Valkyries Won a Title in Year Two, Faster Than Anyone

Expansion teams are supposed to spend their first years apologizing. The Golden State Valkyries spent their second one lifting a trophy. On October 31 at Chase Center, Golden State beat the Atlanta Dream 68-63 in Game 7 of the WNBA Finals — the first Game 7 in the league's history — and became the fastest expansion team in major North American sports to win a championship.

The strangest part of the roster is who isn't on it. The Valkyries are the first team in league history to win a title without a single All-WNBA player. There was no anointed superstar carrying them. There was a system, a deep rotation and a defense that held Atlanta to 63 points with everything on the line.

The path there wasn't soft. Golden State finished the regular season 32-12 as the second seed, beat Dallas 2-1 in the first round, swept the defending champion Las Vegas Aces in the semifinals, then outlasted Atlanta across seven games. That's not a fluke draw. That's the league's established order getting beaten in sequence.

It builds on a first season that already broke the expansion script. In 2025 the Valkyries went 23-21 and became the first expansion team to reach the playoffs in its inaugural season, selling out all 22 home games at 18,604 fans a night. Coach Natalie Nakase won Coach of the Year. The foundation wasn't rushed — it was just ready immediately.

The depth showed up in the awards column, too. Janelle Salaün was named the 2026 Sixth Player of the Year, and in the Finals the Valkyries got 11 points from Tiffany Hayes, a 10-point, 10-rebound, five-assist night from Veronica Burton and 13 rebounds from Kiah Stokes alongside Gabby Williams' 30. Atlanta's Jordin Canada scored 18 and Allisha Gray 16, and it still wasn't enough.

The person who assembled it deserves a line in this story. Head coach Natalie Nakase won Coach of the Year in the franchise's debut season in 2025, then coached the second-year team to a 32-12 record and a title. Golden State paid a reported $50 million expansion fee to enter the league. Two seasons in, the rest of the WNBA is still trying to figure out how the new team became the standard this fast.

Under the new CBA, every Valkyries player also receives a $60,000 championship bonus. It's a fitting footnote for a franchise that paid a reported $50 million expansion fee and then made the rest of the league look slow. The question for 2027 isn't whether Golden State is real. It's whether anyone can catch up to a team that skipped the rebuilding years entirely.