The Golden State Valkyries are ready to ride.
The San Francisco Bay Area’s first-ever WNBA team has a great name, a general manager and a head coach, not one but two logos, Stephen Curry-approved swag, and as of Friday, a roster. That’s a solid foundation for their inaugural season, which tips off in May at the start of the WNBA's 2025-2026 season.
Because the Valkyries are a brand new team, they were able to participate in what the WNBA calls an “expansion draft,” allowing them to add up to one player from each preexisting team to their own roster. (Those teams were able to protect up to six players each, which is why Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson, and Breanna Stewart did not wind up on the Valkyries roster.)
Still, the Valkyries have created a solid roster of 11 players who “compete like their life depends on it,” Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase said at a press conference last week. The Valkyries wanted players who “want to always win” and “feel sick when [they] lose,” general manager Ohemaa Nyanin said at the same presser.
The two biggest gets were sophomore guard Kate Martin, a versatile scorer from the Las Vegas Aces, and forward Kayla Thornton, who played critical minutes in the most recent WNBA Finals with this year’s champs, the New York Liberty.
That type of experience is “priceless,” Nakase said of Thornton. “When her name is called, she steps up.”
Beyond Thornton, there are three other Valkyries with championship experience, which Nakase said is “vital.” And that’ll be key, given that team owner Joe Lacob has set an ambitious goal for the Valkyries to take home a championship of their own within five years.
The expansion draft is just the beginning of the Valkyries roster-building process. Come opening day on May 16, when the Valkyries face the Los Angeles Sparks at the Chase Center, there will undoubtedly be some different faces on the team.
The Valkyries have three more chances to add to their roster before then: free agency, which begins early next year; April’s WNBA Draft, where the Valkyries have the No. 5, No. 17 and No. 30 overall picks; and the trade market. As the Valkyries look ahead to other team-building opportunities, general manager Nyanin said at a press conference last week that the team is “open for business.”
“I think we're ready to talk to any and everybody that wants to have a conversation with us about being a part of this journey,” Nyanin said. “We are just really excited about the opportunity to welcome these free agents and these college athletes, as well, and just wanted to give ourselves as much flexibility to be able to go and get athletes in the near future.”
The Valkyries will certainly be looking for a star or two to round out the roster.
One strong possibility would be six-time WNBA All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Jewell Loyd, a guard who has spent her entire career with the Seattle Storm. She requested a trade this month, shortly after the Storm determined there was no evidence to support Loyd's claims of bullying, discrimination, and harassment. A star such as Loyd would be instrumental in helping the Valkyries achieve their ambitious goals.
Last month, Golden State announced the franchise had surpassed 20,000 season ticket deposits, though it’s unclear how many of those $25 deposits have translated into actual purchases. Season ticket packages along the sideline start at $1,995 per seat, according to the ticket prices I saw while looking into buying my own season tickets, and on a crowdsourced Google Sheet.
The Valkyries did not return my official press request on its season ticket sales and pricing strategies, but Valkyries president Jess Smith previously said it would be important to “make sure that we’re valuing our product the right way to drive more revenue into the system, and of course making it accessible to everybody,” she told me in April when I interviewed her at an event at Manny’s.
Sometimes in women’s sports, teams just give tickets away, hoping to build a fan base that will buy tickets later, Smith told me at Manny’s. But “you’re immediately telling people what your product is worth by doing that, and you’re also not able to create the experience that brings them back,” she said.
The real test of the Valkyries’ brand will begin once the season tips off, and we can count the butts in seats. The team’s NBA counterparts, the Golden State Warriors, have set a high bar for attendance at the Chase Center, selling out game after game for multiple seasons. (The Warriors have had 529 consecutive sellout games since Dec. 18, 2012, according to the NBA.)
No matter what happens, we’re in a new era for women’s sports. Martin, the newly-drafted guard, is excited to “be a part of history,” she told reporters Friday, adding that it’s “something really cool and something I’m going to be able to talk about for the rest of my life and tell my kids one day, that I was a part of an expansion draft and the first WNBA team in San Francisco.”
