The Golden State Valkyries will start their time in the WNBA with an advantage over many other teams.
As the W's latest expansion team begins building out its first roster and preparing for its first WNBA Draft, they are certainly at a disadvantage in terms of team talent, experience, and history. Yet where this franchise does have an advantage is that the most successful basketball organization of the last decade is now behind the Valkyries and molding their future success.
Joe Lacob, owner of both the Golden State Warriors and now the Valkyries, overhauled a Warriors organization that was the laughingstock of the league for a number of years. Over the past decade, however, they have been to the NBA Finals six times, winning four titles. Part of that success was a result of drafting a Top-10 player of all time at seventh in the 2009 NBA Draft, but a large part of that success was the structure built around Stephen Curry and the rest of the core players.
That included the hiring of head coach Steve Kerr, a former champion as a player who has been as good as any head coach in the league the last 10 years. Since he was hired in 2014, no NBA head coach has accrued as many wins as Kerr's 805 regular season wins. And in terms of postseason wins, Kerr is already seventh all-time and has the highest postseason win percentage in NBA history.
Now, Lacob is putting in place the pieces to try and once again take a basketball league by storm.
The Valkyries' early hire puts them light years ahead
This summer, a whopping seven WNBA teams moved on from their head coaches. In a league with just 12 teams, that's a staggering 58 percent of teams with a vacancy. That left a mad scramble to try and find the best possible candidates to step into those roles -- coaches with untapped potential to become the next Becky Hammon or Sandy Brondello.
The Golden State Valkyries don't have any players yet -- they won't until the WNBA expansion draft on December 6th. The season doesn't begin until May. The Valkyries didn't have a time crunch to have a new head coach in place before the end of the last WNBA season.
To their credit, however, they acted like they did and made their hire before any of the other teams had time to evaluate and hire their own candidates. They announced the hiring of new head coach Natalie Nakase on October 10th, before the WNBA Playoffs had concluded and before a number of teams had even made the decision to move on from their current coaches, let alone make the next hire.
Nakase, 44, is a coach with an exceptional resume for her first head-coaching position in the league. She was a star at UCLA in her playing days, then coached overseas after retiring before making her way stateside. She was a member of the LA Clippers' organization for a decade, learning from the likes of Jerry West, Lawrence Frank and Ty Lue.
Most recently, of course, Nakase was the lead assistant coach under Becky Hammon with the Las Vegas Aces, playing a major role in their back-to-back championships in 2022 and 2023. Hammon is the name du jour in WNBA coaching circles, someone who interviewed for NBA head coaching jobs and came from the Gregg Popovich coaching tree -- as did Steve Kerr, who won two championships under Coach Pop with the San Antonio Spurs.
Hiring Nakase away from the Aces wasn't an easy task, either - she made it clear over the past couple of seasons she wouldn't leave for just any job. General manager Ohemaa Nyanin had to sell Nakase on the future potential of building a team from scratch -- albeit a team with a ready-made fan base, a proven ownership team and a massive market.
What the Valkyries accomplished by hiring Nakase before the cycle truly kicked off for the rest of the league was that they got their No. 1 pick instead of waiting for other teams to jump in and make it a bidding war. They didn't have to worry about settling for their backup option, or restarting a search -- they got their top choice, and arguably the top choice on the entire WNBA coaching market.
The rest of the WNBA has had to pass around re-hires with mixed track records, or try to identify their own high-powered assistants to take a chance on. The Chicago Sky hired Tyler Marsh, who was an assistant coach under Nakase in Las Vegas! Natalie Nakase was the best candidate on the market, and the Valkyries put her in place before anyone else had a chance to blink.
There's no guarantee that Nakase will be an excellent coach, just as there was no guarantee Steve Kerr would be one of the best head coaches in NBA history. But Lacob put decision-makers in place who prioritized integrity, relational skills and a variety of coaching inputs; it worked with Kerr, and it has an excellent chance of working with Nakase.
The Valkyries have a long ways to go, but they are already moving at light speed.