The Las Vegas Aces were built to succeed. (And it’s working.)

Liz Cambage, dressed in black and drenched from a morning downpour, rushes through the door of a television station 37 minutes after she was supposed to be on air.

”I’m ready,” the Aussie says, apologizing for the delay after her GPS led her up a mountain instead of routing her to the Fox 5 newsroom in Henderson, Nevada. “I’m alive. I made it.”

The morning show appearance falls in the middle of a busy week for the 6’8 star center of the Las Vegas Aces who led the team to a win over the Seattle Storm the night before. All-Star weekend is only three days away, and with it comes an opportunity for the city of Las Vegas to showcase their investment in the WNBA’s newest team.

Joined by Aces head coach and general manager Bill Laimbeer, Cambage dries off and makes her way to the set for the segment. When the cameras stop rolling, the two will return to the chaos of All-Star Weekend as the faces of a franchise setting a new standard for building successful WNBA teams.

But right now, if only for a few minutes, they’re simply the face of the hometown team in a city ready for basketball.

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The Aces’ success is no accident, but it took a long time to get here. They were built from the bones of the San Antonio Stars, a team with players and management who bought into its mission, but ultimately weren’t given the resources to fulfill it. San Antonio held the franchise for 14 seasons after it was relocated from Salt Lake City, where the Utah Starzz were one of the WNBA’s founding eight franchises.

In Texas, the team wasn’t adequately equipped to handle its day-to-day operations. Travel schedules were wonky and included multi-layover flights. They also struggled to upkeep their locker room and training room equipment.

Sharing a city with the Spurs, San Antonio’s perennial NBA championship contenders, didn’t help. When MGM International Resorts bought the team in 2017 and moved them out west, the Aces became the third WNBA team to debut in a city with no NBA counterpart (along with the Connecticut Sun and the now-defunct Tulsa Shock). Considering it had been decades since the UNLV Running Rebels’ basketball glory days, Vegas was starved for hoops.

”[Las Vegas] built themselves as a basketball town, but it’s dormant right now,” Laimbeer says. “You put a good product out there, and the fans will come.”

Timing was also on MGM’s side. They caught the city just as it begun its transformation into a sports town. The Golden Knights went to the Stanley Cup Finals in its inaugural season, just as the Aces made their debut. Vegas is also anticipating the Oakland Raiders’ relocation in 2020, the same year the city will host the NFL Draft.

Ownership had to start from scratch when they moved the franchise, and knew they needed someone in charge who could handle both the team and the business. Laimbeer, a two-time WNBA Coach of the Year who finished his 5th season with the New York Liberty, was their target. He saw it as an opportunity to build a team from the ground up with ownership willing to invest in doing it the right way.

But what does that investment look like?

Aces assistant general manager Christine Monjer runs business operations, and every decision she makes holds one purpose: to instill a love for basketball in a community that hasn’t seen consistent success in the sport since the 1990s. And if Vegas was going to embrace the Aces, the Aces needed to embrace Vegas in more ways than one.

Monjer was part of the brand design team for the Aces, which ultimately dropped everything from its gray, white and black uniforms in San Antonio and rooted the brand in imagery inspired by architecture along the Las Vegas Strip.

”A lot of the older buildings had more ornate finishes, but the new construction, it’s very sleek, it’s contemporary, it’s more modern,” Monjer says. “We were leaning into this new landscape that’s evolving on Las Vegas Boulevard.” The Aces’ logo joins the letter A with letters L and V to create a diamond — “the card suit we’ve leaned into the most,” Monjer says — with a monochromatic color scheme and punches of red and gold.

The Aces also needed a brand new home. MGM poured more than $10 million into updating their arena, adding more comfortable seating, a new basketball floor, coaches’ offices and locker rooms, upgraded suites, and a brand-new Jumbotron. “This place is dope,” All-Star guard Kayla McBride says, “and when it’s filled up it’s even doper.”

The rebrand was about more than visual upgrades. It was about attracting the right type of basketball fan — those who want to support a consistently good team — who could build a local community around the Aces. MGM management stayed heavily involved during the Aces’ first season, particularly when it came to selling tickets to employees, executives, vendors, “anybody that you could get to buy tickets,” Laimbeer says.

Ticket sales and sponsorships drive the Aces’ business goals. The latter gets a considerable boost from MGM’s powerhouse connections, but the stiff competition among other gaming and entertainment brands presents obstacles for growth. “The No. 1 unique challenge is that there are limited manufacturing and companies in this town,” Laimbeer says. “Most of the companies are gaming, and they have lots of employees who can buy tickets and lots of sponsorship dollars.”

