A'ja Wilson has finished in the top two of WNBA MVP voting five seasons running and won it outright four times, more than any player in league history. Through the first two-thirds of the 2026 season she's building a case for a fifth.

She's leading the league in scoring, sitting near the top in rebounding and blocks, and the Las Vegas Aces have climbed to the second seed behind a Minnesota Lynx side that's pulled clear of everyone.

The chasing pack, Paige Bueckers, Olivia Miles and Caitlin Clark, are each playing well enough to pick up first-place votes somewhere. None of them are close enough to be favourite.

How WNBA MVP Voting Works

The award goes to a national panel of sportswriters and broadcasters rather than a fan vote. Voters submit a ranked top five, and points get allocated on a sliding scale, 10 for a first-place vote, seven for second, five for third, three for fourth and one for fifth. Whoever accumulates the most points across the panel wins.

Last year's panel ran to 72 voters, and Wilson took the award with 51 of the 72 first-place votes and 657 total points, comfortably clear of Napheesa Collier in second on 534.

Timing follows the end of the regular season closely. The 2026 season wraps up on Thursday 24 September, with the playoffs tipping off three days later on 27 September, and recent years have seen the MVP confirmed in that same narrow window between the last regular season game and the opening night of the postseason.

Expect the announcement to land right around the turn of the calendar from late September, not months after the fact.

One thing matters for how the race gets read: team success counts, but it isn't decisive. Wilson won last year's MVP with the Aces sitting second, not first, in the standings. Rookies have also almost never won it, which matters for how Miles' candidacy gets treated even with the best record in the league behind her.

A'ja Wilson's Case for Five

Wilson is putting up numbers that track almost exactly with the season that won her a fourth MVP, except bigger. She's leading the league in scoring at 26.6 points a game, adding 9.6 rebounds, 3.2 assists, 1.5 steals and 2.0 blocks a night, and shooting 53.7 per cent from the field and 44.6 per cent from three.

July alone was a different level again, 28.3 points a game and more than 10 rebounds across seven games, form that should land her a third straight Western Conference Player of the Month award.

The volume of dominant nights is the number that stands out. Wilson has scored 30 or more points in 10 games this season, double the total of any other player in the league. She's doing it as the best two-way player on the floor as well, not just the best scorer, which is the argument that separates her from every other name in this market.

Wilson was co-Defensive Player of the Year last season and remains firmly in that conversation again in 2026, a detail that reinforces just how complete her case is rather than distracting from it.

The Aces sit at 21-9 and hold the second seed in the West, well back of the Lynx's league-leading pace after Minnesota built a four-game lead over the rest of the competition.

That gap will get raised as a knock on Wilson's case, and it shouldn't carry much weight. She won MVP in 2025 with the Aces also sitting second, behind that same Lynx franchise on the ladder, and voters didn't blink.

The closest thing to a complication is voter fatigue, the same argument that got made before her fourth trophy last year and didn't move a single vote. Nothing in this year's numbers suggests 2026 plays out any differently.

Who's Chasing Wilson in the WNBA MVP Race

Paige Bueckers has turned Dallas from the league's worst team into a genuine playoff side, and her fingerprints are all over it.

The Wings finished 2025 at 10-34 and currently sit at 19-11, one of the biggest turnarounds in the league this season. Bueckers is averaging roughly five points a game fewer than Wilson in her sophomore season, and the gap between best player on a transformed team and best player in the league is exactly what's holding her back in this market.

Olivia Miles has the strongest team-success argument in the field. The Lynx own the league's best record, and Miles became the first player in WNBA history to reach 400 points, 100 rebounds and 100 assists inside her first 22 games, en route to averaging around 19.5 points, 4.8 rebounds and 6.0 assists.

The problem for her market position isn't the stat line, it's precedent. Only one rookie in league history has won this award outright, and matching that is a far higher bar than her numbers alone suggest.

Caitlin Clark opened the season as a co-favourite with Wilson before an inconsistent start pushed her price out. She's rebuilt some of that ground on the back of a five-game Indiana win streak, nine wins from her last 11, and a stretch in which the Fever scored 100-plus points in five straight games, a first in league history.

Clark also picked up her fourth career triple-double in that run, tied for third-most in league history. It's a genuine hot streak. It's arriving from too far back to threaten the top of the market.

