Natalie Nakase turned a collection of castoffs into champions—and showed the rest of the WNBA what’s possible
The Valkyries, in Norse mythology, were supernatural female figures who carried wounded warriors off the battlefields and took them to Valhalla, where they were offered healing—and a second chance at an epic battle.
The Golden State Valkyries debuted their logo—which depicts the Bay Bridge—and name in 2024, in a video featuring the magisterial narration of Oakland’s own Kehlani. “This is where legends take flight,” she declares. “But our story has yet to be written.”
On Saturday night, in the biggest game in WNBA history, the Valkyries completed a grueling seven-game triumph over the Atlanta Dream, capturing a miraculous championship in just their second season—the fastest ascent to a title in major North American sports history. Fans came to the Halloween night game dressed up as Golden State’s modern reimagining of the Valkyrie: winged and armored, clad in violet and gold.
“That’s who we are at the end of the day,” Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase tells The Ringer. “We battle. We got battle tested with that seven-game series. Every player we have embodies a Valkyrie.”
Even the biggest women’s basketball events often have a way of feeling niche. Not so within the Bay Area, where the Valkyries have sold out every home game since their inception. And Game 7 was a capital-E Event in the minds of everyday commuters, Uber drivers, hotel receptionists, and flight attendants.
In just two years, the Valkyries have given their fans, players, and staff something that many professional sports franchises spend decades trying to create: a genuine sense of identity, purpose, and belonging.
Gabby Williams celebrates after winning the WNBA Finals
“That matters,” says Valkyries forward Gabby Williams, who spent her summers growing up in the East Bay and scored a WNBA Finals–record 28 points in the second half of Game 7. “Something about, I’m driving to the game, I’m stressed. I’m nervous. I see a Valkyries Waymo. I see a billboard. I see buildings lit up in purple. I see ‘Go Valks’ everywhere. All I keep thinking is ‘I can’t lose. This is the moment. This is my time to give my everything for this community.’”
The Valkyries, to a woman, have reasons to see themselves as castaways—even Williams, their star free agent acquisition.
She and her teammates suffered many of the same indignities. The Chicago Sky, who drafted her in 2018, suspended her in 2021 because she wanted to maintain her commitment to playing internationally for France. But it was her ability abroad that drew the interest of the Valkyries, who have one of the most robust international scouting operations in the WNBA.
The Valkyries were intrigued by her leadership and late-game heroics as a member of the French national team, which almost upset the Americans in the 2024 Olympics. The Valkyries had their eyes on her before their first season in 2025, but at the time she was under contract with the Seattle Storm. When she hit free agency last year, Golden State finally had its chance to bring her to the Bay.
With the Valkyries, who pride themselves on defense and collective sacrifice, the perpetual Defensive Player of the Year candidate did the thankless, workaday tasks that impact winning at a superstar level.
When Nakase needed someone to box out Angel Reese in the Finals, Williams was there.
When she needed someone to set the tone by applying ball pressure from the opening tip of Game 7, Williams opened the game with a steal and a weakside block.
And when Golden State needed a traditional closer, she took the reins in historic—and classic—fashion, dribbling the ball at the top of the key, running down the clock, and then going to work in the second half.
She played, as Valkyries owner Joe Lacob predicted, like the best player in the world.
And that’s how the Valkyries became the first team in WNBA history to win a title with zero All-WNBA players. They took a collection of underdogs, reserves, and misfits and offered them resources and opportunities they’d rarely—if ever—been given.
In return, they transformed into something else entirely: champions.
Being taken in an expansion draft is a bittersweet experience. It is to be rejected and chosen all at once.
Nakase knows, better than most, the grief that accompanies failure in the face of maximum effort. If she wanted her motto—“emptying the tank”—to be sustainable amid building an expansion team, she knew she had to help her players heal their competitive wounds, undergirding her demands with an environment of psychological safety.
Nakase, the first Japanese American head coach in WNBA history, was a 5-foot-1 3/4 walk-on at UCLA who built herself into a pro overseas before injuries ended her career.
“We’ve all been waived. We’ve been cut,” Nakase tells The Ringer. “We do all share that similarity, that trauma.”
She arrived at her love of basketball and her process of refinement via her father, Gary, who was born in a Japanese internment camp in 1942.
When she was a child, he woke her early on weekends to work out in their makeshift gym and practice in their backyard court. When her skills rose to the level of her peers, he signed her up to play against older players.
Even after injuries dashed her pro dreams, she continued to embrace and create adversity like she had when she was a kid. She pivoted to overseas coaching jobs but dreamed of coaching in the NBA, and she went to workouts with former NBA players where she dragged weights through the sand alongside them—a way of proving that she could put herself through anything that they did. She eventually got a job with the Los Angeles Clippers, where she went from being an unpaid intern to an assistant video coordinator to a developmental coach. Then she was brought on as an assistant for the title-winning Las Vegas Aces, which put her in position to become head coach of the Valkyries expansion team.
Nakase’s dad passed away in 2021. Now, when she yearns for his voice, she lets everything get quiet and talks to him. He was there in spirit, Nakase says, when she was first tapped as the Valkyries coach. And he was there during the Finals, telling her to be ready to be her best—in every timeout, huddle, and opportunity to communicate with her team.
She became the embodiment of his ethos, and of her own motto—emptying the tank—when she collapsed on the court and then shot right back up in the closing minutes of the Valkyries’ tight first-round elimination game against Dallas.
“That woman has … I don’t want to say the word, but she has cojones,” Lacob told The Ringer after the Valkyries won Game 2 against Las Vegas in the semifinals.
Working with the blank canvas of a brand-new roster, the Valkyries have constructed a team built in Nakase’s own image: ultracompetitive, underestimated, selfless, and smart.
