Mark Davis built Aces' WNBA dynasty. Can Raiders finally follow? | Opinion
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HENDERSON, Nev. – It was a playful, yet substantial suggestion to Mark Davis.
"Whatever you’ve done in charting the course for the Las Vegas Aces, can’t you just apply that to the Las Vegas Raiders?"
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I mean, the Aces have won three WNBA championships since Davis bought the franchise in 2021 – and are gunning for a repeat crown. The Raiders are on their 10th head coach, including interims, and haven’t won a playoff game while posting just two winning seasons since Davis inherited the franchise following the death of his iconic father, Al, in 2011.
“I know. I know,” Davis told USA TODAY Sports, grinning as he sat off the edge of the field following a Raiders training camp practice.
“I use the same exact management style, really. I understand the things I know and the things I don’t know. I hire people that know those things. It’s worked for the Aces. And I just haven’t gotten it 100% right here yet. I believe we might be…”
Davis, 71, went on to acknowledge that all of his optimism about his new regime, headed by rookie head coach Klint Kubiak and second-year general manager John Spytek – and boosted by a minority owner named Tom Brady – won’t carry water without results.
After all, it wasn’t too long ago Davis was telling me how fired-up he was about promoting interim coach Antonio Pierce to the head job (2024), in part because the former linebacker who grew up in Compton, California, – Raiders country – was a Raider at heart who could get the best out of players. Before that (2022), he was convinced that giving another shot to Josh McDaniels, the Bill Belichick disciple, was the right move. Before that, Davis thought he hit the jackpot in luring Jon Gruden back to the franchise (2018) after years of trying to sell the idea to Coach Chucky.
Now, it’s Kubiak, who helped the Seahawks win Super Bowl 60 as offensive coordinator, following the one-and-done era of Pete Carroll, with Spytek getting a one-year headstart in his first GM gig.
“It’s interesting trying to put together the head coach-general manager dynamic,” Davis said. “And getting it right. I just haven’t been able to do that. I hadn’t gotten the right matchups and all that. I feel this time we’ve got it. Klint and John are on the same page.”
So far, so good. The Raiders – with Fernando Mendoza, the No. 1 pick overall, learning from the sidelines behind veteran quarterback Kirk Cousins – head into their early-season showdown against the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday at Allegiant Stadium as one of the NFL’s five unbeaten teams (3-0). They’ve already matched their victory total from last season (3-14) and have quickly transformed from NFL pushover to major surprise.
And what a week this is for Davis, as another Sports Equinox looms in this season on the sports calendar. On Thursday night, three days before Maxx Crosby gives chase to Patrick Mahomes, the Aces host the Indiana Fever with a chance to advance to the second round of the WNBA playoffs.
“What I did with the Aces, I hired the strongest women I could find and I got the ‘F’ out of the way,” Davis said. “And we’ve got three championships.”
For all of the misfires Davis has had in hiring Raiders coaches, his move in hiring Becky Hammon as Aces coach – and making her the first woman coach at any level to top $1 million in annual salary – struck gold.
Of course, it helps to have A’ja Wilson, a four-time WNBA MVP and three-time league scoring champ, in the mix. Yet getting out of the way (sort of), as Davis put it, has proven to be sound strategy. And so lucrative.
Davis bought the Aces in 2021 from MGM Resorts (with Brady also on board as a minority owner) for $2 million. Now the franchise ranks among the most valuable in the WNBA, with a $310 million valuation when Forbes released its first-ever such ratings of WNBA teams late last year. Talk about return on investment.
“Fantastic. Absolutely,” Davis said. “As a business, cash-flow wise? No. It looks like not the smartest thing. But when you look at the valuation increase, then on that side of the ledger it was a helluva endeavor.”
And the soaring Aces value is just one reflection of Davis’ financial fortune. In moving the Raiders from Oakland, Davis was lured with a taxpayer-funded, $2 billion stadium that fuels another type of rising valuation. In the Forbes rankings for 2026, the Raiders were deemed with NFL’s eighth-most valuable franchise at $10.3 billion.
Yet for all of the negative connotations that come with rich NFL owners benefitting from taxpayer-supported stadiums, there are some things Davis can’t be knocked on. The Raiders, for one, have shown that despite playing in a domed stadium, it is possible to have natural-grass playing surfaces – which has become an increasingly desirable target for the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) to pursue on a broader scale for the next round of labor talks in the coming years.
Davis has said that having a retractable grass field at Allegiant Stadium is important because he believes football should be played on grass, which he believes reduces injury risk – contrary to the NFL’s standard contention that there is no difference in risk between natural grass and artificial turf surfaces.
And that pro-player stance is even more pronounced with Davis’ WNBA impact.
At a cost of $40 million, the Aces were the first WNBA team to have an exclusive practice facility, a 64,000-square foot palace adjacent to the Raiders headquarters. While it’s been a few years now, the point that WNBA legend Candace Parker made in 2023 when she signed with the Aces for the final season of her 16-year career – that she had never had her own locker during her professional career before that – still resonates.
“The investment into next door was an important factor,” Davis said. “I think it was borne out when Candace Parker said it was the first time she ever had a locker with her name on it, where she could leave her stuff after that.”
Davis also established an alumni network with the Aces, who moved to Las Vegas in 2018 from San Antonio. Before that, the franchise was located in Utah.
“The first thing we did when we got the Aces, we contacted all the people from Utah and San Antonio,” Davis said. “It stemmed from what the Raiders are all about. No. 1 is family. It was 22 years in the league when I took over and he players who played there (in the previous cities), they had been forgotten, all the alumni. Well, the most valuable asset the Raiders have is the alumni and I wanted to bring that to the Aces as well. So, we brought all the players back to see a game, meet the players, talk to them about the future, about building a fraternity with the women.
“So, to give them the respect they deserve in all of that, those two things I could control,” he added, referring to the headquarters and alumni network. “The third thing was compensation. I couldn’t control that.”
In July, the WNBA, citing insufficient evidence, cleared the Aces of salary cap circumvention after a two-year investigation into the $100,000-per-year stipend the Las Vegas Convention Bureau paid each player the past two seasons.
“Obviously, we got in trouble sometimes – based on false narratives,” Davis said.
He was also fined once for expressing concern about negotiations before a new collective bargaining agreement was struck earlier this year.
No, it’s not typical for team owners to battle for players to get paid more money.
“That’s why they didn’t have me involved in the collective bargaining agreement,” Davis quipped, “because they knew what side of the table I’d be sitting on.”
The new CBA, by the way, stipulates that every team must have its own training amenities – including exclusive locker rooms, private WNBA-regulation courts, separate weight rooms and medical/treatment rooms – carrying out the spirit Davis had in challenging other teams to follow his lead.
Now if Davis can only cash in with his Raiders. Extending to the final years that his father ran the franchise, the Raiders haven’t won a playoff game since the 2002 season that ended with a Super Bowl 37 loss.
Or, as Davis puts it, “We’ve been in the desert for 30 years.”
But at least with the Aces next door, they have good company.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mark Davis built Aces' WNBA dynasty. Can Raiders finally follow? | Opinion