CHELSEA GRAY HEARS A’ja Wilson talk. A lot. About trophies. About buckets. About blocks. About boards. But of the millions of words her outspoken teammate has uttered throughout their five seasons and two WNBA championships together as teammates on the Las Vegas Aces, 11 stand out to Gray.

She heard them in June, when nothing was going right for the Aces or Gray or Wilson. Las Vegas, among the preseason favorites to win the 2025 title, was hovering around (or below) .500, and Gray remembers Wilson calling her out.

“There’s no way I should ever have more assists than you,” Gray recalls Wilson telling her.

The words stung.

Through the end of June, the reigning WNBA MVP had out-assisted the “Point Gawd” in six games, and the Aces turned the calendar to July with an 8-8 record. At the time, the 32-year-old Gray, who has filled hours of video with flashy passes over the course of her career, averaged 4.3 assists.

“Our relationship is super honest and raw,” Gray said. “I’ve cried in front of her. She’s cried in front of me.”

From July through the end of the regular season, Gray averaged 7.1 assists, including a season-high 14 in an August game against Dallas when the Aces were in the middle of a 16-game winning streak. In the playoffs, Gray pushed that average up to 7.8, the highest postseason average in her career. She has had 10 assists in three of the Aces’ 10 postseason games so far.

Her response to Wilson’s challenge has helped guide the Aces to a 2-0 series lead over the Phoenix Mercury in the WNBA Finals, two wins away from their third championship in four years. Game 3 is Wednesday in Phoenix (8 ET, ESPN).

“It’s that kind of bond that we can have conversations in the middle of the game,” Gray said. “And we understand where we’re coming from.”

GRAY TAKES THE HANDOFF along the sideline and heads to an open spot. She sits down on the bench wielding a marker and a dry-erase board. It’s Game 1 of the Finals and the score is tied 23-23 with 8:49 left in the second quarter. Gray draws up the play she wants so her teammates can see her thoughts.

After the Aces’ 79-76 victory, Gray is quick to clarify that she isn’t using coach Becky Hammon’s personal board. Not even she is that bold. “They have two boards back there,” Gray said. The one she used doesn’t technically belong to Gray. She just happens to be the one who asks an assistant coach for it.

Gray started taking control of the board in huddles and timeouts from time to time when she came to Las Vegas in 2021 after spending her first six seasons in Connecticut and Los Angeles.

She already had built a reputation as a player with extraordinary vision and a high IQ, and she has only built on that since.

“When she takes the clipboard, everybody locks in,” said Aces guard Dana Evans, who had 21 points in the Game 1 win. “We know that she’s about to show valid points. She’s not doing it just to do it.”

For Gray, it’s about helping her teammates see what she or Hammon are talking about. It’s something she has done more frequently this year.

“They have to see it sometimes on the board rather than just saying it,” Gray said. “It’s made me a better player and a better leader, to be able to explain stuff. And people listen. It’s allowed our huddles to be a little bit tighter.”

Ceding some control to Gray is an easy decision for Hammon when the results are buckets. Hammon may call one out of bounds play, but if Gray sees something different, she’s empowered to make a different one.

That was the case during Game 3 of the Aces’ semifinal series against the Indiana Fever. With 3.6 seconds left in the third quarter, the referee handed Gray the ball to inbound from the sideline on their side of half court. Gray recognized that Jackie Young had leverage on her defender, who’d inadvertently given Young a free run to the basket. Young took off, and Gray launched the ball down the court. It dropped into Young’s hands in stride and she laid it in.

“My thing is, I always want them to have an aggressive nature,” Hammon said. “These possessions where it’s like they’re running routes over the top, that’s the kind of pace I want all the time. So when they do it without me saying it, I love it.”

GRAY SNAGS THE BALL out of the air and turns up court. The Aces lead by 17 midway through the fourth quarter of Game 2. As Gray trots toward the Aces’ basket, Young flanks her on the outside. Young gets a step ahead of Mercury guard Kahleah Copper and turns up the speed.

Gray sees the beginning of separation and turns her head away from Young as she drops a perfectly weighted bounce pass past Copper’s outstretched fingers. Young scoops up the ball in stride and lays it in for two of her 32 points on the day. The basket is Gray’s 10th assist, marking her second career Finals game with 10 points and 10 assists. Only three other players have multiple such games in their careers: Alyssa Thomas, Courtney Vandersloot and Sue Bird.

