All eyes are on the Golden State Valkyries ahead of the team's Expansion Draft Friday, and perhaps no one feels this as acutely as GM Ohemaa Nyanin.
After five years with the New York Liberty (first as director of basketball operations and then assistant GM), Nyanin took the job with the Valkyries at the beginning of the 2024 season. As a result, she wasn't on the bench when the Liberty won the franchise's first-ever championship, but she watched from across the country.
Now, Nyanin is locked in on the task before her. Her goal is growth and building a future for the team that can last. As she told Andscape's Sean Hurd in an interview published Tuesday, "What I don’t think that I gave a lot of credence to probably in the beginning is not everybody wants to build."
As a result, it's taken her longer than she thought it would to put together her goals and plans for the team. But now that the Expansion Draft is nearly here, Nyanin is ready — mostly.
"I’m allowing for all the small wins to kind of keep me going, to getting to all the things that we need to get to," she expained. As the outlet noted, the wins that Nyanin is proud of including the hiring of coach Natalie Nakase and vice president of basketball operations Vanja Černivec.
And if the rules of the Expansion Draft have been confusing for fans, it's worth noting that Nyanin has also found herself checking (and double checking) exactly how the event will proceed. "I would say on a daily basis, I read the rules to make sure that I’m not missing anything," she told Hurd. "It’s been a journey. I don’t want to put a pejorative or something, like, that’s super-fluffy and exciting around it. It’s just been a journey. I guess people can determine how hard or not hard the journey has been, but it’s something that our league is going to go through."
You can read the interview with Valkyries GM Ohemma Nyanin at Andscape.