In the past year, the Las Vegas Aces won their first WNBA championship, Brittney Griner came home after 294 days of being wrongfully detained in Russia and triple-doubles took over the league.

There was plenty to talk about in the WNBA during 2022, and with 2023 right around the corner, let’s revisit the biggest storylines of the year.

The Year of the Aces

Las Vegas entered the season with a stacked roster — led by A’ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray and Kelsey Plum — and a first-year head coach in Becky Hammon who came with much fanfare. It was a recipe for utter dominance in 2022, as the Aces won the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup, took home multiple individual awards and claimed their first WNBA title, which was also Las Vegas’ first major pro sports championship. Behind Gray’s Finals MVP performance, the Aces topped the Connecticut Sun 3-1 in the series and embarked on a championship-level celebration.

BG comes home

Since Brittney Griner was detained in Russia in February, efforts to bring her home were at the heart of everything the WNBA did in 2022. “Free BG” was the theme of the season as players and coaches kept her name in the headlines. At the WNBA All-Star Game in July, both teams emerged from the locker rooms after halftime wearing Griner jerseys, while Phoenix Mercury teammate Skylar Diggins-Smith devoted her weekend wardrobe to making statements about Griner’s wrongful detainment. The league never stopped campaigning for her release, and finally after 294 days, Griner was released in a prisoner swap on Dec. 8. The 32-year-old is officially home with family and said she intends to return to the court in 2023.

Saying goodbye to two greats

Sue Bird and Sylvia Fowles have been household names in the WNBA since they debuted in the league in 2002 and 2008, respectively. After accumulating six WNBA championships and 21 All-Star Game appearances between them, they both headed into retirement following the 2022 season. Bird finished her career with a trip to the playoffs, as the Seattle Storm fell to the Aces in the semifinals, while Fowles left the Minnesota Lynx and the league in the same way she came in. Thirteen years after dunking in her first All-Star Game in 2009, Fowles brought the Chicago crowd to their feat in 2022 with another slam in her final appearance.

The Kelsey Plum show

Kelsey Plum made the most of her first WNBA All-Star appearance, scoring 30 points — which tied a record set by Maya Moore — and winning the All-Star MVP award. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert honored Plum at halfcourt after the game, presenting her with a trophy that was noticeably smaller than All-Star MVP trophies in recent years. The little trophy ended up being the subject of jokes for the rest of the season, including from Engelbert herself after Las Vegas’ Commissioner’s Cup win and in Plum’s recent appearance on Kevin Hart’s show.

Kelsey Plum is your #WNBAAllStar Game MVP 🏆 pic.twitter.com/WaFHv17gjz

— espnW (@espnW) July 10, 2022

Contract divorces

If WNBA fans didn’t know what a contract divorce was heading into 2022, they certainly did by the end of the season. Five players “divorced” from their respective teams during the season, including Angel McCoughtry from the Lynx after two games, Liz Cambage from the Sparks in a messy situation and Tina Charles from the Mercury to join the Storm for their playoff run.

Prioritization causes controversy

The league and WNBA Players Association agreed upon the prioritization rule as part of CBA negotiations in 2020. Before it goes into effect in 2023, many players took issue with it publicly this past year. The rule is as follows: Players with two or more years of experience in the WNBA must report to their teams by the start of training camp or by May 1, whichever comes later. If they miss the start of training camp, they will be issued a fine. The penalty for missing the start of the season is a one-year suspension. It’s controversial because it limits the income opportunities for players, who can make much higher salaries in Europe.

Expansion talks

Earlier in the year, Engelbert said the league was aiming to select two locations for expansion teams by the end of 2022. Expansion has been a hot topic in recent years as limited roster spots and salary cap restrictions have left more and more talented players without teams. In a December interview with The Athletic, Engelbert walked back the original timeline. The WNBA has narrowed its search down to 10 cities, with at least one team likely to join by 2025.

Triple-double boom

There were nine triple-doubles recorded in the WNBA in 2022. In the 25 years prior, since the league launched in 1997, there had been only 11. Alyssa Thomas led the sudden surge with two playoff triple-doubles, becoming the first player to reach the feat in the WNBA Finals and the first to register four career triple-doubles. Candace Parker and Sabrina Ionescu each recorded two triple-doubles in 2022, while Moriah Jefferson had one.