Gray finished with 10 points, 10 assists, 8 rebounds, 3 steals and 3 blocks in the Aces’ 91-78 Game 2 win.

“She does so many little things,” Hammon said Sunday. “Her passing is elite, but it’s all the other little things that she’s doing that really helped us win the basketball game.”

A year ago, Gray was working her way back from a fracture in her left foot suffered during the 2023 WNBA Finals. She lacked her usual mobility and power. She couldn’t get the separation she needed for her pinpoint passes, and she couldn’t get the lift she needed to hit her fadeaway jumper. The Aces lost to the eventual champion Liberty in the semifinals.

Gray experienced injuries at the end of her college career at Duke that bled into the beginning of her professional career. A right kneecap fracture sidelined her for the entirety of her 2014 rookie season with Connecticut. But until that foot fracture, she hadn’t been seriously injured as a pro, and she’d never returned midseason before.

She wasn’t herself physically last season, but Gray said that has changed this year. She said she’s in her best shape since the 2023 championship run.

“It really helps our team,” Gray said. “I’m able to play for longer stints at a high level both offensively and defensively.”

Gray, who will play in her 20th WNBA Finals game on Wednesday, the most among active players, is showing why she is the only pure point guard to ever win Finals MVP, which she did in 2022. She is shooting 45% from 3-point range this postseason, up from 37% during the regular season, and her best postseason percentage since that 2022 run. Her hands-on defense is creating additional opportunities and possessions. Gray averaged 1.4 steals in the regular season, but is averaging 2.2 steals in the postseason.

Mercury assistant Kristi Toliver knows how difficult it can be to slow down Gray. Toliver watched her development up close when Gray was the starting point guard in L.A. for the 2016 season, Gray’s first in a Sparks uniform.

“She’s fearless,” Toliver said. “She’s clutch and wants that moment. She wants that smoke.”

What Gray doesn’t want is another game where Wilson can point out her lack of production. If Gray were so inclined, she could rib the co-defensive player of the year about out-blocking her in Game 2. It is, after all, the kind of relationship they have. The kind of relationship champions have.

“She’s always going to be her true self, and it allows you to be your true self,” Wilson said. “I think that has always been our friendship and our bond. She’s calm through the storm. I’m so grateful for her to be our point guard.”

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — In April 2013, the Denver Broncos were still in pain after an overtime loss to the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC’s divisional round that abruptly ended quarterback Peyton Manning’s first season with the team. But in the “we just have to get back to work” mantra of then-GM John Elway, the Broncos’ scouting and personnel staff had already gathered for predraft meetings.

Nobody knew it then, but that room provided a glimpse at future NFL front offices. Among the scouts, interns and assortment of staffers were six would-be NFL general managers, four of whom are currently in their positions, with Elway forming what would become the Broncos’ deep general manager tree.

“I learned so much,” San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch said. “I’m not sure if I’m in this position if I don’t see it done that way with those people. You can’t see years ahead in that moment … but that foundational desire for people to want to pull in the same direction to succeed — I saw that there, right from John on down to all of us.”

The Broncos (3-2) face the New York Jets on Sunday in London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (9:30 a.m. ET, NFL Network). The 0-5 Jets are in their first season with general manager Darren Mougey, who joins Lynch, the Las Vegas Raiders‘ John Spytek and the Washington Commanders‘ Adam Peters as current GMs who cut their teeth on Elway’s Broncos staff.

That staff also included former Raiders GM John Ziegler, who is currently an assistant general manager with the Tennessee Titans. Champ Kelly was there, too; he finished out the 2024 season as the Raiders’ interim general manager and is currently a senior personnel executive with the Miami Dolphins. All six were with the Broncos between 2013 and 2015, three seasons out of a four-year run in which the Broncos tallied 50 regular-season wins, four AFC West titles, two Super Bowl appearances and a Super Bowl 50 championship.

“I think we all had aspirations, but you were so focused on the tasks,” said Mougey, who started as a scouting intern for the Broncos in 2012. “Nobody was sitting around like, ‘Man, I’m going to be such a GM’ … [but] I always felt like it was a talented group. You’d just watch how they worked and how they treated people and know if you got the chance to do this, you’d want it to feel like that.”

As the GMs reminisce about the Broncos days, there are memories of cramped spaces, thousands of player evaluations, arguments, moments that made them laugh and what each called the construction of a “rare” bridge from being co-workers to lifelong friends.

