As a general rule, expansion teams aren’t really supposed to be very good right away. Sure, the initial player draft offers a chance to assess the league’s potentially undervalued and overlooked players on the off chance of finding a hidden treasure, but from there, contention usually requires a lot of patience: A bunch of losing seasons provide the high draft picks to slowly accumulate talent, with a legitimate chance to contend finally waiting at the end of that long building process.
The Golden State Valkyries apparently missed that memo.
Barely two seasons into their existence, the Valkyries are headed to the WNBA Finals against the Atlanta Dream (Game 1 at 12:30 p.m. Saturday). To get there, they closed out the Las Vegas Aces on the road. This was a matchup that began as a huge mismatch in team pedigree -- the Aces had won three of the past four WNBA titles, while Golden State literally didn’t exist two years ago -- if not talent. Instead, it became a changing of the guard, with the league’s new contender sweeping aside one of its greatest dynasties.
Exactly how historic are the Valkyries as a recent expansion team? And how have they managed to go from an expansion draft to a Finals appearance in less than two years? Let’s dive into five charts that explain Golden State’s unprecedented rise.
Going into 2025, it was a bit of a mystery how the Valkyries would end up doing in their first WNBA season. Previously, expansion teams had posted an average winning percentage of .306 with a minus-8.4 net rating (we’re not including 1997, the league’s first season). If history was any indication, fans could expect Golden State to be one of the league’s worst teams out of the gates.
But before Golden State, the league hadn’t added a new team since the Atlanta Dream in 2008, meaning a backlog of great players was building up in competition for the same number of total roster spots in the W. (Witness the number of high draft picks who would be waived heading into each season.) Contrary to the historical record, this suggested the Valkyries would be tapping into a vast reservoir of available talent when building the first WNBA expansion squad in nearly two decades.
And that has largely proved to be true. The Valkyries ended up having the second-best first-year winning percentage (.523) of any WNBA club -- trailing only the 1998 Detroit Shock (.567) -- and the best expansion year by both net rating (plus-1.8) and Elo rating (1494). And all they’ve done since is continued that meteoric rise, to the point that they had the best regular season for a second-year team by all available measures of team quality, and in fact finished with the second-best record in the league -- and best net rating overall -- in 2026.
As a result of their dramatic rise from, well, not having a team at all in 2024 to the league’s top net rating in 2026, the Valkyries’ odds of winning the WNBA title also have risen dramatically. Going into the season, Golden State looked like a solid pick to return to the playoffs and possibly even win a series (last year’s season ended with a 2-0 first-round sweep to the Minnesota Lynx). But contending for the championship seemed like a much taller order -- especially in a crowded field that contained the former champion Aces and Liberty, plus the improved Olivia Miles version of the Lynx, an Indiana Fever team featuring a healthy Caitlin Clark, and the overhauled Dream.
And for the first few months of the season, that seemed about right. The Valkyries were 13-7 through the end of June, one of the better records in the league but still clearly within a five-team logjam below Minnesota and Las Vegas. It seemed as if Golden State were destined to spend all year fighting for razor-thin seeding margins within that group. But since July 1, the Valkyries rattled off a league-best 19-5 record and saw their odds in statistical systems like Elo zoom past those of the presumed-favorite Lynx by the end of the regular season, when the latter hit a late slump. A 5-1 playoff start has only reinforced their status as a serious title threat, and now the early-season underdog Valkyries are statistical favorites to win it all.
If we had to pick a single calling card for the Valkyries’ impressive championship bid, it has to be their defense. With a defensive rating of 100.6, they not only led all teams in suppressing opponents’ per-possession scoring, but the gap between Golden State and No. 2 Atlanta at 104.5 (3.9 points per 100 possessions) was roughly the same as the gap between Atlanta and No. 7 New York at 108.7 -- or nearly the gap to league average itself, which was 109.1. The Valkyries’ difference compared to that league figure (minus-8.5 points per 100) ranked as the sixth-best single-season WNBA defense ever relative to average.
The 2025 Valkyries landed on a number of top-tier defenders through the expansion draft, including Veronica Burton on the perimeter and Temi Fagbenle on the inside, helping Golden State rank fourth on defense right out of the gate under coach Natalie Nakase. But an even more refined version of the team’s D came into shape in 2026, with names like Kiah Stokes -- whose block saved the Valkyries in Game 2 against Vegas -- and Gabby Williams joining Burton this season.
