2026 Las Vegas Aces
125 · 2026-06-18 · medium
"I said it two years ago," said Las Vegas Aces head coach Becky Hammon on May 27. "I don't know why everybody's so stuck on that." As somebody who has said things that everybody got stuck on, I know exactly why. Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which I read for the first time as a failed anthropology minor, describes the process by which information proliferates through human cultures. Data units replicate like invisible cells in a societal superstructure, constantly competing for host space in human minds, not unlike the complex physiological processes happening in your human body right now. Dawkins borrowed and spliced mimema, or "imitated object", from the Greek language to coin a new term to describe the Darwinian process of natural information selection. He mnemonically rhymed it with "gene" so that readers would remember it later, and people wound up remembing him as That Annoying British Atheist Guy. "If your best player is small, you're not winning" is a meme, just like "The CAA will not get three NCAA Tournament bids in 2011" is a meme. Both things were said in very specific Sportz Talk contexts; if you have never been in front of a camera or microphone and ordered to fill the next five minutes of structured airtime, you will never understand the low-wattage grindset your brain enters, and YouTube podcaster bullshit absolutely does not count. I should point out that this is the one single thing that Becky Hammon, a Class of 2023 Naismith Hall of Famer and a Good Foreigner GOAT, and I will ever have in common. The only reason she was rocking a baby pink suit in a Bristol studio in the middle of December, two months into the 2023-24 NBA season, was because Stephen Silas and Nate McMillan had NBA head coaching gigs and she didn't. Big Shot Becky couldn't crack the glass ceiling after seven years of Hangin' With Pop in San Antonio, so she became the WNBA's first million-dollar head coach instead, and has won three titles in five years. I woke up early this morning and watched Las Vegas avenge their season-opening loss to Phoenix, and you know what? Hoop Girl Summer just might end with a fourth in six. As for low-information meme-heads who are still on about Becky Hammon's infamous comments" about Jalen Brunson, will any of them ever be named to the TIME100? (Whatever that is?) "No disrespect for Becky, man," Knicks shooting guard Mikal Bridges said on his Instagram the other day. "She’s a motherfucka for real."