“Adam Peters and I shared an office — it was like a box, like 10 feet by 10 feet, two desks facing each other, glass wall out to the hallway, so like a fish bowl,” Spytek said. “[After] Thanksgiving, we were in there every day. He had outranked me, so he made me have the desk with my back to the hallway so everybody could see what was on my computer screen. … Still makes me laugh.”

While Peters was hired into the Broncos’ scouting department in 2009, it was a group assembled largely by Elway after he was entrusted by former Broncos owner Pat Bowlen in early 2011 to pull the franchise out of a malaise that included missing the playoffs for five straight seasons. More than a decade later, the group holds true to the roots that trace to late nights and shared offices on the second floor of the Broncos’ complex (which some called the “bullpen”).

“You know, I was talking to Adam and [Spytek], especially when they were going through the process of getting those [GM] jobs and then [Mougey],” said Matt Russell, who was the Broncos’ director of player personnel and is now a senior personnel executive with the Philadelphia Eagles. “And I told my wife at that point, I don’t know if there is a record for GMs out of one place, but this has got to be close. A rare thing.”

EACH CURRENT GM has a memory of the moment when Elway welcomed them into the fold. And when asked about the biggest lesson they learned from the Hall of Fame quarterback and Broncos legend, they each used the same word, unprompted.

Bold.

“Just be bold, make decisions with courage,” Peters said. “Think we all learned the value of courage in the job, looking right into the pressure and make the right decision.”

The pursuit to sign future Hall of Famer Manning in 2012 encapsulated that ethos. The then-four-time NFL MVP was coming off his fourth neck surgery and had missed the 2011 season when the Broncos dove in to get one of the most decorated players to ever enter free agency.

As Elway famously said, “There was no Plan B.”

“To see how competitive John was, how driven he was in that role, how much it all meant to him,” said Spytek, who was hired by the Broncos as a Southwest area scout in 2013. “You saw how to go for it, to not be scared ever. Just say f— it. Back when it happened I don’t think people really saw Denver as the option for Peyton Manning or thought Peyton would come here. But John was like f— it, let’s make that happen.”

All four current GMs say they remember Elway’s boldness as they form their own strategies toward free agency, the draft and day-to-day decisions with their rosters. Decisions such as Mougey moving on from quarterback Aaron Rodgers for Justin Fields, Lynch trading for running back Christian McCaffrey in 2022 and Spytek convincing Pete Carroll to come out of retirement to coach the Raiders.

Even Lynch — who attended his first combine with the Broncos’ scouting staff in 2011 while he was still a color analyst for Fox — was not immune to the aura. Lynch was a Hall of Famer in waiting at the time and had been asked by Elway to dip his toe into scouting. Lynch served as an advisor with Denver. And he saw a different side of his longtime friend — a confident decision-maker who was willing to allow those around him to have an unfiltered opinion.

“I mean, I had a playing career, had played for the organization, had been around John in a lot of different situations,” Lynch said. “But I learned John is an intimidating presence; he’s John freaking Elway. … But I would guess if you asked any of us, his ability to listen was so big. He heard us, all of us.”

Lynch, who was hired as the 49ers’ general manager in 2017, said those meetings with the Broncos influenced one of his most significant hires. Shortly after he accepted the 49ers job, Lynch brought Peters in from Denver as his vice president of player personnel.

“Even if he had thoughts that were contrary to John’s, he’d share them and he had the reasons why,” Lynch said. “And when I got the opportunity, I remembered and hired Adam.”

Peters said that the first time Elway asked a scout or another member of the personnel staff for an opinion in a crowded meeting room served almost as a rite of passage. Elway then might challenge that opinion to see whether the staffer was ready to defend it — or he would simply nod at points well made.

“And the first time he agreed with you, and it worked out, man, that felt pretty good,” Mougey said.

“Elway always did such a good job of bringing people in and still letting you know you had a place and a voice,” Peters said. “Some places you might be just a scout, or just pro personnel, or just an intern, but you never felt you were ‘just’ there; you were heard. I remember that, and try to keep that with me as I do this.”

ONE OF THE more unique things about that Elway regime was the “breakfast club.” The environment in NFL front offices, in Spytek’s words, often involves “a bunch of people hunched over screens.” But Elway had a different idea.

If you were on Denver’s scouting staff and working in the building, there was a daily 7 a.m. standing appointment. It would involve a weight training and conditioning workout in the team’s weight room, put together by then-Broncos strength coach Luke Richesson and led by Elway. Attendees say it never felt voluntary, nor did they consider it a chore. It was as normal a part of their day as breakfast. And it wasn’t easy; even Lynch, roughly five years removed from playing, had to push to keep up. He said, “I thought I was in really good shape then, but I was like, ‘Damn.'”

