Hammon puts the W on her NBA resume

The Las Vegas coach and former San Antonio Spurs assistant wins the WNBA championship.

As the door to the Tennessee men’s basketball office kept revolving, Pat Summitt was fully encamped down the hall. More than once she was asked if she would consider leaving her empire at the top of the women’s game to coach the guys.

“I really think women should help women,” she said, back in the late 90s, although you could tell she had thought about it.

Summitt never got a chance to vault that ceiling. No one else has either. There are officials and assistant coaches in the NFL, and there are coaches in major league baseball, and there are women who train and ride thoroughbreds.

The one thing basketball has is a leading candidate. Becky Hammon (pictured) was a great WNBA player, a bronze medalist on the Russian Olympic team, a star with bad knees. She was an assistant for eight years with the San Antonio Spurs, with head coach Gregg Popovich, perhaps the most powerful advocate in the game, singing her praises.

After coaches with all kinds of Spurs’ connections kept getting chances at NBA jobs, leaving Hammon on the San Antonio bench, Hammon agreed to coach the Las Vegas Aces of the WNBA. On Sunday the Aces eliminated Connecticut in Game 4 of a 5-game final, and Hammon had helped those particular women quite a bit.

The Aces brought the first championship to Las Vegas since UNLV won the NCAA tournament in 1990, and the first by a pro team. It wasn’t an illusion. They went 26-10 in the regular season.

A’ja Wilson, the league MVP for a second time, was the only WNBA player to average 20 points and 10 rebounds. Chelsea Gray, the first-ever Duke player of either gender to win Finals MVP, was the second leading scorer in the league, behind Seattle’s Breanna Stewart and just ahead of Wilson.

Gray shot 53 percent from the 3-point line for the postseason and averaged 21.3 points. There are those in Los Angeles who aren’t surprised. In 2016 Gray scored 11 consecutive points in Game 5 to get the Sparks past Chicago and win her first WNBA title.

Wilson played all 40 minutes on Sunday, averaged 37 for the postseason and averaged 2.4 blocked shots. She was a first-overall pick in 2018 and already has a statue in her image at South Carolina. A’ja is indeed named after the title of Steely Dan’s classic album, because her dad Roscoe, who played professionally in Europe, liked the band. Her middle name is Riyadh, in honor of an aunt who fought in Desert Storm.

Combine those storylines with the sensational goodbye from 40-year-old Sue Bird, who led the league in assists for Seattle, and you might think the WNBA is on the rise. It has been with us for 26 years now, and many of its games are nationally televised. Ratings were up 16 percent during the regular season. But the inscription on the sideline in Connecticut — BG 42 — was a bleak reminder of what hangs over everyone.

Brittney Griner, the nine-time WNBA All-Star, was arrested in the Moscow Airport on Feb. 17, for carrying a cartridge that contained less than one game of hash oil. She was sentenced to nine years in prison on Aug. 4.

There has been talk of prisoner swaps, but the wheels are barely moving, and it’s one of those ominous stories that highlights American helplessness. It also reminds everyone of the tenuous nature of women’s basketball. Griner was only playing in Russia because a life of WNBA-only play is unsustainable. The top players can earn up to $1 million there, then play a summer schedule with the WNBA. That is not only disruptive to family and spirit, it’s an undue strain on ligaments and tendons, even if the best players were making seven figures in Russia.

Stewart, Jewell Loyd and Diana Taurasi lead the league with salaries of $228,000. Bird was playing on the $72,000 league minimum this season, which is also what the top four draft picks get. The salary cap, per team, stops short of $1.4 million.

Seattle was the only WNBA team to average more than 10,000 fans.

When the Sparks sent out videos protesting the commercial flights they were forced to take, especially when things went haywire and professional athletes were forced to sleep on undetachable airport chairs, there was a fair amount of eye-rolling going on. But Major League Soccer uses charter flights everywhere, as well as the four established major sports leagues.

Last year Joseph Tsai, owner of the New York Liberty, began chartering flights and was haymakered with a half-million fine, because the league felt it was a competitive advantage. Duh. Of course it is, but don’t punish Tsai for being successful and resourceful. Put the challenge to the other owners.

The Dodgers had their own plane before anybody else in baseball. Detroit Pistons’ owner Bill Davidson christened “Roundball One” to transport his Bad Boys around the country in comfort. The rest of the league squawked, then came around.

For those of us who have seen Kareem Abdul-Jabbar attempt to squeeze himself into even a first-class seat, or Julius Erving hoist his suitcase off a carousel after a week-long road trip, the charter is the lowest common denominator, the least the league can do.

Fortunately the WNBA permitted charters in the Finals this year and last.

One day, a daring college administrator will ask Becky Hammon to coach the men’s basketball team, something UCLA could have considered, at some point, during its dogged half-century search to find the next John Wooden.

Or someone in the NBA, buried in an eternal rebuilding program, will decide Hammon is not only the right coach but the right commodity. The Sacramento Kings have not made the playoffs since 2006. What exactly would they be risking?

Hammon has said that if her name had been Brian, she would have already been hired and fired by NBA teams a couple of times. Instead, it’s Becky, and when she is seen with a trophy among several trophy ballplayers, that name comes closer to the normalization required.