One franchise, three cities and three names.

The Las Vegas Aces began in Utah. English Wikipedia says the franchise was founded in Salt Lake City as the Utah Starzz before the WNBA’s first season in 1997, one of the eight original teams in the league. The name, Wikipedia says, nodded partly to the Utah Stars of the old American Basketball Association, while the double “zz” at the end echoed the Utah Jazz, the NBA club that shared the team’s ownership in its early years.

That arrangement ended after the 2002 season. Wikipedia says that when the NBA divested itself of all its WNBA franchises at the end of 2002, the Jazz ownership did not wish to keep the Starzz, and no local buyer came forward. The franchise was sold to Peter Holt, then the owner of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, and moved to Texas for the 2003 season. It became the San Antonio Silver Stars, and, according to Wikipedia, its colours changed to the silver and black motif already used by the Spurs. The visual link to a men’s team in the same city was explicit, and the star in the name carried over from the Utah years.

The name was trimmed in 2014. Wikipedia says the Silver Stars became simply the San Antonio Stars that year, and the team played under that name until 2017. After that season, Wikipedia says, Spurs Sports & Entertainment decided to put the team up for sale, and it became clear the franchise would move again.

The buyer was a casino company. Wikipedia says the NBA and WNBA approved the sale of the Stars to MGM Resorts on 17 October 2017, with the plan of moving the team to Las Vegas and playing home games at the arena inside Mandalay Bay, now called Michelob Ultra Arena, from the 2018 season. A new city opened the question of a new name, and the answer came two months later.

A red, white and black diamond and a name from the card table.

The Aces name was unveiled on 11 December 2017. Sam Gordon of the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that day on an hour-long ceremony at the House of Blues inside Mandalay Bay, attended by MGM Resorts president Bill Hornbuckle, WNBA president Lisa Borders, Clark County commissioner Stephen Sisolak and Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, along with head coach and general manager Bill Laimbeer. The reveal ended in red and black confetti.

Keeping the old nickname had been an option. The Review-Journal said it had reported the previous month that the WNBA had filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the rights to “Las Vegas Stars”, and that Hornbuckle confirmed the franchise had considered keeping the nickname. He said, however, that MGM had owned the rights to “Las Vegas Aces” for more than a year, and that the group preferred the new identity and had settled on the name about a month before the event.

Hornbuckle described the name as a “double entendre” to the city, according to the paper: a name, he said, that offered excitement to the community and that people could get behind. He added that it was “simplistic”. Borders, the paper reported, tied the word to being at the top of whatever you are trying to do, and said MGM would bring that value to life with the team.

The first logo matched the confetti. The Review-Journal described it as a sleek red, white and black diamond carrying the franchise’s name and the city’s initials. The team set out to play its home games at what was then the Mandalay Bay Events Center, a venue the paper noted had previously hosted boxing, UFC bouts and preseason NBA games. ESPN later described the scheme the team wore before 2024 as red and gold.

Design and documentation.

A women’s professional basketball club builds its identity under a different set of pressures from a men’s club in the same city. Many teams in the league were set up in markets that already had an established men’s franchise, and some began life as sister clubs to an NBA team, sharing an owner, a front office and an arena. That arrangement shapes the brand from the start: the women’s team often borrows a colour, a type style or a naming idea from its partner, then has to decide how far to move away from it as it gains its own owners and its own audience.

Colour is usually the first place that independence shows. A club can stay close to the regional palette of the city’s other teams, or pick a combination that no neighbour uses, so that a jersey reads as its own at a glance on television and in the stands. Names tend to come from weather, landscape, local landmarks or a sense of energy, and short single-word names give designers room to build a mark around one strong shape.

Arenas matter too. Teams that share a building with a men’s club, an ice-hockey team or a concert schedule have to make their court, signage and branding stand out on nights when the venue belongs to them, and teams that move between venues carry their identity from one building to the next.

A Raiders owner, and a team turned silver and black.

Ownership changed in 2021. Wikipedia says Mark Davis, owner of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, agreed to buy the team from MGM on 14 January 2021, and that the league approved the purchase on 12 February 2021. Davis has owned the Aces since then. Wikipedia says ground was soon broken on a training facility for the Aces in Henderson, Nevada, next to the Raiders’ own headquarters, completed in April 2023; the team is now headquartered in Henderson. In March 2023, according to Wikipedia, the former NFL quarterback Tom Brady bought a minority stake in the team.

The identity followed the owner. ESPN reported on 6 March 2024 that the Aces had revealed new uniforms for the 2024 season, dropping their previous red and gold colour scheme for a silver, black and white look similar to that of the Raiders. The white “Heroine” uniform carried the team name and number in a silver outline, with alternating black and white stripes along the side, and the “Rebel” edition used the same silver outline with the colours inverted. ESPN noted that Davis’ two teams now shared a similar silver, white and black scheme.

Elaine Emerson of FOX5 Las Vegas reported the same day that the team had shown off a new logo along with the uniforms in a post on X, and called the silver, white and black look an obvious nod to Davis. Red was not retired. According to the team, as quoted by FOX5, “Championship Red” remained part of the team culture and a core part of its identity, and the new jersey went on sale at the team store at the Aces facility that weekend.

Seen in sequence, the colours have moved three times: Spurs silver and black in San Antonio from 2003, MGM’s red, white and black at the 2017 reveal, and silver, black and white under Davis from 2024, each change arriving with a change of owner or city.

For a design guide, the Las Vegas Aces show how a name can stay fixed while the palette tracks the owner. Compare the Las Vegas Raiders, whose silver and black the Aces adopted in 2024, the San Antonio Spurs, whose colours the franchise wore in Texas, and the league itself in WNBA. For this guide we use black, silver and championship red with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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