Travel issues

Commercial flights to and from games continued to plague the league in 2022. Nneka Ogwumike was one of several players to call out the travel policy after the Sparks were forced to sleep in the airport due to flight cancellations in early August. The league chartered flights for the Commissioner’s Cup Championship and the WNBA Finals, but players continue to ask for more. The issue got more complicated in March when a report in Sports Illustrated revealed the New York Liberty had been fined a WNBA-record $500,000 for chartering team flights in the second half of the 2021 season, a move that violated the league’s CBA.

Eden Laase is a Staff Writer at Just Women’s Sports. Follow her on Twitter @eden_laase.

Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, at a White House ceremony this afternoon. 

The Team USA standout is the most decorated women’s swimmer in the sport’s history. In addition to her seven Olympic golds, she’s also won a total of 21 gold medals at the World Championships, the most of any swimmer regardless of gender. 

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The esteemed award recognizes those who have "made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors," according to a White House press briefing. 

Ledecky is one of 19 medal recipients chosen by the Biden administration this year. She joins a class that spans the worlds of politics, sports, film, human rights, religion, and science. Her fellow 2024 awardees include Everything Everywhere All at Once actress Michelle Yeoh, pioneering Hispanic astronaut Dr. Ellen Ochoa, and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, plus posthumous winners Jim Thorpe, the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the US, and assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers. 

Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and USWNT legend Megan Rapinoe were among 2022’s class of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients. Biles and Rapinoe were the fifth and sixth women athletes to be given the honor, making Ledecky the seventh.

After an illustrious career for both club and country, Gotham FC and U.S. Women’s National Team defender Kelley O’Hara announced today via Kelley on the Street that she will be retiring from professional soccer at the end of this year, making the 2024 NWSL season her last.

"I have always said I would play under two conditions: that I still love playing soccer, and if my body would let me do it the way I wanted to," O’Hara told Just Women’s Sports in the lead-up to her retirement announcement. "I realized a while back that I was always going to love it, so it was the physical piece that was going to be the deciding factor."

The 35-year-old will retire as a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and at least a two-time NWSL champion, depending on where Gotham finishes this season. Her legacy as a player is hard to fully encapsulate, and will forever run through some of the biggest snapshots in USWNT and NWSL history. 

In 2012, O’Hara played every minute of the USWNT’s Olympic gold medal run, after having recently converted into a defender. Her soaring goal off the bench in the 2015 World Cup semifinal is the stuff of legend. And her return from lingering injury to play in every knockout match of the national team’s 2019 World Cup win cemented a storybook international career. 

It was O’Hara who scored the overtime goal in 2021 to earn the Washington Spirit their first-ever NWSL championship, and O’Hara who returned to help see Gotham earn a title in 2023 after years spent in the trenches with the club’s previous iteration, Sky Blue. Her 15-year career spanned two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. (she earned her first professional title in 2010 with WPS’s FC Gold Pride), as well as sweeping changes to the sport both on and off the pitch.

On the field, O’Hara has always been known for a motor that never quits, making the right flank her domain in attacking possession and defensive transition. In recent years, she’s also been celebrated for a competitive fire that raises the level of her teammates, whether she’s in the starting XI or supporting from the bench.

But injuries take a toll, a reality not always seen by the fans watching from home. "I've never taken anything for granted, and I feel like I've never coasted either," O’Hara said of her late-career success in the NWSL despite battling injuries. "I've always been like, 'I gotta put my best foot forward every single day I step on this field' — which is honestly probably half the reason why I'm having to retire now as opposed to getting a couple more years out of it. I've just grinded hard."

Recently, O’Hara has been sidelined at Gotham with ankle and knee injuries, and the situation motivated her to really prioritize listening to her body. "To get injured and come back, and get injured and come back, and just keep doing it, it really takes a toll on you.

"People don't see the doubt that's associated with injury,” she continued. "As athletes we feel a certain way, we perform a certain way, our body feels a certain way, we're very in tune with our bodies. And there's always so much doubt surrounding injury. It’s like, 'Can I feel the way I felt before?' The reality is sometimes you don't."

O’Hara didn’t arrive at the decision to move on from her playing career lightly. But once she began seriously considering making 2024 her final year during the last NWSL offseason, it felt right. "Once I was like, 'Alright, you know what, this will be my last year,' I have had a lot of peace with it," she said. "Truly the only thing I felt was gratitude for everything that my career has been, all the things I've been able to do and the people I've been able to do it with."