The thing about being owned by the biggest show in town is that competitors don’t necessarily view the Aces as a team representing the city as a whole. “MGM owns it. We play in MGM’s building. You get to the arena, you have to walk through MGM’s casino,” Laimbeer says. “The other owners of the casinos look at it like it’s the MGM Aces, not the Las Vegas Aces, so that’s a constant battle.”

MGM isn’t as directly involved with the day-to-day operations in year two, leaving the Aces to build on the brand-new infrastructure. The franchise is calling it a “benchmark year” that will set the pace for the Aces’ future because the numbers can actually be taken at face value without accounting for giveaway seats and MGM vendor suites. “The first year it’s brand new, and you have to launch it, and it’s all hands on deck,” Laimbeer says. “And then after that, reality sets in.”

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Laimbeer’s involvement with the business side shifts during the season so he can focus on the one thing that drives it all: the team. And to say the Aces have a lot going for them on the court is an understatement. Along with swinging a blockbuster deal for Cambage earlier this year, they have two-time All-Star and 2018 Rookie of the Year, A’ja Wilson, the 2019 No. 1 draft pick, Jackie Young, McBride, and Sixth Woman of the Year favorite Dearica Hamby.

Their skill gets fans through the door, but the Aces’ personalities are captivating and make for one of the easiest sells in all of pro sports. And it isn’t just at the top with standout players like Cambage and Wilson. Take Sydney Colson, for example, a backup point guard who had to earn a spot through training camp.

Before each game, Colson leads the pack of 12 in a dance where the team claps and stomps to hype the crowd and themselves. She makes everything up in the locker room, relays it to her teammates, and even directs the camera operators on where they should stand.

Over time, it’s evolved into the Lady Aces chant.

[clap, clap-clap-clap]

[clap, clap-clap-clap]

[clap, clap-clap-clap]

LADY ACESSSSSSS!

Few franchises can achieve anything special without team camaraderie, and the Aces have it.

Laimbeer often ends pregame shootarounds with a cash prize for any player who knocks down a half-court shot. It’s their way of earning back the $10 he charges those who forget their practice jersey. The morning before the team’s game against the Storm, McBride, a repeat offender, is ready to redeem herself and win the $80 jackpot.

With a serious face, she turns on the jets, runs, and launches from the center of the court. The bank was open. “I got my money back!” she yells, pumping her fist. Moments later, Hamby knocks down the same shot. “Shit. Every time,” McBride says with her hands over her face. They split it, $40 each.

Before film sessions, Laimbeer likes to loosen up the vibe of the locker room by cracking jokes and playing old videos of commercials he starred in as an NBA player in the ‘80s. And he’s not above embarrassing his players either, like the time he showed a video of Cambage getting a lapdance at the “Thunder From Down Under” Australian male strip show.

Cambage is one of the WNBA’s best players and most dynamic faces. She can shoot from three-point range and is mobile enough to cause problems anywhere in the paint. She holds the league’s scoring record with 53 points in a game, too. But more importantly for the largest-growing professional women’s sports league in the country, she’s a shit-stirrer on the court and an advocate for change off of it. One minute she’s the league’s biggest trash-talking villain, the next she’s a fun-loving Instagram star who opens up to thousands of fans regarding her struggles with mental health.

Cambage should be the WNBA’s most marketable superstar and the league’s failure to recognize her as one has always frustrated her. It took until the 2019 season, when she forced a trade from a smaller-market Dallas team to Las Vegas, for her to finally have a useful platform for growing her fanbase. Her Instagram following grew by 10,000 during All-Star weekend alone.

On top of that, Vegas has allowed Cambage to explore her passions outside of basketball, including taking the stage at Mandalay Bay Beach to deejay the opening set of the All-Star weekend concert. “A big push right now is people being more than athletes. I am more than an athlete,” Cambage says. “I’ve got businesses to run. I can run parties for my vitamin company out [here] — I can run training sessions and do all this other stuff away from basketball.

”If I have to just focus on basketball, I’d lose my mind and overthink and get consumed by the game. It’s nice being in a city where I have an escape from basketball every day.”

Treating his players well is important to Laimbeer, and he knows the Aces have a unique opportunity to do that better than other WNBA franchises.

”We’re not a New York, we’re not a Detroit, we’re not an Atlanta, we’re not a Los Angeles,” he says. “We’re a big small town that can look after the players easier and make them feel more special. The other part is that we have a story to tell — we have personalities from myself onto all of the players.

”It makes for good storylines. The world is changing in terms of media coverage for the WNBA. We have players that can play in that world.”

