Las Vegas Aces superstar A’ja Wilson is TIME’s Athlete of the Year, because, of course, she is.
The 6-foot-4 South Carolina native earned her second WNBA scoring title, third Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY) award and fourth MVP (the first in league history to accomplish the feat) weeks before winning her third championship. The now two-time Finals MVP and the Aces swept the Phoenix Mercury in the WNBA Finals.
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Wilson is the first player in WNBA or NBA history to win a championship, Finals MVP, regular-season MVP and DPOY award in the same season. She’s also one of four players in the WNBA or NBA to win four MVP trophies before the age of 30. Fittingly, Wilson wore a Thanos-inspired glove to Las Vegas’ championship parade earlier this year to celebrate.
“When you’ve collected everything, that’s Thanos,” Wilson told TIME. “And this year, I collected everything. I don’t really talk much s—, I mean crap. I kind of let my game do it. This was my biggest moment of doing it, because no one’s ever done what I’ve done. And I think people really needed to understand that.”
Wilson was part of several TIME honorees for 2025, including KPop Demon Hunters as the 2025 Breakthrough of the Year, YouTube’s Neal Mohan as the CEO of the Year and Leonardo DiCaprio as the Entertainer of the Year.
Her ascension to the greatest year in her career did not come without some struggles. At the midway point of the WNBA season, the Aces were sitting at .500 and were on the receiving end of a 50-plus blowout loss to the Minnesota Lynx.
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Then, a switch flipped. Las Vegas rattled off 16 straight wins to get to the postseason, and endured back-to-back playoff series that required the team to play every game possible (three against the Seattle Storm and five against the Indiana Fever) before getting to the Finals.“Sometimes you’ve just got to get knocked down to get built back up,” Wilson said. “I think 2025 was a wake-up call that I needed, to let me know that I can’t be satisfied with anything. There’s somebody out there that’s going to try to take your job. You need to make sure you’re great at it, every single day.”
Wilson further cemented her legacy and perhaps her TIME Athlete of the Year award when she hit a game-winning shot against the Mercury during Game 3 of the WNBA Finals. The shot, released with a fitting 2.2 seconds left on the clock (a subtle ode to her No. 22 jersey), cemented the series for the Aces and catapulted Wilson into the conversations for the WNBA’s greatest player of all time. Still, the WNBA star wouldn’t quite put herself in that category just yet. That said, she believes that she’s making it hard for people to chase after her.
“When you think about a lot of GOATs, they have those career-defining shots that solidify you as the best…”, she said. “I didn’t really have one of those. I had championships, yeah. But it was never really like a moment of like, ‘Whoooooooo. That’s why she is who she is. She’s exactly who she thinks she is.’”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Las Vegas Aces star A’ja Wilson named TIME’s 2025 Athlete of the Year