“One of the reasons John built it the way he did was the player in him,” Mougey said. “We were his team, his group, his guys — we agree, we disagree, we shoot the s—, we talk. He was building teams in a team because those were his experiences as a player. It’s powerful. And you could tell he loved that part of it.”

Peters said the 49ers formed their own breakfast club when he and Lynch moved to San Francisco, and that’s when they became invested in each other outside football. As they spent time together, discussions moved beyond the next meeting or deadlines to conversations about family, social life, alma maters and places to eat on the next road trip. And it’s that sharp-tongued, give-and-take that they remember with smiles now.

“It was ball busting, 7 a.m. version,” Spytek said. “It was what John knew as a player, what he brought to us. We knew what was going on in each other’s lives. It creates natural conversations that help do the work. … And most importantly, I think it made the disagreements more functional because we all knew what we were about.”

PETERS SAYS THERE are days when his cellphone almost ceaselessly crackles with activity. Injury updates, agents reaching out, practice squad slots to fill and any number of problems that come with the job.

Yet among the frenzy will be a photo, meme, joke, thought of the day or just a check-in from someone in the still-ongoing group chat.

“A picture will get shared of somebody’s trip or something funny they saw. Something will come up, or somebody will say something or do something in public, and everybody will bust on it,” Mougey said. “We’re all-in there still, everybody from that group in that time, not just [the current GMs] — a lot of important people to me.”

“Sometimes, even some actual football gets done,” Spytek said. “We’re still tight.”

But it’s not all fun and jokes. The bond goes deeper. The Raiders’ current GM can recall story after story of the moments that made him laugh, but the most important will always be an emotional trip to the Senior Bowl in January 2015. It occurred weeks after Spytek’s 21-month-old daughter Evelyn Grace had died on Dec. 24, 2014, from complications from surgery. She was born with cytomegalovirus infection, or congenital CMV, a type of virus that can impact a newborn’s brain, liver, spleen and lungs and effect their growth.

“My wife [Kristen] and I were devastated, our family was devastated, and the guys you’re talking about, they were the people that showed up for me and my family,” Spytek said.

“But Adam Peters — we were supposed to go to the Senior Bowl, and I hadn’t really gone to work since we lost her. He asked me if I wanted to go, so talked it over with my wife and I ended up flying out with him into Pensacola [Florida]. And all that’s left is this two-door, tiny speck of a car, and we were smashed together driving down the highway. And he didn’t need to say much or do much in an impossible time of my life. … You could work a lot of places and never be with people who show up for you the way those guys did and have.”

THE BRONCOS’ PERSONNEL department eventually eroded, a victim of its own success. After Denver’s Super Bowl win to close out the 2015 season, Spytek was hired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as their director of player personnel. Lynch and Peters left for San Francisco after the 2016 season.

Denver missed the playoffs for eight seasons after the Super Bowl win, and by 2021, Elway had stepped away from running the team’s football operations. Mougey remained after current Broncos general manager George Paton was hired in 2021, eventually becoming assistant general manager before he was hired by the Jets earlier this year.

While everyone has dispersed across the NFL, they still gather each year at the combine. They carve out an evening at The Whistle Stop Inn in Indianapolis to celebrate Tom Heckert’s life. Heckert, a former general manager for the Eagles and Cleveland Browns before he came to the Broncos in 2013 as director of pro personnel, died in 2018 of amyloidosis, a rare blood disorder.

“Everybody who knew Heck tells the same stories and laughs the same laughs,” Peters said. “And you wouldn’t miss it. … It kind of brings us together and we kind of remember all of the people we were with there.”

Even as they all look back on their time with the Broncos, there is still the competition of the job. They’d like nothing better than to hoist a Lombardi Trophy before the others do. And then, as Spytek said, “Everybody else can win one after that.”

Perhaps they’d needle one another in the chat while embracing memories of a cramped second floor, a Hall of Fame legend for a boss and more hope than experience.

“I know there are people who say they can sit in a room and tell which of the scouting interns will be a GM someday,” Russell said. “I don’t think that’s possible, but what I will say is possible — because I saw it with my own eyes in that room — there are guys that are young, have the energy and the confidence that separate themselves. And they have separated themselves.

“I’m not surprised. Not one bit.”