The Valkyries’ defensive recipe blends a few components. They have one of the better rim protectors in the league in Stokes, which contributes to a league-low 47.8 effective FG% allowed, plus a couple of premier ball hawks in Burton and Williams, which forces opponents into mistakes -- they also ranked No. 2 in turnover rate forced. And opponents don’t get many easy transition opportunities against Golden State because the Valkyries play at the league’s slowest pace and hardly ever turn the ball over. Nakase was the lead assistant under Becky Hammon for the 2023 Aces when they had one of the best defenses in WNBA history -- and now she’s using those lessons to try to dethrone her old team.
Obviously, a team doesn’t post the league’s best net rating and fight to within a game of the WNBA Finals without star performances, and the Valkyries absolutely got one of those this season from Burton.
The Northwestern alum was originally taken No. 7 by Dallas in the 2022 draft, but the Wings never really gave her much opportunity to earn an expanded role; she started 19 only total games in her first two seasons, averaging a paltry 14.5 minutes over that span before being waived before the 2024 season. After signing with Connecticut midseason, Burton continued to log backup minutes (12.7 MPG) despite improving her scoring efficiency with increased usage.
It wasn’t until Burton, left unprotected in the expansion draft, landed with Golden State that she finally found a situation in which she could start -- and she has thrived in the role. Averaging 29.0 MPG as a Valkyrie, Burton has remained one of the league’s top defensive guards while also taking a huge step forward as an offensive presence, which earned her Most Improved Player honors in 2025. But the advanced metrics in particular adore Burton for her two-way play; her ability to draw fouls while still taking plenty of 3s; her playmaking (she maintained a 34.5% assist rate with just an 11.9% turnover rate); and her massive on-court impact, which showed up at both ends of the court. Burton finished the season ranked second behind only the MVP A’ja Wilson in both LAKER wins added and win shares.
Burton had help. Led by Williams, who arrived from Seattle as a big-time impact player in her own right, six additional Valkyries beyond Burton had at least 2.5 LAKER wins added; no other team in the league had more than five players crack that barrier, much less if their top star is tossed out. Add in Nakase, the 2025 WNBA Coach of the Year, and the Valkyries are loaded with talent from top to bottom.
As much as we’ve been extolling the virtues of Burton’s game, she hasn’t been as effective as usual in the playoffs -- averaging just 9.5 PPG on 35.3% shooting from the field in six games. She has still made her trademark on-court impact; Golden State has a plus-12.4 net rating when she’s in the game, 13.3 points per 100 better than when she sits. And in the clutch, she made multiple big shots when Golden State needed her. But her postseason LAKER rating of plus-2.7 points per 100 is markedly down from her mark of plus-7.5 in the regular season.
Luckily for the Valkyries, they’ve received big performances from some of the other names on the roster -- most notably Williams, who is averaging 22.7 PPG in the playoffs. Another player who has run with an opportunity in Golden State, Williams was always more of a defensive player than a scorer in her previous career stops, but her usage rate this season (29.0%) was a whopping 11.2 points higher than her previous career average, and she’s pushing it even higher (to 32.1%) in the playoffs.
Of course, Williams does have a tendency to raise her game in the postseason (where her career scoring average of 14.5 PPG is markedly higher than her 9.3 regular-season figure), but this is taking things to a new level. And the other Valkyries to raise their output significantly in the playoffs are Tiffany Hayes and Cecilia Zandalasini, who both have produced massive LAKER ratings (Hayes is at plus-10.7!) in around 18 minutes per game off the bench.
It should be noted that the Valkyries’ run has involved its fair share of gritty wins, surviving Dallas in a win-or-go-home Game 3 to win in the first round, needing some late free throws and a last-second block to take the 2-0 lead over Las Vegas, and then outlasting the Aces in overtime of the semifinals clincher. There’s no question Golden State will have another tough assignment taking down Angel Reese and the Dream -- and the league’s second-best defense -- to win a title.
But the Valkyries have spent their entire, brief existence defying conventional expectations for expansion teams. Why should the most significant step yet along their improbable path to a championship be any different?