A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart is the WNBA’s Bird and Magic

There’s nothing worse than an ending that doesn’t offer a definite ending. Think The Sopranos cutting to black in the diner or Emmy-winning GLOW being canceled on a cliffhanger during the pandemic as the ‘94 MLB strike-shortened season of series finales. Last month, Winning Time ended with the Boston Celtics celebrating the ‘84 title. The outline of the 2023 WNBA season’s final act was far more straightforward.

The two centerpieces of the WNBA’s superteams have their own Magic-Bird war brewing, and the season culminating in a battle between them is the only way this storyline could have concluded. Vegas vs. New York in the WNBA Finals is advertised as a showdown of superteams. But at a microscopic level, this is the climax of the Stewart-Wilson conflict. This is Mahomes-Brady if both were in their 20s. The peak years of Kobe-LeBron never ended in a Finals showdown. Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid may never settle their three-year MVP award debate in a best-of-seven series.

Stewart and Wilson, however, are in a position to lay all their cards on the table in one climactic set. One is a generational bucket-getting genie who can summon points at a prolific rate from anywhere on the floor. The other is a two-way obelisk who alters the game on both sides. It’s the matchup Jokic and Embiid couldn’t live up to. Their last postseason meeting ended with Stewart earning Finals MVP, but Wilson was still soft-launching her career then.

This time, both franchise cornerstones are squarely in their primes. Winning Time is collecting worms, but this show is the Magic-Bird rivalry of our time. Putting the racial dynamics aside, here’s a cold, hard look at their nightly contributions.

• Player A: 23 ppg, .465 FG%, .850 FT%, 9.3 rebounds, 3.8 assists, 1.6 blocks, 1.5 steals, 28.5 PER
• Player B: 22.8 ppg, .557 FG%,.815 FT%, 9.5 rebounds, 1.6 assists 1.4 steals, 2.2 blocks, 32.5 PER

Take your pick.

Player A is Stewart. Player B is Wilson.

The genesis of Wilson’s Aces happened organically. Between 2017 and 2019, the Aces tanked, forfeited a game, and leveraged a lottery system that took their cumulative two-year record into account to draft Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young, and Wilson first overall in three consecutive seasons. It was quite the spree, and Wilson’s emergence in particular blasted this franchise into a higher gear.

Stewart left behind Jewell Lloyd in the Great Northwest and traveled the circuitous route from Seattle to partner with 2020 No. 1 overall pick Sabrina Ionescu in Stew York City. A star-studded lineup was 3D printed around its two pillars. There’s even a third MVP in the mix. During the offseason, 2021 MVP Jonquel Jones extricated herself from the Connecticut Suns’ perennial-bridesmaid purgatory and pursued her revenge on Las Vegas for their Finals defeat by latching onto the Liberty. The Aces kept pace in the…