Atlanta walked into Las Vegas on Tuesday night and took the Aces apart 97-82, and the strangest part of the evening was that Becky Hammon ejected herself out of the second half. She got tossed in the first, and the Aces played the rest of the night without the voice that has run every huddle in that building for years.
Rhyne Howard led the way with 23. Angel Reese went for 21 points and 10 rebounds, her 24th double-double of the season, which leads the league by a distance. That is not a hot week. That is a habit. Reese has built her whole professional identity on the idea that the ball coming off the rim is a skill rather than an accident, and a 24-double-double season is what that looks like when it stops being a talking point and starts being a fact on the page.
Fifteen points is not a fluke margin either. That is a team getting outworked in its own gym.
checked the almanac: hammon coached this franchise to back-to-back championships in 2022 and 2023, and before that she was the first full-time female assistant coach on an NBA bench with San Antonio in 2014. she is not a coach with a reputation for losing her composure over nothing.
I do not have the full accounting of what got her sent off, and I am not going to guess at it. What I can see is a Las Vegas team that lost the thread early and never got it back, and an Atlanta team that has a first option in Howard and a nightly floor in Reese, which is a very sturdy way to build a summer.
Both clubs turn around Thursday night. The Aces host Connecticut, and the Sun just handled the Sparks 85-77, so there is no soft landing waiting. Atlanta heads to Los Angeles the same evening.
What I am watching next is simple: whether Las Vegas comes out Thursday looking annoyed or looking tired. Those two responses look nothing alike, and by halftime you will know which one you got.