The Aces’ already limited depth has now become an even more pressing concern.
The impact of those absences was clearly visible in Game 1. Las Vegas was essentially leaning on Wilson, Gray, and Young to generate almost everything offensively, and while those three did deliver, combining for 51 of the team’s 60 total points, the contribution from the rest of the supporting cast was negligible. When your three primary contributors account for that overwhelming a share of your production, any defensive scheme that makes even one of them work harder than usual becomes exponentially more damaging.
The contrast with the Valkyries could not have been more pronounced. While Gabby Williams led the way with 25 points, Golden State demonstrated exactly the kind of roster balance and depth that makes them such a difficult matchup to prepare for. Their bench unit completely transformed the game, outscoring the Aces’ reserves 27-7.
Kaitlyn Chen provided a significant double-digit contribution from the second unit, finishing with 11 points and offering Golden State a reliable additional scoring option that Las Vegas simply could not match. And Chen was not the only depth piece who delivered.
Aminata Gueye, a player who logged only limited minutes during the regular season and saw just ten minutes during the first-round series against Dallas, was trusted with early minutes by Natalie Nakase in Game 1. Gueye rewarded that decision emphatically, finishing with nine points on 4-of-5 shooting alongside two steals and a block.
That kind of contribution from a player the Aces had not specifically prepared for is precisely what Lundberg is pointing to when he describes the Valkyries as a team that comes at you in waves.
The depth advantage is real, and it figures to remain a significant factor heading into Game 2. Whether the Aces can find a way to overcome it, whether Hammon’s confidence in her team’s ceiling translates into the kind of performance she is describing, is the central question that will define this semifinal series.