If you’ve lived in Nevada long enough, it might feel like your sports world has been turned upside-down.
The UNLV football team wins; UNR loses. Las Vegas — once sworn off by all professional sports franchises — now has four major league teams, and two of them have won championships. The Oakland A’s are planning to build a stadium on the Strip. And an NBA team is likely on its way.
Here are a few highlights to watch for as fall sports kick off.
Will the Aces get a three-peat?
Four players from the Las Vegas Aces played for Team USA in Olympic women’s basketball, winning the gold medal. As of this writing, the Aces are in fourth place out of the WNBA’s 12 teams and again heading to the playoffs.
During the Olympics, the league paused games for two weeks, while the Aces’ A’ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray, Jackie Young, and Kelsey Plum played in Paris. Some Aces insiders were concerned that the wear and tear of the Olympics would negatively affect the players’ performance when they returned.
But Adam Hill, sports reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, poo-poos that notion.
“They weren’t concerned about setting records for wins. They were playing all year for the playoffs,” Hill says. “They’re playing as well as they’ve played in months. They’re actually playing defense now.”
If there’s concern, he adds, it’s that “some other teams got really, really good.”
Are the Raiders good now?
Two games into the season, the Raiders were 1-1, with a surprise win over a very good team, the Baltimore Ravens.
Hill believes that the Raiders may have had less to do with that outcome than their
opponents.
“I don’t think the Raiders won; I think the Ravens lost,” he says. But, he adds, the Raiders have been playing very clean football, which can lead to breaks in a game, as well as wins.
“So give them credit for what they did do,” Hill says. “Most of the team said, ‘We can’t look at this like, ‘Hey, we’re great.’ If you do, you’re in real trouble.”
He doesn’t expect the team to make the playoffs. “I think they win seven or eight games,” he predicts, “but I don’t think that they’re a playoff team.”
College football’s stunning turn.
UNLV’s football team won nine games in 2023, the most in 39 years.
In September, they were ranked in a national Top 25 poll for the first time since 1978. Hill credits first-year coach Barry Odom with the turnaround, and he believes the team is heading to another bowl game this year. He also thinks this might be Odom’s last year at UNLV, because other universities are bound to come calling.
“What I’m preparing for is, don’t be mad at him when he does leave,” Hill says. “He’s going to have a ton of money thrown at him. But ... he has laid a foundation here that’s not going to fall apart instantly.”
Will there be a Las Vegas A’s?
Finally, there is (arguably) the least-anticipated arrival in Southern Nevada sports: the Oakland A’s. The team’s owner, John Fisher, has secured some $380 million in public funding from Nevada and picked a place (where the Tropicana is set to be demolished on Oct. 9) to build a ballpark for which he’s released preliminary designs. But he has no deal to finance his part of the move or stadium, and the team is expected to play in Sacramento until at least 2027.
Will they or won’t they move to Las Vegas? “No,” Hill says, smiling. “I say no.”
