SAN FRANCISCO — In mid-June, Halle Berry had an issue, and that created a conundrum for Gabby Williams. The leading scorer for the Golden State Valkyries worked late on a Monday night. She was set to clock in again the next morning across the bay. But Halle Berry could not be left alone, and addressing this first thing would rob Williams of a couple hours of sleep, which was suboptimal given the demanding nature of her job. So Williams contacted her bosses. She explained her predicament. They offered a quick and easy solution.
Bring Halle Berry along. Someone would keep her company.
This is an entirely true story, because Halle Berry is, in fact, a 9-year-old rescue cat, and because the lone billion-dollar franchise in the WNBA, an expansion club that tipped off in 2025, understands the means to its ends. A pet with a Hollywood name gets star treatment. Her relieved All-Star owner gets extra rest and then gets back to work. It’s a savvy trade: Paws for effect. “Every little thing, they figure out,” Williams says after a shootaround at the Chase Center a day later. “The only thing you have to worry about is playing basketball.”
The Golden State Valkyries, in their second competitive summer, have gotten a lot right in a hurry, and with good timing at that. A historic collective bargaining agreement in April set new WNBA benchmarks for salaries, player experience and much more. Golden State was basically birthed into existence in front of it all. Leveraging advantages ranging from a Sephora-sponsored practice facility to a posh 18,000-seat arena to on-call cat-sitters already has forged an eclectic roster into a championship contender. The Valkyries do what some others still don’t after decades. They are the glitch that is a feature.
Now the head start has to withstand everyone else’s obligation to catch up. Pure circumstance may help with that — one operational trick Golden State can’t share with league peers is how to be located in an ideal WNBA market from the jump — but the elevated standards are out there for all to pursue. So a club intentionally given so much must act like nothing is a given.
“It’s the only way that I know how to come to work every day,” says Natalie Nakase, who won WNBA Coach of the Year honors after leading the Valkyries to the playoffs in their debut season. “There’s no way we’re gonna have a losing program. There’s no way. I don’t know how to work in that kind of system.”
After a cross-country flight following a board meeting, but before he locates a smashburger to solve for dinner cravings, Joe Lacob sits down to discuss past and present. He was the largest investor in the American Basketball League, a professional women’s hoops organization launched in 1996. It shuttered in late 1998. “We did not succeed,” Lacob says with a laugh. Some stuff they got right, he thinks, but mostly he believes the problem was being a little too early.
Now it is profitably later. Lacob and his Golden State Warriors co-owner Peter Guber agreed to pay $50 million in 2023 to run the WNBA’s first expansion team in 15 years. Three years later, in its most recent study of the league’s franchise valuations, CNBC appraised the Valkyries at $1 billion. They are the first women’s professional sports franchise to hit that mark. Small wonder that the expansion fees for the next three franchises to enter the league — Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia — landed at $250 million apiece.
Golden State ownership isn’t flipping the property anytime soon, if ever. So that $1 billion number is kind of just a number. But … it’s a big number to hit in a relative blink, resetting expectations of what’s achievable in the WNBA marketplace. “Even with the backing of, say, the Warriors in this case, or the NBA in general, it’s still all pretty hard,” Lacob tells The Athletic, wearing a violet Valkyries pullover and a Warriors lanyard with his building ID card attached. “I think we have a great team that has maximized that opportunity. The execution of this startup, if you want to call it, I think is probably one of the best. I’ve started 70 companies in my life. Mostly tech. But this is one of the best.”
Inheriting some gems helped.
The Sephora Performance Center practice facility, located in downtown Oakland, used to be the home base for their NBA counterpart. It’s crisp and distinct now, with a mural of a Valkyrie warrior in the hallway outside and purple and black everywhere inside, with some Sephora stripes as an accent. (No one has gotten around to changing the massive blue WARRIORS signage on the rooftop, though.) The Chase Center, opened in 2019, is on a 38-game sellout streak for its WNBA tenant. The scene inside the private floor-level Chase Club on a game night has an NBA feel, with crowds lining up to grab a slice at the pizzeria, gourmet popcorn at the movie theater snack station or a Violet’s Fizz specialty cocktail from the bar that retails at $25.50.
