There was a time when A’ja Wilson wasn’t exactly sold on basketball. As she once recalled, she saw all the sweating and intensity around the sport and thought: “I’m a princess.” Watching her teammates win eventually changed that. She didn’t want to be the player who simply held the trophy while everyone else had done the work. So she started chasing the feeling for herself; even though, as Wilson has joked, she still isn’t particularly fond of the sweating that comes with it. Still, that competitive edge now has her on the brink of having her name in the same sentence as Michael Jordan.

For WNBA analyst Terrika Foster-Brasby, Wilson’s season has made a fifth MVP feel increasingly difficult to argue against. “If A’ja Wilson gets this 5th MVP, she’ll be in the same stratosphere as Bill Russell and Michael Jordan as the only players in either league with 5 MVPs. And after tonight’s performance, hard to think she won’t win it. #WNBA,” wrote Terrika in an X post on September 28.

Michael Jordan won the NBA’s regular-season MVP award five times during his career, with all five coming during his time with the Chicago Bulls. He also won the Finals MVP on six occasions. Before Michael Jordan, Bill Russell was also the regular-season MVP on five different occasions. There is, of course, one more name looming above that five-MVP mark: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The NBA legend holds the league record with six regular-season MVPs.

Still, Wilson is not far behind in joining Jordan and Russell, having already won the WNBA regular-season MVP four times: 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2025. Last year, she became the first player in WNBA or NBA history to win a championship, regular-season MVP, Finals MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, and the scoring title in the same season.

Interestingly, Wilson wasn’t always the imposing presence she is today. At South Carolina, Dawn Staley and assistant Nikki McCray used to tease her by calling her “Charmin,” poking fun at how soft they thought she was. Wilson has since credited that tough love with helping her develop the thicker skin she needed, as she developed into one of the WNBA’s most dominant two-way players.

Wilson finished the 2026 regular season as the league’s scoring leader at 26.2 points per game, claiming her third consecutive scoring title. She also averaged 9.4 rebounds and 3.2 assists while leading the league with 1.9 blocks per game.

Becoming the first player in WNBA history to record multiple seasons of 1000+ points, she finished the regular season with a staggering 1,073 points, just 13 shy of Indiana’s Kelsey Mitchell, who broke Wilson’s 2024 record of 1,021 points in a season. Aces HC Becky Hammon was full of praise for Wilson after she achieved her second 1000+ season on September 20 in a game against the Seattle Storm.

“It seems like she’s breaking a record every day, so you start to lose track of them. Nothing surprises me with that woman. I mean, tonight she has nine dimes. She just continues to get better,” said Hammon.

In a previous game against the Seattle Storm in June, Wilson broke Diana Taurasi’s record for the fastest player to reach 6,000 career points, achieving the feat in just 278 games, compared to Taurasi’s 291. She dropped 34 points, 12 rebounds, and nine assists in a win over the Storm.

Gathering all those numbers and praises took effort, and Wilson’s resolve to never shy away goes well beyond what shows up in the box score. In 2025, she began bringing a tablet and keyboard to Aces film sessions, taking notes on what she had already studied on her own and sharing those observations with the group. Soon, the laptop became a running joke among her teammates. Rookie Aaliyah Nye joked about Wilson always being on “her little laptop,” while Kiah Stokes admitted she had never seen that side of her teammate before.

And an MVP case is about more than just putting up big numbers; it is also about the impact a player has on her team, where Wilson again certainly makes the case. She is the only player in WNBA history to average at least 20 points, nine rebounds, two assists, two blocks, and one steal in a season, a statistical combination that is more than telling of how much of the game she affects at both ends of the floor. And the speed at which Wilson has reached those milestones is just as admirable. She needed only 40 games to go from 5,000 to 6,000 career points, the fastest such jump in WNBA history.

But perhaps one anecdote captures that team-first impact better than another stat ever could. During a rough stretch last season, she looked at veteran playmaker Chelsea Gray and told her, “There’s no way I should ever have more assists than you.” The comment landed hard. A team player through and through.

That said, Wilson was named the AP WNBA Player of the Year for a third year in a row recently, taking home the award after receiving 15 of the 17 first-place votes from a national media panel. This was the fourth time that Wilson had won this award in her career, but the award’s charm remained special for her.

“It’s big. It’s an honor for me to do it three times in a row. It’s not easy,” Wilson said, per AP. “My counterparts in this league are really good. I don’t take it lightly because of how much talent we do have in this league.”

On September 25, the Aces star also collected her 33rd WNBA Player of the Week honor, tying Tina Charles for the most in league history. It was also her fifth such award of the season, coming after Wilson averaged 27.8 points, 8.8 rebounds, 3.8 assists, 1.3 steals and 1.3 blocks across a four-game stretch.

Behind Wilson, the Aces will look for a repeat of last season when they defeated the Fever on their way to the title. But regardless of the postseason results, Wilson remains the favorite to retain her regular-season MVP crown.