A'ja Wilson agreed Wednesday to a three-year, $5 million supermax contract with the Las Vegas Aces, a fully guaranteed deal that keeps the league's biggest star in Las Vegas.
The agreement is the largest in WNBA history and comes after Wilson said last week that she was not testing the market and was not leaving Vegas. She made that plain at USA Basketball camp: she was not looking, and she knew exactly where she was.
The size of the contract reflects both Wilson's place in the league and the timing around a new collective bargaining agreement that lifted the supermax from $250,000 in the last CBA to $1.4 million. Before her signing, Las Vegas had $2.7 million in cap space remaining, and the Aces had already brought back most of their 2025 championship team in free agency, including Jackie Young, Jewell Loyd and Chelsea Gray.
Wilson had been the third-highest paid player in Las Vegas under her previous two-year, $400,000 deal signed in 2023, behind Young and Loyd. Now she moves back to the top of a roster that just won its 2025 championship, the club's third title in four seasons, after a.500 start at the All-Star break and a 16-game finish to the regular season that turned the year around.
There was little mystery about the outcome. Wilson, drafted by the Aces with the No. 1 overall pick out of South Carolina in 2018, had just won her record fourth MVP award, passing the three MVPs held by Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie and Lauren Jackson. Last season she averaged 23.4 points, 10.2 rebounds, 3.1 assists and 1.6 steals, while also adding to a résumé that already includes Rookie of the Year, two Finals MVPs, seven All-Star selections and three Defensive Player of the Year awards.
Las Vegas also signed Chennedy Carter to a training camp deal Wednesday, a reminder that the Aces are still filling out the edges while keeping the core intact. Wilson's contract does not just reward what she has already done; it locks in the player around whom the Aces have built everything, and it does so at a moment when the league's money is finally catching up to its best-known name.
For Wilson, the message was never complicated. She was not shopping for a new home, and the Aces were never really at risk of losing her. The real story now is that the league's most decorated active player is back where she said she would be, with a richer deal and the same demand that has followed her since 2018: win again.