The team’s energy transfers to the court, too. Whether it’s an injured A’ja Wilson dancing hard near a security guard (who joins in), or a bemused Cambage staring down the Chicago Sky’s Cheyenne Parker after they make incidental contact, the Aces are entertaining in more ways than putting a ball in the hoop. “It’s one thing if you have a player who’s doing that,” The Ringer staff writer Shea Serrano says. “It’s another thing if it’s the best players on your team.”

The WNBA has missed the mark on marketing the personalities of its best players. The fans crave it and the proof is in the numbers. The Aces have more than 63,000 followers on Instagram, seventh-most in a league of 12, despite being around for just two seasons. Las Vegas has become a team for not only the local community but for fans around the country.

”To be treated this way and loved by the organization and the fans, it’s cool,” McBride says. “It makes you want to go out and give everything that you have because you want to bring a championship to a city and an organization that has given you so much.”

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The Aces have carefully cultivated a locker room of like-minded stars. But there’s another reason they’ve been able to flourish into a fan-favorite franchise like few others before them: investment at the top.

Revenue and ticket sales are critical for any entertainment entity, but it’s amplified for the W (whose sister company, the NBA, reminds the public of the some $10 million it loses each year).

Not all of the league’s 12 franchises are failing, but as a whole it’s underachieving. This year, the WNBA announced the hire of its first commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, formerly the CEO of Deloitte. The league purposely selected a businesswoman who could prioritize player and fan experience alongside ticket sales and sponsorships.

A league can’t grow a fanbase if its biggest assets aren’t happy. And the biggest stars of the W aren’t happy. In this season alone, seven-time All-Star Brittney Griner foreshadowed leaving the sport because she doesn’t feel protected by the league and Maya Moore, a three-time champion and MVP, took the season off. Even Cambage threatened to leave the W before being traded to Las Vegas.

The league is at a crossroads. Its collective bargaining agreement is set to expire on Oct. 31 after the WNBPA chose to opt-out. The biggest issue? Pay. The maximum WNBA salary is $117,500 for the 2019 season, a fraction of the money the same players make abroad in China or Russia. “We had to go to a communist country to get paid like capitalists,” Diana Taurasi, the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer, told ESPN this year. Taurasi’s Russian team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, paid her the same amount of money to sit out the entire 2015 season that the WNBA would’ve paid her to play.

Then there’s travel. The league’s current CBA states that all players must fly coach. For All-Star weekend, that meant 6’8 Griner was assigned a seat in the middle of a three-person row. She used her own money to upgrade to first class. Another downside of commercial air travel is that it sometimes hurts players and teams who can’t stay on schedule due to everyday travel woes. In 2018, the Aces were trapped in 25 hours worth of delays and flight cancellations so crippling that the franchise forfeited a game with playoff implications in Washington D.C. weeks before the postseason.

Photo by Michael Gonzales/NBAE via Getty Images

Though ownership like MGM may have been willing to expend its services to fly its team privately, the WNBA seeks to outlaw such financial imbalance and keep parity within bigger and smaller markets. But the Aces have found loopholes their players appreciate.

When Kayla McBride played in San Antonio, she remembers flying in tightly packed Southwest flights with at least one, and sometimes multiple, layovers. That rarely happens now that the Aces fly Delta and almost exclusively take direct flights. They can’t fly first-class by CBA rule, but they can fly “comfort,” which provides three extra inches of legroom. The team also books exit rows and aisle seats for their tallest players.

”When you have [great ownership] it changes everything,” McBride says. “You don’t have to worry about the day-to-day things because they’re taken care of for you. And that’s so huge, because our league is so short and compact, and we play so often. So when you have people looking out for you on that level, it makes everything easier to just come out and play the game.”

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Bringing the All-Star Game to the Mojave Desert in July could have been a risky move. Yet, Las Vegas Boulevard’s throng of tourists seems unfazed by the sweltering 105-degree heat and grasshopper carcasses crunching beneath their feet after a freak invasion swarmed the Strip.

Billboards promoting the Aces and the league’s 22 All-Stars tower above the Bellagio and Mandalay Bay resorts. City transit buses have been transformed into mobile Aces ads featuring photos of the team’s top players. DJ Liz Cambage’s name sits in the lower-third of posters for the Snoop Dogg and Iggy Azalea concert. Their brand is everywhere, and with the Aces leading the WNBA in merchandise sales this year, it’s clear the team’s popularity is reaching far beyond Las Vegas.

This level of publicity for the sport doesn’t happen in every WNBA city. But this isn’t just any city. And the Aces aren’t just any team.

“It’s a place that’s gonna market itself,” Colson says. “People want to be in Vegas.”