She said she’ll miss daily interactions with her teammates and all the amazing memories they’ve created, though she feels lucky to have formed relationships that go beyond sharing a locker room. "You're basically getting to hang out and just shoot the shit with your best friends every day," she reflected. "Which is so unheard of, and I just feel very lucky to do it for so long."

The Stanford graduate also mentioned that the NWSL’s suspension of regular season play in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic made her realize how much playing allowed her the space to simply be creative every day. The tactical elements of soccer provided O’Hara an outlet for problem solving and made use of her naturally competitive edge.

She’s now gearing up to channel her on-field intensity into her post-playing career full time, which is a new chapter she’s excited to begin. "I don't know if the world's ready for it, like the fact that I'm not going to be putting all of my energy into football all the time," she said with a laugh. 

O’Hara said she would like to stay connected to the game in some fashion, whether it be as an owner, coach, or member of a front office. She’s also interested in the growing media space surrounding women’s sports, having provided on-camera analysis for broadcasters like CBS Sports in addition to starting a production company with her fiancée.

"I just feel like I have a lot of passions, and things that excite me," she says. "And I do want to stay as close as I can to the game, because I feel a responsibility — and I'm not sure in what capacity — to continue to grow it."

A sense of responsibility to grow the game has been a consistent refrain for the USWNT and NWSL players of O’Hara’s era, who ushered in a new age of equal pay for the national team and collectively bargained protections for those in the league. The landscape for new players looks different than it did 14 years ago, in large part due to this pivotal generation.

"I feel an immense sense of pride around that, because I don't know if any of us knew that was gonna happen," she said. "We kind of, as things unfolded, took the next step towards changing what women's football looks like in this country and around the world.

"I'm really grateful to have been part of this era with the players that I was [with], not backing down and pushing and knowing that was the right thing to do."

Whatever the future holds, O’Hara is going ahead full throttle. It’s a piece of advice she’d also give to the next generation of professionals looking to make their own impact.

"Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it, and the chips will fall in place," she said. "If you love something, you're willing to do what it takes. You're willing to make the sacrifices, you're willing to handle the roller coaster.

"To me, it's simple. Don't do it for any other reason but that, and I think you'll be alright."

The Phoenix Mercury center spoke with Robin Roberts about her 10-month incarceration, reflecting on her poor living conditions and shaky mental state ahead of her May 7th memoir.

"The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper," Griner told the ABC News anchor in last night’s 20/20 special. "That was the moment where I just felt less than a human." 

She also detailed some of her lowest moments during that time, saying with tears in her eyes that she went so far as to consider taking her own life on more than one occasion. However, the thought of Russian officials not releasing her body back to her family made her reconsider.

"I just didn't think I could get through what I needed to get through," said Griner.

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In February 2022, Griner was arrested and charged with drug possession and smuggling by a Russian court after Sheremetyevo International Airport police found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The cartridges were prescribed by Griner’s doctor for chronic pain back in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. In the interview, the two-time Olympic gold medalist said she had a "mental lapse" while packing, and never intended to bring the cannabis products with her when she returned to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.

"It's just so easy to have a mental lapse," Griner said. "Granted, my mental lapse was on a more grand scale. But it doesn't take away from how that can happen." 

She was later sentenced to nine years behind bars after her Russian attorneys advised her to plead guilty the following July. Griner was then sent to a remote penal colony where she was forced to spend her days cutting cloth to make military uniforms. From there, it only got worse.

"Honestly, it just had to happen," she said when asked about her decision to cut off her signature long locks. "We had spiders above my bed making nests.

"My dreads started to freeze," she added. "They would just stay wet and cold and I was getting sick. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to survive."

Shortly after Griner’s initial arrest, the U.S. State Department classified her case as wrongfully detained, escalating its urgency within the government and calling even more attention to the situation. On December 8th, she was freed in a prisoner exchange negotiated by the Biden administration.

While she told Roberts she was "thrilled" when she got the news, she was also very upset about having to leave fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan behind. She also continues to carry guilt about her arrest, saying "At the end of the day, it's my fault. And I let everybody down."

Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, hits shelves on May 7th.

"Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets," Griner told ABC News in an exclusive statement. "But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare."

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

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In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.