four wins away from a WNBA title<\/a> in just their second year of existence.<\/p>\nThis isn\u2019t supposed to happen. It defies logic, history, and our understanding of how things are supposed to work in the W.<\/p>\n
The top women\u2019s basketball league in the world has never been deeper, more vicious, or more loaded with transcendent talent in its 30 years of existence.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s simply too much competence across the board for an expansion team to barge into the party and drink all the top-shelf champagne.<\/p>\n
Right?<\/p>\n
Apparently wrong.<\/p>\n
When Lacob announced this franchise, he promised a championship within five years. That felt like standard owner bravado, the kind of hollow promise designed to sell season tickets. I remember standing on the floor of Chase Center when it happened, popping to attention as the words hit my ears and looking around towards anyone to confirm that he, in fact, just said that.<\/p>\n
And I wasn\u2019t the only one doing it.<\/p>\n
I might have been chuckling \u2014 this guy \u2014 but he wasn\u2019t kidding.<\/p>\n
Well, his team is running roughly three years ahead of schedule.<\/p>\n
Year 1 of the Valkyries was cute. It was plucky. And it was a wildly impressive accomplishment in its own right.<\/p>\n
The Valkyries scraped together an expansion roster of castoffs and spare parts, put together great systems and better team chemistry under coach Natalie Nakase, and played a brand of suffocating defense that crashed the postseason party out of the gate.<\/p>\n
Cute doesn\u2019t win titles, though.<\/p>\n
No, for that, league history shows you need true it-all-flows-through-me superstar.<\/p>\n
The kind that the Aces, for instance, have in A\u2019ja Wison, the now five-time MVP, and Chelsea Gray.<\/p>\n
And yet when these teams, the Valkyries and Aces, met with a trip to the Finals on the line this past week, it was Golden State who was \u2014 front-to-back, Game One to Three \u2014 the superior team. The championship-level team, even.<\/p>\n
Golden State\u2019s entire existence on this stage is a giant, unapologetic middle finger to traditional roster construction.<\/p>\n
Veronica Burton was once discarded by Connecticut. Friday night, she was out-dueling Gray in crunch time with the poise of a tenured assassin.<\/p>\n
It was Tip Hayes \u2014 a former Ace \u2014 bringing immediate chaos and unrelenting dribble penetration off the bench.<\/p>\n
It was Kayla Thornton \u2014 a champion with the Liberty who made available in the expansion draft \u2014 lifting her game when the moments of the game called for it.<\/p>\n
It was Kiah Stokes \u2014 another former Ace \u2014 walling off the paint, cleaning the glass, and turning easy layups into mathematical impossibilities.<\/p>\n
Those aren\u2019t role-player highlights. Those are championship contributions delivered by players other front offices deemed expendable.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s crazy,\u201d Burton told NBC after the final buzzer.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s right, but, on the other hand, the Valkyries aren\u2019t showing us anything we didn\u2019t see all summer, when this group ground opponents into fine powder.<\/p>\n
Teams coming into the league are supposed to tank. They\u2019re supposed to pray for lottery ping-pong balls, draft a generational scoring savior, and spend half a decade learning how to win.<\/p>\n
The Valkyries saw that path, chose a different one, and skipped the line.<\/p>\n
Their two first-round draft picks? Only one is on the roster, and she doesn\u2019t even crack the playoff rotation.<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t have a renowned, all-WNBA bucket getter for the clutch, though this series against the Aces threw that take into question.<\/p>\n
No, this team has built a roster by winning on the margins. Their one splashy offseason signing was Gabby Williams on a max deal, and she was brought in, mainly, because she\u2019s yet another elite defensive player. Williams finished 32nd in scoring last season.<\/p>\n
But when the buckets needed to be made Friday in crunch time of a closeout game, it was Williams \u2014 not Wilson or Gray \u2014 who came through again and again.<\/p>\n
Who cares if this was the first time on this kind of stage for this team? They were ready.<\/p>\n
The Valkyries team is the old Golden State ethos stripped of its arrogance and rebuilt with pure grit: Strength in Numbers, but with brass knuckles.<\/p>\n
Williams and Burton owned the high-leverage minutes in Game 3, but that title DNA the Valks showed all season \u2014 the one that every player in violet embodies \u2014 showed up in those now famous margins, this time of the game.<\/p>\n
No non-charter expansion team in WNBA history had ever reached the Finals in its second season until Friday.<\/p>\n
Lacob promised a revolution, and the Bay Area built a juggernaut out of attitude and toughness.<\/p>\n
The Valkyries hacked the league. And now they\u2019re on the precipice of running off with the crown.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2016, when Joe Lacob infamously declared his Golden State empire was \u201clight-years ahead\u201d of everyone else,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":927925,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[461,49,3335,48,1612,62656,4245,318719,82,2091,630],"class_list":["post-927924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-basketball","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-canada","tag-golden-state-valkyries","tag-inside-sports","tag-latest-headlines","tag-social-alert","tag-sports","tag-sports-columnists","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=927924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/927925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}