Ballots are open across the league and the two marquee categories are already closed. A'ja Wilson is the MVP. Olivia Miles is the Rookie of the Year. When the reporting uses the word shoo-in for both ends of the 2026 WNBA MVP race, you are not watching a debate, you are watching a coronation with paperwork.
Wilson first, because there is nothing else to say about her that a ballot can improve. She has turned the best individual award in women's basketball into an annual maintenance item. Voters have stopped arguing about whether she is the best player and started arguing about whether it is boring to keep saying so. It is not. Greatness held at that altitude for that long is the rarest thing in the sport.
checked the almanac: lisa leslie, sheryl swoopes and lauren jackson each stacked three mvps, and for a long stretch of league history three looked like the ceiling of the whole thing. that is the neighborhood wilson lives in now.
The other end is the fun one. Miles did not just win a rookie award on reputation, she moved a record. The reporting out of Minnesota has her past Caitlin Clark's single-season rookie scoring mark, which is a genuinely absurd sentence to type two seasons after Clark set it. That is not a slow-and-steady rookie class. That is the league's entry level rising a full step in under three years, and it is the healthiest sign the WNBA has going.
Then there is the Golden State wrinkle. A Valkyries pair lands among the other award winners, and I will not put specific names on hardware I have not seen certified. But consider the timeline. That franchise did not exist before 2025. Expansion teams are supposed to spend year one getting bounced around and year two learning how to close games, not sending two players up to the podium. Somebody in that front office built faster than the rulebook says you can.
What comes next is immediate for Miles. Minnesota is at Indiana on Tuesday night at 8 ET, a national window, a record-holding rookie against a Fever team with real seeding stakes. Awards are nice. September basketball is the actual test, and it is the one that tells you who these players are in a year.