A’ja Wilson’s Game Is Joyfully Precise

The bucket that earned A’ja Wilson her 999th and 1,000th points of the season was perfectly representative of the other 998 points Wilson has racked up during her unprecedented 2024 campaign. With two minutes left in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game against the visiting Connecticut Sun, Wilson popped out to the perimeter to receive an entry pass from Jackie Young. Despite intense pressure from Brionna Jones, Wilson corralled the pass, took two hard dribbles toward the elbow with her off hand, and pulled up to cash the 11-foot leaning jumper right before DeWanna Bonner’s help from the strong side could alter the shot.

Wilson is putting the finishing touches on the best scoring season in WNBA history. In what is sure to be her third MVP season, Wilson is putting up 27 points per game, the highest figure in league history, on 59.2 percent true shooting. She has as many games with 35 points or more (four) as she does games with fewer than 20 points. Despite the wear of playing the most minutes for Team USA in Paris—naturally, she led the national squad in scoring—she’s bagged two 40-pointers since the Olympic break.

When it comes to Wilson’s season, the trail of broken records she’s left in her wake and her relatively straightforward game make it easy to focus merely on the matter of “How many?” at the expense of the more interesting matter, which is “How?” The only faintly guardable Caitlin Clark called Wilson “unguardable,” which I think is the ideal adjective for her game. Wilson has a 6-foot-8 wingspan and a high release point on her jumper, which means she can get said jumper off whenever she has even reasonably good position. Her footwork is as good as any big I’ve ever seen—the archetypal Wilson play involves her spinning and shot-faking her way from a contested 13-footer into a wide open six-footer—which means she’s always in a good position.

It all flows from that fairly simple starting proposition, which can come off as boring to some. Not everyone loves midrange hoops, where Wilson has made a home, taking 42 percent of her shots from 10 feet out to the three-point line. She is foremost a reliable player, someone who gets buckets within the flow of a potent Aces offense, rarely forces the issue, and doesn’t splash a ton of threes (she’s good for one every other game). The flair she has is more minute, though to misread her game as fundamentally uncool is to miss out on the best player in the league leveraging her talents to do exactly as much as her team needs her to do. It just so happens that her team needs her to do a ton: bail out soggy offensive possessions by going one-on-one, set a bone-rattling screen to free one of the guards, and most of all, score all the time. She leads the WNBA in usage and also has its lowest turnover rate, which is a frankly stunning set of twinned statistics. Imagine someone with the offensive workload of Giannis Antetokounmpo turning the ball over at the rate of someone whose only job is to stand in the corner.

And she’s operating that cleanly while exploring more of her off-the-dribble game this season. Wilson’s face-up game has always been deadly, though this year, she’s starting possessions a bit further out and operating with the ball a bit more. I love watching teams spring flash doubles at her or shade someone into the paint when she has the ball, only for her to problem-solve the defense instantly and spin into the only open pocket of space around. The fact that she’s named after the Steely Dan song is so coherent with the way she hoops that it feels apocryphal.

Wilson setting new frontiers in scoring would be worthy of toasting even if she weren’t also nabbing 12 rebounds per game (a career high, second only to Angel Reese) and blocking a league-leading 2.6 shots per game. She’s the best player in the league, and has been for years, and while most of her peers have flashier games, I think Wilson is a super-cool type of best player. She does everything, all the time, showing fans what it looks like when a player of unique and prodigious talent figures out how to use that talent as precisely as possible.