The Golden State Valkyries are your 2026 WNBA Champions, and the journey to get here is about as absurd as a journey can be.
On October 5, 2023, the WNBA made an exciting announcement: the Bay had been awarded an expansion team. The area and its surrounding cities are entrenched in basketball history, between the Sacramento Monarchs (a former W franchise that eventually folded in 2009), the San Francisco Pioneers (which played in the Women’s Professional Basketball League from 1979-1981), and the legendary success of the Golden State Warriors in the NBA.
Warriors Co-Executive Chairman and CEO Joe Lacob was announced as the then-unnamed team, and he immediately made a splash by guaranteeing that the franchise would win a ring in the next five years: a lofty goal given the historical precedent. Prior to the Valkyries, the expansion team to win a championship was the 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks (three years), and in the W, the fastest track was four years (2004 Seattle Storm). Lacob was sure that he could join this prestigious club, though, and he injected that belief into building the franchise.
In May 2024, the team announced that it would be called the Golden State Valkyries – partially decided by community input from the San Francisco Chronicle. Five months later, Lacob hired Natalie Nakase, who’d served as an assistant coach in both the WNBA and NBA, and had won two championships with the Las Vegas Aces.
In the franchise’s first year, they made headlines by making the playoffs as the No. 8 seed. Little did anyone know, they were far from done with shocking the world.
Valkyries in the Finals
About three years after the initial announcement, the Golden State Valkyries – now equipped with Gabby Williams and Kiah Stokes – found themselves all the way in the Finals after a year of being doubted and brushed off. Despite finishing the 2026 season as the No. 2 seed and as the No. 1 defense in W history, the Valkyries were underdogs: they were a roster of players who’d been brushed off in one way or another, whether it be getting cut from the W four times like Veronica Burton or simply being overlooked by coaches and fellow players like Williams recalled. The entire nature of the expansion draft, through which a bulk of the Valkyries’ roster was built, implies that they were the leftovers; the players that teams felt they could do without.
On the other side of the bracket was the new look Atlanta Dream, who’d added young star Angel Reese to its ranks the previous summer. Reese, who’d just been named Defensive Player of the Year, was out for blood to start her playoff career, averaging 18 points and 8.4 rebounds per game in the first five games of the postseason as the Dream swept both the Washington Mystics and New York Liberty on their way to the Finals. Rhyne Howard and Allisha Gray, longer tenured guards who’ve made names for themselves for a number of skills on the court, co-headlined the Atlanta squad with Reese, and now DeWanna Bonner, who’d signed with the team late in the season.
Both teams had good reasons to have chips on their shoulders, but the championship trophy doesn’t concern itself with narratives or pre-season power rankings. All that matters is what goes on between the black lines.
Games 1 and 2 were fairly uneventful – the Valkyries and Dream each took a game in Ballhalla, with both teams holding each other to historically low shooting percentages as expected. Gabby Williams exploded for 26 points and four rebounds in Game 1, and two days later, Angel Reese became the youngest player to record 30+ points and 15+ rebounds in a Finals game.
Things took a very sharp turn for the Valkyries when, in Game 3 in Atlanta, they suffered a devastating 97-71 blowout on the backs of a 21/12 night from Reese, 16 points and five steals from Howard, and a loud 15 points from Naz Hillmon. Even though the WNBA Finals format newly allotted teams seven games to decide a champion, discourse around the series seemed all too confident that it was over for the young franchise.
Before Game 3, Nakase promised that it would be the team’s best effort of the season. “Sometimes promises aren’t kept,” she said after the game. “I think the will is there, the want to is [there], but I’m missing the piece of putting it together.”
Atlanta, on the other hand, seemed on top of the world. During practice the next day, Reese spoke to the media about how much she was enjoying the mental games of the series in a way that implied that the Valkyries were already broken. “You can see it in their emotions and facial expressions. A lot of us are looking at that, making sure we can find any little thing to give us that edge and have our leverage over them…It’s just looking at those small things that can give us more of an edge.”
Game 4 showed Reese was wrong. After an impassioned huddle by Williams and some days to recuperate from the, to be frank, embarrassing showing in Game 3, the Valkyries marched back into State Farm Arena and snatched a win by holding the Dream’s starters to a combined 48 points, and Reese to eight (2-for-12). Kiah Stokes grabbed a staggering 16 rebounds, eight being offensive, allowing Golden State to shoot 18 more field goals than Atlanta and to pull off a five point win despite shooting 18 less free throws.
Such is the nature of a seven game series: the tides turn, and they turn fast. A team that owns all the momentum one day can lose it all in one fell swoop the next. Now the Valkyries had the momentum heading back to Chase Center,
The Kiah Stokes game. 13 points. Eight rebounds. Three history-making blocks. Three made threes. Even with Williams struggling to find the bottom of the net for the entirety of the night, Stokes, along with Burton, Tiffany Hayes, and Cecilia Zandalasini, propelled the Valkyries to a nine-point win to keep Ballhalla’s hopes alive for a championship.
“It’s so hard to perform if you don’t feel like the people [around you]have your back, and it’s so easy to perform when you feel like they have your back, and that’s what it is here…you wanna run through a brick wall when you love the people you’re around,” said Burton after the game.
Game 6, which was played at 12:30 pm in Atlanta, was another tough one for Golden State – on a numbers only metric, it was easily the best game the Dream had played throughout the series. They shot 44 percent from the floor and 43 percent from three, which feels low given how many shots it looked like they took and made.
And so it was set: in the first year in which the WNBA Finals could go to seven games, we had a Game 7. In Ballhalla. On Halloween. Seriously, could it get better?
Game 7 rocked Boohalla
Ahead of the game, Nakase vowed that the Valkyries were “punching first. It’s a non-negotiable…We’re dictating all night tonight.”
This time, Golden State kept that promise for at least a little bit, starting the game shooting 3-for-6 to get off to an 8-0 run. The lead fluctuated throughout the first quarter, with some Veronica Burton heroics from midrange being the deciding factor to the Valkyries heading into the second up 14-12.
The momentum flipped entirely in the second as the Dream started the quarter with a quick 9-0 run. Jordin Canada got off to a quick start in Game 7, reaching 13 points on 5-for-10 shooting in the first half. The Valkyries had no answer for her speed or her uncanny ability to slither into the paint and draw fouls, and it almost cost them the championship.
Then something in the air shifted. Williams, who ended the first half with only two points, singlehandedly decided that she will win that championship. Maybe she was fueled by all the second-place finishes she’s suffered with France against Team USA; maybe she remembered all the voices who, during the regular season, were sure she wasn’t a championship-level No. 1 option. Maybe she caught a glimpse of her family in the stands. Maybe she heard the voices in Ballhalla telling her she couldn’t lose.
She makes a layup. Then hits a step back three. Then another. And another. Then two more midrange shots. Williams scored 15 straight points for the Valkyries in the third and fourth quarters, and Ballhalla was stunned. Her shotmaking looked more akin to a player in an empty practice gym than someone fighting under the pressure of a win or go home game for a championship.
The Dream tried to fight back, but there wasn’t much else they could do. Even though the score never got out of hand, and the Valkyries only won by five points (68-63), Williams took Atlanta’s soul with that run. She – and everyone else in the arena – knew it was sealed.
Newly-crowned Finals MVP Williams said, “It started with us believing in each other. That’s so special. We just kept our circle so tight to shut out the outside noise…and we just focused on the good stuff.”
Thanks to Williams, Stokes, and the rest of the Golden State Valkyries, the Bay has a lot of “good stuff” to focus on for the next few months.
