Drawing any big conclusions from expansion drafts is tough—the brave and foolish have tried. But Golden State Valkyries owner Joe Lacob, who also owns the Warriors, has been pretty clear about what he expects from the team, which will play its first season in 2025. “I’m telling you right now, we will win a WNBA championship in the first five years of this franchise,” he said at an announcement ceremony in late 2023.
If the league’s top teams have offered instructions for building a contender, Valkyries ownership has followed them in the early going. Those instructions, broadly speaking, are to attract and retain top talent, and be well-coached and well-run. Practice facilities have become shorthand for the former; just about every WNBA team now has or plans to build a new practice facility. The Valkyries will have their own swanky facility in Oakland, expected to open before the inaugural season. As for the second, the Valkyries hired away general manager Ohemaa Nyanin from the reigning champion New York Liberty. With head coach Natalie Nakase, they’ve also hired one of the league’s top assistants, an alum of Becky Hammon’s back-to-back champion Las Vegas Aces staff.
In other circumstances, Lacob’s five-year timeline would seem like a good way to grade the expansion draft selections. Are they tradable contracts that might be turned into draft picks? Are they diamonds in the rough that could form this team’s core? But the picks hardly tell us what the Valkyries will look like in 2025, let alone beyond that.
Only one of the 11 players the Valkyries took in the expansion draft last Friday is on a rookie contract: Kate Martin, the selection from the Aces. Seven are international players. In recent years, many of the league’s European players have participated in WNBA seasons only sporadically, when they don’t have conflicting national team commitments. Chicago Sky selection Maria Conde, of the Spanish national team, was drafted in 2019 but hasn’t ever played in the WNBA. Neither has Dallas Wings selection Carla Leite, a 20-year-old star in the French Ligue Féminine de Basketball. Her fellow countrywoman Iliana Rupert, selected from the Atlanta Dream, has played in two of four WNBA seasons since being drafted. (French people are always on strike.)
The actual circumstances of the WNBA make it hard to distinguish the expansion Valkyries from any other team. “We thought very thoughtfully about if every athlete from each team was unprotected, what would be our knee-jerk reaction?” Nyanin said in a recent interview on the Warriors pregame show, explaining her staff’s early expansion draft planning work. That’s the sort of thinking the rest of the league’s general managers might be doing in a year. When the 2024 season ended, the players voted (as expected) to opt out of their current collective bargaining agreement; it will now expire after the 2025 season. They did so not long after the league announced a landmark 11-year media rights deal, valued at $2.2 billion. The money expected in the next CBA has kept most players from signing long-term contracts. With two exceptions (Kalani Brown and Lexie Brown), the only WNBA players signed past 2025 are on rookie contracts. In other words, every veteran player but those two will hit free agency next offseason.
That doesn't mean all or even most players will change teams. Moving’s a real pain. But Golden State, and the incoming Toronto and Portland expansion teams, are joining the WNBA at a perfect time. At the Finals in October, I asked commissioner Cathy Engelbert whether these expansion owners, who were paying large expansion fees and making all kinds of facility and arena investments, were being held to a higher standard than current owners. “You want to make sure the expansion owners know, when you come into the league, it's a competitive league,” Engelbert said. “We want those expansion teams to come in and be the most successful they can. You may have a different view, but I think our current owners are all rowing in the same direction as far as how they know they need to get free agents to build a championship squad.” In a league where free agency is the predominant team-building tool—which it has been since the last CBA and will continue to be, absent “Bird Rights”-type provisions designed to keep drafted players with their first teams—anyone can win a championship in five years. This is good news for well-run franchises and a problem for the rest: After next season, every team’s an expansion team.
Which is not to say the players on the 2025 Valkyries don’t matter, even if the next free agency periods will dramatically reshape the roster. These are the players to whom a generation of Bay Area fans will form their first attachments. And they won't be hard to love. Veronica Burton, the Connecticut Sun selection, wins over everyone with her tenacious defense. Washington Mystics pick Julie Vanloo, a true point guard and even better shooter, makes any team worth watching. Here’s to cult hero Temi Fagbenle. Here's to a million Kate Martin and Kayla Thornton jerseys. Here's to the incoming rookie class. You only get one season like this: the magical, kooky experience of a whole new group of gals coming to town. Valks fans should enjoy it. There are four more years to figure out the rest.
