WNBA championship rankings: 2023 Las Vegas Aces are the GOAT - ESPN

We first ranked the WNBA championship teams before the 2021 Finals, and the top team came from the Comets dynasty: Houston's 2000 squad.

Now the 2023 Las Vegas Aces take over the top spot of our updated rankings.

Their 3-1 WNBA Finals win over the New York Liberty completed on Wednesday gave the https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/38691481/aces-edge-liberty-secure-second-straight-wnba-championship">Aces their second consecutive championship, a feat that hadn't been accomplished in the league since the Los Angeles Sparks did it in 2001-02.

«There is a reason it hasn't been done in that long. It's hard to do,» said Aces forward Alysha Clark, who also won titles with the Seattle Storm in 2018 and 2020.

«It's hard to get to the Finals multiple times. I've been around this league long enough. I've been on rebuild and championship teams. You never know when you're going to get this opportunity.»

Trying to rank champions is like trying to decide which spectacular ocean sunset is the best. Each champion gets the same trophy and title, a designation that can never be taken away.

Among the biggest challenges is ranking champions from the same franchise who were made up of mostly the same players. Is one of Houston's four consecutive title teams demonstrably better than the others? We've attempted to split those hairs.

And, of course, there is more than one way to assess the data. ESPN's Michael Voepel ranked the teams based on discussions with coaches and players around the league, plus old-fashioned subjectivity.

ESPN's Kevin Pelton ranked the former champs 1 through 27 using a similar statistical model to the one he developed to determine the NBA's top teams. Based on the predictive power of point differential, it starts with