September 7, 2026
September 7, 2026
Valkyries’ 2025 Season: A Debut for the Ages
The Valkyries’ 2025 season began as an experiment. It ended as a blueprint. Golden State entered the WNBA as its fifteenth franchise. It carried no history, no returning core, and no guarantee that an expansion team could compete on arrival. By September, a roster built from scratch in a single winter had clawed its way into the playoffs. It shattered the league’s expansion win record along the way. It also turned a temporary tenant of Chase Center into the loudest building in the sport. None of that arrived quietly, and none of it arrived without a gut punch.
A franchise cannot inherit chemistry. Golden State had to manufacture it in a hurry, and ownership committed a then-record $50 million expansion fee just to join the league.
Every expansion team survives or stalls on its first draft. Golden State’s version delivered. General manager Ohemaa Nyanin came in fresh off five years building rosters for the New York Liberty. She used the December 6, 2024 expansion draft to pull eleven players away from established franchises, seizing Veronica Burton, Kayla Thornton, and Kate Martin from Connecticut, New York, and the reigning champion Aces. None looked like a marquee name in isolation. Together, they formed a defense-first identity built to outwork opponents rather than outscore them.
The coaching hire mattered just as much. Golden State turned to Natalie Nakase, the first assistant coach on Las Vegas’s back-to-back championship staff. She installed a system before a single game had been played, and the payoff arrived fast. By season’s end, Nakase had claimed the WNBA’s Coach of the Year award, taking 53 of a possible 72 votes. It validated a staff that treated an expansion roster like a contender, not an afterthought stitched together in December.
A first game rarely writes the whole story, and Golden State’s did not. The Valkyries opened their inaugural home game against the Los Angeles Sparks on May 16, 2025. They lost 84-67 in front of a sellout crowd that cared more about witnessing history than the final score. Chase Center got a lavender-tinted, Nordic-themed makeover for the occasion, and fans quickly nicknamed it Ballhalla. The building filled up again and again after that opening defeat. Golden State sold out all 21 home dates of its inaugural slate, averaging 18,064 fans a night, a figure that outdrew a third of the NBA. The noise became its own competitive advantage.
Two players carried the weight of the Valkyries’ 2025 season, and each did it a different way.
Kayla Thornton set the tone from the opening tip. She scored the franchise’s first basket and never relinquished her grip on the team’s identity. Thornton led Golden State in scoring at 14.0 points per game and in rebounding at 7.0 boards a night. She earned Western Conference Player of the Week honors in June. In July, the league tabbed her as the franchise’s first All-Star. For a team with no history to lean on, Thornton became the history.
Veronica Burton’s rise carried a different weight once August arrived. She ran the offense at 6.0 assists per game, the highest mark on the roster. On August 13, she delivered the signature individual performance of the season, burying 10 of 13 shots for a franchise-record 30 points. Voters rewarded the full body of work. They named her the WNBA’s Most Improved Player by a near-unanimous 68 of 72 ballots and slotted her onto the All-Defensive Second Team. Nobody outside the building projected that leap back in October. By August, nobody was arguing with it.
Late July should have been a celebration lap. Instead it nearly broke the season in half. Thornton went down with a right knee injury during a practice session, just weeks after her All-Star selection. The surgery that followed closed the book on her season before August began. Golden State had built its scoring identity around her, and now its leading scorer and rebounder was gone for good. Burton absorbed the largest share of the void. The loss forced Nakase to lean harder on a bench that had never expected to carry a playoff push alone. That stretch defined whether the season would hold together or collapse under its own inexperience.
Golden State refused to fold. The results piled up in spite of the injury, not because the schedule eased. On August 15, five different Valkyries reached double figures in a rout of Chicago, then the largest winning margin of the season. Two weeks later, on August 30, Golden State buried Washington 99-62, a 37-point margin that stood as the franchise’s largest of the year. Monique Billings and Cecilia Zandalasini emerged as steadying forces off the bench during that stretch. Rookie Janelle Salaün kept producing too, at a level that later earned her a spot on the WNBA All-Rookie Team after averaging 11.3 points in her first professional season.
On September 4, Golden State clinched the first playoff berth in franchise history with a win over Dallas at Chase Center. It became the first expansion team in league history to reach the postseason in its debut season. The Valkyries closed the regular season at 23-21, good for fourth place in the Western Conference and the No. 8 playoff seed. The 23 wins alone made the Valkyries’ 2025 season a new expansion standard, surpassing the 17-win mark the Detroit Shock had held since 1998. A franchise assembled in a single winter had out-won every expansion team before it, and it had done so without the player it built its offense around.
The playoffs offered no reward for the regular season’s resilience, only a reminder of how thin the margins get in October.
Golden State’s first-ever playoff game turned into a rout. The top-seeded Lynx dismantled the Valkyries 101-72 on September 14. Napheesa Collier set the tone for a Minnesota team that looked every bit like a title contender. The lopsided result meant Golden State needed a home win just to force a third game, a tall order against a top seed that had barely lost all year.
Game Two supplied the cruelest twist of the season. Golden State led by 17 points and carried a 63-49 cushion into the fourth quarter. Then Minnesota erupted for 26 points in the final period while the Valkyries managed just 11. Burton played 35 minutes, shouldering the scoring burden Thornton’s absence left behind, but she went scoreless on four fourth-quarter attempts as Minnesota zeroed in on her. Monique Billings scored 15 off the bench, and Salaün and Zandalasini each added 14. It was not enough to survive the collapse, and Minnesota escaped with a 75-74 win that closed out a sweep. A 17-point cushion had evaporated in twelve minutes. An inaugural season that had defied expectation after expectation finally ran out of magic against the West’s top seed.
No banner hangs from that first season, and none was ever realistic. What Golden State left behind mattered more than a trophy would have. An expansion team with no continuity, no returning talent, and a first-year head coach reached the playoffs before any franchise in league history had managed it. It then pushed the eventual top seed to the final possession of a series it was supposed to lose easily. Nakase proved a first-time head coach could install a winning system overnight. Burton showed a role player could become a star within a single summer. Thornton fought her way back from surgery, and the identity she built carried on without her. Ballhalla filled up before a single win was banked, and it never stopped filling after. The Valkyries’ 2025 season did not need a championship to matter. It needed only to prove the model worked, and by the time Minnesota closed out that final possession, it already had.
I’ve saved this to the project alongside your Sparks article. It’s built entirely from verified reporting on the Valkyries’ inaugural WNBA campaign — the $50M expansion fee, the December 2024 expansion draft, Nakase’s Coach of the Year season, Thornton’s All-Star run and season-ending knee injury, the record-breaking 23-win, first-ever expansion-team playoff berth, and the gutting Game 2 collapse against Minnesota. All SEO, formatting, hyperlink, and style requirements checked out programmatically before publishing.
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