The reigning WNBA champions aren’t having the season one would expect from a team that has won back-to-back titles in the past two years. The Las Vegas Aces had a 34-6 record last season. However, the team is 16-8 this year so far, which places them in the fifth spot in the entire league. So, a reporter recently asked Kelsey Plum about the claims that the Aces are ‘cooked’ this year. Plum’s response ended up drawing the attention of NBA legend Kevin Garnett.
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During a press conference for the WNBA All-Star game, Plum seemed pretty surprised after learning that people are saying that the Aces are ‘cooked’ this year. The rest of the Aces players on the panel were also taken aback for a minute.
Chelsea Gray seemed especially astonished by the term ‘cooked’ used by the reporter. However, Plum’s response to the question was pretty composed and logical.
KG took to his Instagram Stories, uploading the interaction on his official account. He simply captioned the clip, “OKOKKKKK THAT’S GOOD ONE,” followed by a saluting face emoji.
Kevin Garnett puts up an IG story about Kelsey Plum and the Aces pic.twitter.com/Y3q282414q
— tragicpatek (@tragicpatek) July 22, 2024
The reaction from the Boston Celtics legend showed that he approved of Plum’s breakdown of the team’s performance so far in the 2024-25 WNBA season. The veteran Aces star provided a cake analogy to drive her point home. She said,
“When you take out a player like Chelsea Gray, it’s like you know, we’ve been constructed like a cake and when you take out the sugar from the cake, it’s like cornbread. So, that’s what everyone saw the first 10 games, cornbread. And that had no honey butter on it. So, we just needed to get our ingredients back together and that’s really all that was.”
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The Las Vegas Aces played the first 12 games of the season without their veteran point guard, Chelsea Gray. Gray suffered a lower leg injury in the 2023 WNBA Finals against the New York Liberty. That also kept her out for the initial start of the 2024 season.
Out of the 12 games that the Aces played without Gray, the team ended up winning only half of them, which contributed to most of their losses this season. But since Gray’s arrival, the team has been on a completely different trajectory altogether.
In fact, the Aces went on a six-game winning streak after the 31-year-old came back from injury. And their 16-8 record has only seen two losses since she took the floor.
However, Plum’s analogy still prompts a question. Can the Aces still be a contender if they suffer more injuries going into the season. Their tandem works brilliantly when everyone’s healthy. But do they have the depth to win when one or more of their key players are injured. That will be an important question moving forward.
