Becky Hammon questions WNBA scheduling after resting A’ja Wilson and Aces stars

The coach said player health “comes first” after a cross-country trip left Las Vegas with little recovery time.

The Las Vegas Aces rested stars A’ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray and Jackie Young on Sunday after a demanding back-to-back that required the team to travel play and travel on consecutive days in different time zones. Without their top three players, the Aces were routed 111-71 by the New York Liberty as coach Becky Hammon prioritized player health over the standings.

But for Aces coach Becky Hammon, the decision was about more than one game. “My players’ health is the most important,” Hammon said after the loss. “You got to be healthy and fresh as much as possible, obviously, after going through a season. So, the health and safety of players come first.”

The Aces had played Minnesota on Saturday before traveling to New York for Sunday’s game. According to The Associated Press, the team did not reach its New York hotel until nearly 10 p.m. . That left the players with less than a full day to recover before taking the court again. Hammon questioned whether such a turnaround was reasonable, particularly with the time-zone change. “I mean, everybody has a brutal schedule at some point. I don’t even think they do this in the NBA, though, where it’s less than 24 hours,” she said.

The situation also carries added significance because Wilson, Gray and Young are expected to represent their countries at the FIBA World Cup next month. That three players are unlikely to get much additional rest before the international tournament. Hammon said she did not want to put her players at unnecessary risk after the team had already spent significant energy traveling across the country.

“I’m not going to put them in any kind of jeopardy to get hurt when we’ve been expending a lot of energy on travel and a lot of miles back and forth crisscrossing the country,” she said.

The AP also reported that, according to a person familiar with WNBA scheduling, the NBA does not typically require teams playing consecutive games to travel across two time zones or have fewer than 22 hours between games. For the Aces, the episode has once again put the WNBA’s demanding travel schedule and player workload under the spotlight.