November 13, 2026
November 13, 2026
Valkyries’ 2026 Season: Champions in Year Two
Valkyries’ 2026 Season rewrote what an expansion franchise believed was possible. Golden State won 32 games, swept the defending champions and outlasted the Atlanta Dream in a seven-game WNBA Finals. The title arrived in only the club’s second year of existence. Per the Elias Sports Bureau, no North American expansion team since 1967 had won a championship faster.
The 2025 debut had already made history. The Valkyries went 23-21 and became the first expansion team to reach the playoffs in their inaugural season. Then Minnesota swept them in the first round, and five straight losses closed the year. The front office treated that ending as a mandate to get tougher.
General manager Ohemaa Nyanin and head coach Natalie Nakase wanted a scrappy, defensive roster with no egos. Gabby Williams fit that profile perfectly. Seattle had cored her, but she reached free agency, and owner Joe Lacob joined the recruiting pitch. Williams, the 2025 steals leader and a two-time All-Defensive selection, signed a multi-year deal on April 12. She said she wanted a chance to win her first championship.
One day later, the Valkyries added Kiah Stokes from Las Vegas. Stokes owned three titles from her time with the Aces. Her role grew immediately when Iliana Rupert announced she would miss the season due to pregnancy. Stokes started every game she played and became the anchor of the paint.
The core stayed intact around them. Veronica Burton signed a three-year deal, while Janelle Salaün, Cecilia Zandalasini and Kayla Thornton all returned. The expansion draft did cost the club Carla Leite to Portland and María Conde to Toronto.
Nakase opened training camp with three days of nothing but defense. There were no shooting drills, no offensive sets and no plays. She had won two titles as an assistant in Las Vegas, and she knew what a championship standard demanded. Her message was simple: Golden State would win by making every possession miserable for opponents.
Golden State seized control of its identity early and never let go. The Valkyries went 5-3 in May and 8-4 in June before the summer turned dominant. They posted 6-2 in July and an overwhelming 10-2 in August.
This team did not lean on one scorer. Williams led the club at 14.4 points per game, which ranked only 32nd in the league. She was the team’s lone All-Star, and she became the first All-Star starter in franchise history. Burton added 12.2 points and a team-best 5.7 assists.
The bench carried the rest of the load. Salaün averaged 12.7 points and won Sixth Player of the Year unanimously. Tiffany Hayes and Kaitlyn Chen supplied steady scoring behind her. The reserves produced 35.9 points per game, a WNBA record and 7.4 more than any other bench.
The defense was the real engine. Golden State allowed a league-low 75.1 points per game while playing at the slowest pace in the league. Williams finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting and made the All-Defensive First Team. Burton and Stokes both earned Second Team honors.
The veterans gave the young core its edge. Hayes, who had come out of retirement two years earlier, averaged 9.0 points off the bench. Charles chipped in 6.3 points and 4.7 rebounds a night. Stokes ranked fourth in the league in blocks, and opponents shot just 38.3 percent at the rim against her. Burton and Williams both finished among the league’s top 10 in steals.
The most telling number of Valkyries’ 2026 Season was a streak that never happened. From opening night through the final game, the Valkyries never lost three straight. They faced that possibility five times and won all five, holding opponents to 70.8 points in those games.
Three separate six-game winning streaks pushed them to the top of the West. They clinched a playoff berth in mid-August and closed with a 76-75 win at Los Angeles on September 24. The final record of 32-12 left them one game behind Minnesota for the conference’s top spot. The full numbers sit on the team’s Basketball Reference page.
Golden State entered October with no All-WNBA player and plenty of doubters. The playoffs would test whether defense and depth could survive the league’s best offenses.
The first round nearly ended the run before it began. Golden State routed the Dallas Wings 104-80 in Game 1. Dallas answered with a 108-100 overtime win at home, forcing a winner-take-all Game 3.
The Valkyries trailed late in that deciding game. Thornton, Burton, Williams and Kaila Charles huddled and took a collective breath. Then they clawed back for a 77-73 win, and the season survived.
The semifinal opponent was the defending champion Las Vegas Aces, one of the highest-scoring teams in league history. Golden State strangled them. The Valkyries won 71-60 and 83-81 at home, then closed the sweep with an 87-77 overtime win in Las Vegas. The Aces managed just 72.7 points per game in the series. Golden State also dragged the pace of the series nearly eight possessions per 40 minutes below the Aces’ regular-season norm. That control of tempo became the blueprint for the Finals.
The Finals opened with a classic Williams moment. She scored eight points in the final four minutes of Game 1, turning a three-point deficit into a 68-64 win. Atlanta then seized the series with a 79-65 win and a 97-71 rout in Game 3.
Golden State faced another potential three-game skid. Nakase gave herself an “F-minus” for her communication and asked her players for feedback. She then moved Hayes and Charles into the starting lineup, sending Thornton and Zandalasini to the bench. Charles finished plus-14 and Hayes scored 13 as the Valkyries took Game 4, 67-62. A 64-55 win in Game 5 followed before Atlanta forced a seventh game with an 80-69 victory.
Game 7 at Chase Center on October 31 began badly. Atlanta led 30-24 at halftime, and another shot at a title looked to be slipping away. Williams refused to let it go. She scored 28 of her 30 points after halftime, a WNBA playoff record for one half. Golden State closed the third quarter on an 11-0 run and won the period 21-14.
Rhyne Howard tied the game at 57 with 2:41 left. Twenty-three seconds later, Williams buried a 31-foot 3-pointer that put Golden State ahead for good. Burton won a late jump ball and sealed it with two free throws at 5.1 seconds. The Valkyries held on, 68-63. Stokes grabbed 13 rebounds, and Hayes, a 10-year Dream veteran, added 11 points against her former team. The ESPN recap of Game 7 captured the sellout crowd’s eruption.
Williams was named Finals MVP after leading all players with 19.6 points and 2.6 steals per game. She joined Penny Taylor as the only players to score 30 or more in a winner-take-all Finals game.
Few championship teams have looked like this one. The WNBA’s breakdown of the title run noted that Golden State became the first champion without an All-WNBA selection. It was also the first champion without a top-20 regular-season scorer. Defense, depth and nerve did the rest, including a 6-1 record in clutch playoff games.
Individual marks followed the team. Stokes collected her fourth title and finished the postseason with 31 blocks, tying Lisa Leslie’s playoff record. Nakase added a third ring after her two as a Las Vegas assistant. The TSN account of the two-year build traced how Nakase and Nyanin assembled the roster.
Lacob had promised a title within five years of the expansion grant. Golden State delivered it three years early, and the owner celebrated with one word: “Ballhalla!” The Valkyries’ official championship story marked the 9-4 playoff run as the peak of the franchise’s brief history. Valkyries’ 2026 Season will stand as the year an expansion club skipped the long climb and went straight to the summit.
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