Valkyries win WNBA championship 2 years into existence, beating Dream in Game 7
· Yahoo Sports
SAN FRANCISCO — Just two years into existence, the Golden State Valkyries became the fastest expansion team in WNBA history to win a championship. They did it with their typical grit and determination — and even some sensational shooting from Gabby Williams — to hold off the Atlanta Dream for a 68-63 victory.
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Both teams were searching for their first WNBA title in the league’s first Game 7.
Williams had struggled for the Valkyries for most of the finals and scored only 2 points in the first half, but she finished with 30 points, exploding in the second half to pull the Valkyries ahead.
So how did this happen?
Everyone likes to go back to the billionaire with nothing to lose. Valkyries owner Joe Lacob introduced an expansion club at a news conference in early October 2023 with a single-minded purpose before it had a name. Everyone goes back to the guarantee. “First (news) conference with the (Golden State) Warriors, I said we will win a championship in the first five years,” Lacob declared then. “I’m telling you right now, we will win a WNBA championship in the first five years of this franchise.”
It was brash and fun. It was also easy for him to say. So what if Lacob was wrong? This was Joe being Joe. “I drive pretty hard,” Lacob told The Athletic earlier this season. “I figure if I don’t, then that’s seen by everybody else.” But nobody was going bankrupt if an obscenely rich man’s clock ran out and there still wasn’t a trophy in the case. What’s the downside of throwing $50 million into the well and making a wish?
The real trick is that none of the thinking, from there, was wishful.
Valkyries president Jess Smith arrived for her interview with Lacob and co-owner Peter Guber, suspicious of an insistence on their way. She’d sit down, they’d tell her they were the Golden State Warriors and this was how the WNBA franchise would be built. Instead, they asked her a question: How’d you do it in Los Angeles? It was curiosity, not institutional arrogance. And it lit the pole star, pointing everyone in the same direction, all the way to what happened Thursday.
They never wanted to create the next Warriors. They were obsessed with being the first Valkyries. “If you’re blue and gold, you will forever be compared to the Warriors, versus being two unique products that get to grow into two powerhouse opportunities,” Smith said. “You can’t be that if you want a unique brand that’s gonna have the same opportunity to grow into what the Warriors have also built.”
Never mind that this became literally true in a couple of ways, given that the Valkyries would play in the same 18,000-seat palace as their NBA counterparts and practice at a complex that still has an old WARRIORS sign on the roof today. That all reflects fairly important advantages not many established WNBA teams had, or even have to this day.
But it was coupled with an independent spirit. There are countless reasons why violet is the team’s primary color, for example, or why it took until late in Year 1 to debut the mascot. Primary among them: a desire to capture something that’s all their own, and do it perfectly the first time. “It was built with such thought,” Nakase said. “And nothing rushed, and nothing (as), ‘We’ll just do it because other teams did it.’ We did it because we wanted to write our own story, our own way.”
And there is the problem for everyone else, besides a franchise with immeasurable upside and beaucoup resources already winning a championship. An arena did not sell itself out, nor come up with the idea for a bar network in the Bay Area. A practice facility did not decide it’s important to track players’ sleep patterns or offer cat-sitting services in a pinch. A cool color palette did not hire a TK coach hiding in plain sight, nor compile a roster with a core of expansion draft cast-offs that, in a blink, is one of the league’s most connected groups.
The problem with trying to be the Golden State Valkyries is that you’re not the Golden State Valkyries.
“I don’t think there’s another Jess Smith right now, I’m just gonna be honest,” Nakase said the day before Game 6, adding Nyanin to that bucket moments later. It extends beyond front-office wonder-makers. Collecting players who commit to the plan is hard enough. (Even after a Game 5 win, the Valkyries locked in on film and asked questions. “Butts off the seat, leaning forward,” Nakase said.) Collecting players who like spending time with each other is hard enough. (“They cook for each other,” Nakase noted. “Cooking is a big love language.”) Collecting players who are good enough to compete for a title is hard enough. Finding a coach to put it all on a string is hard enough.
Doing all of it, at once, isn’t a sports miracle.
But doing it in less than three years…maybe kind of is?
“I’m not going to say it’s not repeatable, because people probably could’ve said it wouldn’t be possible to begin with,” Valkyries point guard Veronica Burton said. “The priorities have to be in the right place. And I think the culture here is incredible, and it’s rare, and it’s not necessarily something you can easily create. But when you’re international about it and your priorities are straight, I think it is definitely possible.”
The Dream couldn’t keep pace in the second half, and Angel Reese was held to just 8 points. Jordin Canada led the Dream with 18 points. But Atlanta also looks like a team that isn’t going away.
Other cities will take their turns, and take their chances.
Portland and Toronto started this season, without ownership making any promises. But it’s at least on the table to do something wild in Year 2. Then comes Cleveland in 2028, Detroit in 2029 and Philadelphia in 2030. Maybe the talent pool will have thinned out too much by then to do anything historic so quickly. Maybe everyone will see all of them coming anyway, given what Golden State accomplished Saturday.
But, hey, go ahead and make a wild, splashy, Cat in the Hat-like guarantee. Speak a fantasy into the realm of reality.
It worked once.
Just doesn’t mean it will ever work again.
This story will be updated.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Atlanta Dream, Golden State Valkyries, WNBA
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