Becky Hammon Admits the Aces Started ‘Pretty Bad.’ Now They’re Stacking Wins.

Becky Hammon doesn’t do sugarcoating. So when she stood at the mic after the Las Vegas Aces finally shook the Dallas Wings monkey off their back, she didn’t pretend this was the plan all along.

The Aces beat Dallas 99-84 on Thursday. That number alone tells a story. The Wings had punked Las Vegas twice this season already — a 95-87 loss in May and then an embarrassing 96-66 blowout earlier this month. Add in an 87-76 loss to New York earlier this week, and yeah, the Aces needed this one.

“I’m a big process oriented people, process oriented coach and, you know, we’re still in process,” Hammon said after the game.

The defensive turnaround

Hammon is chasing consistency. The Aces have shown flashes of elite defense all season. The problem has been stringing those flashes together into full games. Early in the year, Las Vegas sat near the bottom of the league in defensive rating. All three of their losses came with at least 95 points allowed.

That’s started to shift. The Aces have now put together a few solid defensive outings in a row. Hammon wants to keep stacking them. She also made it clear she doesn’t want this group peaking too early.

“Quite frankly, we started out pretty bad,” Hammon said. “Now we’ve strung a couple games throughout the New York game, but a couple games before that where we’ve strung some good defensive games together and we want to continue to kind of stack those kind of games.”

Her bluntness is refreshing. The numbers back it up. The climb is real, and it’s happening at the right time.

Commissioner’s Cup rematch on deck

The timing here is almost too perfect. The Aces head to Brooklyn on June 30 for the Commissioner’s Cup Championship against — you guessed it — the New York Liberty. Same team that just handed them an L. Same team that probably thought it had Las Vegas figured out.

If the Aces can tighten up defensively for 40 minutes, they’ve got a real shot at walking away with that in-season trophy. Hammon’s not calling her shot, but the pieces are moving in the right direction.

For a team that started the season looking lost on defense, that’s real progress. And Hammon knows it. She just won’t say they’ve arrived yet.