Why the Field Looks Thinner Than Usual

The player who has actually finished closest to Wilson in each of the last two years isn't really part of this year's conversation.

Napheesa Collier was runner-up in both 2024 and 2025, and she underwent surgery on both ankles in the offseason, missing the first 10 weeks and 27 games of the 2026 season before finally debuting in late July.

That's roughly a third of the season gone before she played a minute, and MVP voters don't hand the award to players who missed that much of the schedule regardless of what they do in the games they play.

Breanna Stewart, the 2023 MVP, is the other name that's dropped out of genuine contention. Her shooting numbers are down on recent seasons and the Liberty have underperformed against preseason title expectations, which tends to move a player out of the picture even when the raw stats stay respectable.

Kelsey Mitchell is worth a mention rather than a full case. She's been putting up the second-most points per game in the league at times this season, but she plays alongside Clark in Indiana, and the two are more likely to split attention and votes than either is to build a standalone MVP push.

The FIBA World Cup Break Complicates the Run-In

The regular season doesn't run straight through to 24 September.

The WNBA breaks from 31 August to 16 September so players can turn out for their countries at the FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup in Berlin, and Wilson is expected to lead Team USA into that tournament chasing a fifth straight world title, a neat parallel to her own chase for a fifth MVP.

Clark, Bueckers, Stewart and Collier have all featured in USA camps this year and are candidates for the same squad, though the final roster hadn't been locked in as of late July.

That means several MVP contenders could go from an international tournament in Germany straight into an eight-game sprint to the WNBA finish line, with barely a week to recover before the regular season closes.

It's a genuine variable for how the last stretch plays out, and it's the last time this exact clash happens. FIBA has already confirmed the next Women's World Cup won't fall during the WNBA season again.

The tournament format, Berlin schedule and Australia's own path through it are covered in our FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup 2026 betting guide.

The Australian Angle on the WNBA MVP Award

This is a genuinely Australian story before it's anything else. Lauren Jackson, trained entirely in Australia, won this award three times, in 2003, 2007 and 2010, and remains the only MVP winner in league history developed outside the United States.

She held a share of the all-time record until Wilson's fourth win in 2025 broke it. If Wilson gets to five this year, she's separating from an Australian, not an American, as the previous benchmark.

The current Opals contingent isn't threatening that MVP history this season, but the Australian presence in the league keeps growing regardless.

Roughly a dozen Australians are on WNBA rosters in 2026, led by Alanna Smith, who signed a three-year supermax deal with Dallas worth close to US$3.75 million, and Ezi Magbegor, both regulars for Opals duty as well. Nine of the league's 15 teams currently carry at least one Australian on the roster, as deep as the pipeline has ever run.

None of that changes who wins the 2026 MVP. It does mean Australian punters have more reason than usual to follow the race closely, and it's worth remembering that the last time an Australian genuinely contended for this exact award, the response from home was enormous.

How to Watch the WNBA in Australia

ESPN holds the long-term Australian rights to the WNBA, running through the 2035-36 season, with coverage distributed via Kayo Sports, Foxtel and Fetch TV. WNBA League Pass is also available locally for punters who want access to every game rather than the selected broadcast slate, and a number of games are carried on Prime Video as part of the league's broader 2026 media rights expansion.

For the MVP race specifically, the Aces' games are worth prioritising if Wilson's push for a fifth trophy is the angle you're following, alongside the Lynx for Miles and the Fever for Clark.

All three sides are appearing regularly enough on the ESPN slate through Kayo that catching the run-in shouldn't require much hunting.

WNBA MVP Betting Markets

For the latest WNBA MVP odds and markets, check out our dedicated page here at Sportsbet.

Wilson's price reflects a market that considers this close to settled, and outright backers this deep into the season are paying for near-certainty rather than genuine uncertainty.

Where the market gets more interesting is around the edges. Miles and Bueckers both carry rookie and sophomore-season storylines that could shorten sharply on a big finishing kick, particularly if either team overtakes the Aces in the standings down the stretch.

Clark's price is the one most likely to move on name recognition and television audience rather than pure stats, given how much attention the Fever's win streak has generated.

Wilson's Defensive Player of the Year market is worth watching alongside the MVP race rather than instead of it. A player winning both in the same season isn't rare for her specifically, and the two markets tend to move together when her two-way numbers are this strong.