Veronica Burton, the no. 7 pick in the 2022 draft, used to spend her nights in Dallas wondering whether she’d be cut. When that fear became reality before the 2024 season, she was back at her local YMCA the next day, working on her corner 3.
Burton had all the qualities Nakase wanted in the guard who’s running her offense: toughness, intelligence, consistency, and selflessness. What she needed was permission to be imperfect.
When the two reviewed clips of Burton’s turnovers, she braced for criticism. Instead, Nakase praised her ability to recognize the right reads, then helped her refine her execution. Since joining the Valkyries, Burton has recorded five games with double-digit assists and zero turnovers, trailing only Hall of Famer Sue Bird.
“She always had confidence, but I’ve seen it grow, especially with [Natalie],” Burton’s father, Steve, tells The Ringer.
Burton had struggled through the first three games of the Finals. Nakase sent her a highlight reel of her best plays ahead of Game 7and told her to watch it while listening to her favorite gospel song, “Gratitude,” by Brandon Lake.
“‘This is who you are. This is what you bring to the table,’” Burton recalls Nakase telling her. “And that was great for me.”
Kiah Stokes and Nakase were friends long before reuniting in Golden State. When Nakase was an assistant with the Aces, she’d work with the 6-foot-3 center on her ballhandling and shooting, peppering her with questions about how UConn—where Stokes won three national titles—consistently produced players with such strong work ethics and basketball IQs.
“We’re very candid,” Stokes says. “And talk a lot of crap to each other.” She still ribs Nakase about her height.
When Nakase pitched Stokes on joining the Valkyries before this season, the veteran center was ready for a fresh start.
“I just didn’t feel like my true self, and I know I wasn’t really helping the team in the way that I felt like I could have. I had a great run when I was in Vegas, but I just felt like my time there was up,” Stokes tells The Ringer. “It’s just like when your phone is broken or frozen, you just gotta reset it. That’s what I felt like I needed.”
Last season, Stokes played just one meaningful possession in the WNBA Finals for the Aces. This year, she started every postseason game she appeared in. And when the Valkyries fell behind the Dream 2-1 in the Finals, Stokes volunteered for the assignment that would help turn the series around: guarding Angel Reese.
From that point on, Reese shot just 33 percent from the field when sharing the floor with Stokes, per Synergy.
After Game 5, Stokes heard MVP chants from the Golden State crowd. It was a fitting reward for a player who’d gone from an afterthought to an indispensable piece of a championship team. She’s now won four of the past five WNBA titles, putting her one championship shy of Rebekkah Brunson’s all-time record.
“Man, all it took was good people. That’s it,” says Williams. “They don’t care about scoring. They just want to play defense, rebound, and do whatever it takes.”
When outgoing WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert handed the championship trophy to Lacob after the conclusion of the first Game 7 in WNBA history, it felt like a torch was being passed from the league office’s incremental approach to the high-minded idealism of its most ambitious owner.
Lacob famously declared that the Valkyries would win a title within their first five years. They’ve somehow done it in just two by offering a group of players who had always been asked to do more with less with an abundance they couldn’t have dreamed of: a state-of-the-art practice facility and arena, as well as a health, performance, and coaching staff that could fill up a classroom.
“My career was venture capital. I love starting things,” says Lacob. “Starting things sometimes can be an advantage because you get to create the culture, get to create everything about it, and sometimes that’s an advantage over taking over something that you know was a certain way for a long time.”
He is, unintentionally or not, speaking to the paradox that defined the Engelbert era: a culture shaped by scarcity, quibbling over the cost of rocket fuel instead of realizing it was time to reach for the stars.
The Golden State Valkyries after winning Game 7 of the WNBA Finals
The Valkyries’ championship should be a wake-up call for the rest of the WNBA. If Golden State could accomplish this much in just two years, how much are other franchises holding themselves back by refusing to invest more?
A decade ago, Lacob leveraged the romanticism of strength in numbers and pulled off one of the greatest free agency heists of all time, drawing superstar Kevin Durant to the 73-win Golden State Warriors. The Valkyries, with just one superstar and a bevy of players on team-friendly international contracts, are similarly positioned to make a splash in free agency this offseason. Imagine adding Jackie Young to this team. Or Kelsey Mitchell. Or Napheesa Collier.
For the institution writ large, the Finals offer an alternate story after the culture wars that have embroiled the WNBA. For a league that has been facing pressure from right-wing actors to suppress two tentpoles of its culture—Blackness and queerness—the Finals have offered a sharp reminder that, for the WNBA, authenticity is not an obstacle to financial success or mainstream popularity.
The Dream have captured Atlanta’s Black community in the way their NBA counterpart, the Hawks, haven’t.
Ballhalla is a sensorium of queer identity. The franchise is the first women’s sports team to exceed a $1 billion valuation and over $100 million in annual revenue.
The Valkyries are yet another reminder that the WNBA doesn’t have to swim upstream against its identity to flourish. Rather, the team’s success, on and off the court, has been rooted in valuing and investing in its players and fans. The league is still struggling to find its voice, and other teams are still hoping that half measures will get them by. But the Valkyries’ clear-eyed vision and all-in execution have earned them both a title and an identity. Just two years in, they have become the standard and a reminder of the league’s immense untapped potential.
As guard Tiffany Hayes put it to the Golden State crowd after the Valkyries won the title, “This is just what happens when you invest in women’s sports.” Valhalla, releasing its most raucous cheer of the night, concurred.
Seerat Sohi
Seerat Sohi covers the NBA, WNBA, and women’s college basketball for The Ringer. Her former stomping grounds include Yahoo Sports, SB Nation, and basements all over Edmonton.
