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Aces End Longest Road Trip Restless

The Las Vegas Aces ended their longest road trip of the season with their three All-Stars and national team members not suiting up for the finale' against the New York Liberty. The result saw the Aces suffer their worst loss of the year by falling 111-71 at the Barclays Center on Sunday.

Coming off a grueling contest less than 24 hours earlier in Minnesota that saw the Aces lose to the top-seeded Lynx 98-87, head coach Becky Hammon decided to rest A'ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray and Jackie Young to conserve their energy before the Aces head home to begin their own five-game home stand Tuesday night.

Las Vegas concluded the five city, nine-day road trip with a 2-3 mark with victories over Atlanta and Indiana sandwiched in between losses to Chicago, Minnesota and New York.

This was a very unusual situation that we have not seen before with a team playing so many games in a short amount of time so far away from home. The Aces were forced to play three games in a four-day span against three of the top teams in the league all in eastern or central time zone.

After playing Indiana on Thursday night, the team traveled to Minnesota for an early day game on Saturday and then fly to another time zone to play the Liberty for another early contest on Sunday. The reasoning is twofold.

With the new television deal, CBS has a featured game on Saturday afternoons while ABC has their double header of games in the Sunday time slot. Because of the Aces success they are a marquee watch for the national weekend games, so the WNBA features the defending champions in many of these situations. Unfortunately for Las Vegas this did not bold well for the maximum results for a team that was at the end of their exhausting road trip.

The other reason is that all teams are playing a condensed schedule to accommodate the World Basketball Championships. The league is taking a mandatory break from August 29 - September 16 so that WNBA Players may participate for their respective countries in the prestigious tournament that takes place September 4 - 13 in Berlin, Germany. In order to get the WNBA season completed by the middle of October, teams are playing more games in a shorter period of time.

The situation is similar for all teams but the timing, travel and competition level this road trip was problematic for the Aces. It is understandable for Hammon to rest her star players and have them not play in a marquee game, but it may send a message to the league office that says, we aren't going to be accommodating to the television networks at the expense of health and safety reasons for our players.

It is a slippery slope because the argument can be made the reason the players received significant pay increases is primarily because of the new 2.2 billion television deal which now involves seven different networks and streaming services, that funnel a majority of the new money into the league.

In any case, the games go on and as we hit the stretch run of the season. It will be interesting to see how teams handle these situations and what the league does in the future.