“You guys celebrate this more than we do, I guarantee you that,” A’ja Wilson told reporters Sunday, after the Aces won their 17th straight, a playoff-opening victory, 102-77, over the Seattle Storm.
But they’ve reached the point where the streak that got them where they are no longer helps them get where they want to go.
“The streak stopped in the regular season,” Aces coach Becky Hammon said. ”It’s 0-0. It’s the first to nine wins. So that’s how we want to approach it. I tell them all the time about just win the moment, be present in the moment. The next play doesn’t care about the last play.”
The Aces are easily the most extreme example in WNBA history of a team getting hot at the right time. Their 16 wins to end the regular season marked the second-longest streak in league history and the longest any team has taken into the playoffs.
Plenty of teams took lengthy winning streaks into the playoffs.
The Charlotte Sting (2001), Phoenix Mercury (2006), and Los Angeles Sparks (2017) rode seven-game streaks into the postseason.
Not many teams have taken winning streaks into the playoffs and won the title. The Houston Comets (2000), Mercury (2007), and Detroit Shock (2008) took five-game streaks into the playoffs then won the championship.
Sixteen of the league’s 27 champions went into the playoffs off at least two consecutive wins. The 1997 Comets, 2004 Storm, 2009 Mercury, 2015 Minnesota Lynx, and 2020 Storm are the only champions that went into the playoffs off a loss.
The longest winning streak a champion has taken into the playoffs was the Washington Mystics’ six-game run in 2019.
“I ignore it,” then-coach Mike Thibault told the Washington Post. “Mainly because none of that matters if you don’t win at the end.”
But the Aces haven’t just been hot, they’ve been almost flawless for more than a month. And for that reason, there aren’t many teams like them.
The closest comparisons are the 2021 Connecticut Sun, who won 14 straight games to end the season, and the 2017 New York Liberty, who ended the season with 10 straight wins.
Both made the playoffs. Neither won the title.
What the Aces have on their side this year that the Liberty didn’t in 2017 is that the end of the streak doesn’t mean the end of the season.
That era of the WNBA playoffs was a more compact format, with the first two rounds decided with one-game matchups.
Before the Liberty went on their run, they were 12-12 and sitting in sixth place. By the end of it, they had the third-best record in the league. But in their first playoff game, they ran into the Mystics and guard Kristi Toliver, who happened to have a historically hot hand. She drilled nine 3-pointers, dropped 32 points, the Liberty took a 82-68 loss, and a magical run ended in a blink.
The Aces also don’t have to wait nine days to play their first playoff game, the way the Sun did in 2021.
With league MVP Jonquel Jones fueling them, the Sun won 14 straight to end the regular season and finished with the No. 1 seed, which gave them byes through the first two rounds. While they were waiting, the Chicago Sky, who backed into the playoffs at 16-16, were building momentum with wins in the first two rounds. They stunned the Sun, 3-1, in the semifinals on the way to winning the championship.
After that, the league switched to four three-game series in the first round. So the Aces don’t have to maintain perfection to chase their third title in four years. That doesn’t mean they aren’t playing like they do.
“This is now the time where you have to daggone be perfect,” Wilson said. “And we know that for us and the way that people play us we have to bring our A-game every single time. So we don’t take any moment for granted. We understand how hard it is and what it took for us — minus this year — how hard the journey was for us to get to this point.
“So we know we’ve got to come out and be on point. People are going to know our plays, people are going to know motions, actions, whatever. Now it’s just playing perfect basketball at the right time.”
Julian Benbow can be reached at julian.benbow@globe.com.