‘We felt unbeatable’: WNBA great Swoopes assesses Aces’ 3-peat chances

Three-time WNBA MVP-turned-broadcaster Sheryl Swoopes, Aces coach Becky Hammon and Chicago Sky coach Teresa Weatherspoon still remember the minute details of the 1999 WNBA Finals.

Swoopes helped power the Houston Comets to their third straight championship, beating the New York Liberty, who had Weatherspoon at guard, backed up by Hammon.

On Tuesday, they all did some variation of sitting, standing and yelling from the sideline at Michelob Ultra Arena during the Aces’ win over the Sky.

Swoopes and the Comets, who folded in 2008, won the league’s first four WNBA championships, from 1997 to 2000. Three of them came in Finals matchups with the Liberty.

More than two decades later, Hammon and the Aces are looking to duplicate the Comets’ three-peat success. Just like last season, the Aces will need to get past the Liberty to win the title, but it’s likely the teams will meet in the semifinals instead of the WNBA Finals.

The Aces (22-12) and Liberty (28-6) face off for the final time in the regular season at 1 p.m. Sunday in New York. The Liberty won both earlier meetings.

This Liberty team is different from the one Weatherspoon willed to a Game 3 against the Comets with “The Shot” that prevented a sweep. But the franchise still hasn’t won a championship.

From her courtside seat Tuesday, Swoopes she said she couldn’t tell if the Aces have what it takes to make it to the promised land again.

“I don’t see the same hunger from this team that I saw last year,” she told the Review-Journal at halftime, excluding MVP favorite A’ja Wilson from her assessment. “From someone who’s been there, I don’t see it. But I’m not saying they can’t get there.”

‘Flawless’

The Aces went on to win Tuesday, and before the Aces beat the Connecticut Sun on Friday for their fourth straight victory, Hammon said the team’s “hunger level” was the best it’s been all season.

A large reason Swoopes believes the Aces can persevere is because their point guard is “slowly but surely getting back to the old Chelsea Gray,” she said. “And that’s a scary thing.”

To that effect, Gray scored the game-deciding 3-pointer against the Sun, capping back-to-back games of scoring in the double figures after two previous outings with six combined points.

The Aces haven’t consistently looked like the squad that won the past two WNBA championships, which separates them from Weatherspoon’s description of the Comets.

“They were very, very good at everything that they did,” Weatherspoon said. “They were flawless.”

Beyond Swoopes, the Liberty had to guard four-time Finals MVP Cynthia Cooper and Tina Thompson.

“They just came together,” Weatherspoon said. “When you have that one common goal, and everybody’s about it, great things happen.”

Mindset

Swoopes doesn’t necessarily agree with Weatherspoon’s sterling assessment of the 1999 Comets, but she does think her team had something the Aces might not.

“I don’t know if we felt perfect, but we felt unbeatable,” Swoopes said. “It wasn’t about the competition. We knew we had all the pieces that it was going to take for us to win. It was about focusing on us and one game at a time. We knew everybody was coming for what we had, and that just didn’t sit well with us.”

Swoopes has closely followed the Aces’ pursuit of history. She was on the call for the Aces’ 93-90 loss to the Dallas Wings last week, and asked Hammon about the difficulties of trying to win consecutive championships in the pregame news conference.

It’s not lost on Hammon that Swoopes’ questions come from a unique perspective. Hammon said she went from watching Cooper be deemed the “female Michael Jordan” at USC, to playing against her and Swoopes in the WNBA Finals. Knowing what they accomplished, Hammon feels a level of relatability.

Hammon said Swoopes knows how hard it is to repeat, but that the league is just “better” in 2024. Still, Hammon respects the foundation the Comets laid.

“Four in a row,” Hammon said. “I don’t know if that’ll ever be broken, but I’m up for the task.”

Emotional hardship

A rookie in 1999, Hammon was the first person to hug Weatherspoon after she heaved that game-winning half-court shot to give the Liberty an 68-67 win on Sept. 4, 1999, in Houston.

“I remember them celebrating on our courts like they had just won the championship,” Swoopes said. “There was never a doubt in our mind that we weren’t going to come back the next day and win it. But that shot just kind of pissed all of us off. We had the (champagne) bottles ready, confetti. They had already covered up our lockers.”

The Comets won 59-47 in Game 3 to claim the title.

But “The Shot” brought Weatherspoon’s teammates joy in a year where she struggled to find her own. She lost a nephew who she viewed as a brother, Anthony, in a 1999 car crash.

“It was a very special moment for us, for our team,” Weatherspoon said. “And it was a difficult time for me and my family.”

It was an emotional series for the Comets as well, as guard Kim Perrot, who had cancer, died in August. Swoopes described playing in Perrot’s honor as “the most difficult” part of the Comets’ three-peat.

Tough times

It’s not all smooth sailing for the Aces and Liberty this year, either. Kelsey Plum has spoken openly about dealing with the fallout from a public divorce during the offseason. Liberty guard Courtney Vandersloot’s mom, Jan, died in June after a two-year battle with cancer.

Amid the grief, Swoopes said there was a narrative the Comets didn’t get along. For them, it was about “pushing egos aside,” she said.

The Aces have struggled with an opposite issue this season. It’s clear that they like each other off the court, but Hammon has criticized the team for playing “selfish” basketball and lacking trust.

Gray, the 2022 Finals MVP, learned a thing or two from the Comets’ four championships by reading Cooper’s autobiography, “She Got Game: My Personal Odyssey.”

“She was playing with other Hall of Famers,” Gray said of Cooper. “A’ja (Wilson), that’s the go-to one. If she wants the rock, I give it to her. But I think everybody’s individual success and everybody playing the right way makes the team get better. When you want the best for the next person, it results in wins.”

Contact Callie Lawson-Freeman at clawsonfreeman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @CallieJLaw on X.

A previous version of this story misstated the Houston Comets’ Jennifer Rizzotti’s status in the 1999 WNBA Finals. Rizzotti did not play in that series.