There is internal pushback on the significance of bling. “The cool stuff doesn’t mean anything,” Valkyries president Jess Smith says. But Golden State also has established a bar network in the region — 35 spots and counting — creating hubs for fans to gather to watch games. A dozen business partners did endorsement deals with players in Year 1, per vice president of corporate partnerships Katie Stockberger. An All-Star Game voting campaign for Valkyries players included QR-code signage at every BART and Caltrain station along the route to Chase Center, and Williams wound up with the seventh-most fan votes overall.
Targeted, conscious efforts to make the team a bigger deal make the players a bigger deal by extension. And that opens opportunities in an era when opportunities are increasingly important. It’s how Rakuten links up with guard Veronica Burton and guard Tiffany Hayes partners with Chase, among others, outside of team-led promotions. “It’s up to us to elevate the players,” says vice president of marketing Andrea Fernandes, “and get their names known as much as possible.”
Kayla Thornton gets five from Valkyries owner Joe Lacob after Thornton scored against the Chicago Sky at Chase Center. (Thearon W. Henderson /Getty Images)
Historically, the WNBA has not been especially accommodating or proactive when it comes to the player experience across the board. Charter flights were banned until recently. Some teams didn’t have lockers for players. The new CBA underscores a new era of player demands, beyond historic million-dollar salaries; revenue sharing, standards for facilities, housing stipends and retirement benefits are codified league-wide.
Still, benefit of the doubt is tough to come by. “You can do all the research you want, but people lie a lot in this business,” says Hayes, a 14-year veteran who has played for four different franchises. The proof, then, is in the doing.
As veteran center Kiah Stokes considered her free-agent options this offseason, she clocked Golden State as a franchise with its house in order — from marketing and branding to community involvement. Likewise, when she first played at Chase Center as an opponent, the vibe resonated. “I vividly remember it,” Stokes says. “It was insane. That stuck with me.” She did not know that declining breakfast smoothies prepared by the Valkyries staff would prompt someone to offer to go on a coffee run for her. Or that she’d mention that she’s never been a great sleeper, and her new club would propose providing everything from a different comforter to a different mattress to magnesium packets to a full-on sleep study to rectify the problem.
“I think it just sets the standard,” Stokes says. “If you want to be a top contending team, you have to follow along.”
It’s how Williams, the most crucial acquisition of Golden State’s offseason, made her free-agent decision in a short four-day window.
She had everything as a college star at Connecticut. Then she said she found herself at a Chicago-area hospital, on her own, awaiting post-draft tests and flailing at questions about insurance after being selected No. 4 by the Sky in 2018. After three seasons there, the 5-foot-11 wing spent four years in Seattle. That went better. “I didn’t want to take a step down,” Williams says, describing her approach to free agency. Now she’s having a career year (14.9 points per game) as one of the league’s top-paid players (reported salary: $1.19 million) who also never has to worry about her cat. “In Chicago, there was no investment because they didn’t believe,” Williams says. “But here, it’s like they invest because they know that this is a product people want to buy.”
The edges are clear. The Valkyries, as an expansion club, were constructed originally out of WNBA castoffs and skilled international players. Players exposed by other franchises in the expansion draft were largely unproven commodities. Janelle Salaun, a free-agent signee, was a promising but little-known French national team forward. Kaitlyn Chen was a third-round pick in the college draft. Most everyone gathered with a need to introduce themselves, in every sense.
But the environment was uncommonly set up for success, at least relative to the rest of the league. That combination of motivation and infrastructure led to a playoff berth in Year 1. They were a bit like Rocky Balboa, and a bit like Ivan Drago: Underdogs, but trained and treated like formidable elites.
It is not a balance easily achieved or perpetuated. That is why Natalie Nakase is here.
The Valkyries head coach is a 5-foot-2-inch former walk-on guard at UCLA. She is the daughter of a father who put life in binary terms. “My dad always told me, whether it’s practice, a workout, you give your best,” Nakase says. “If a coach says, ‘Hey, huddle up,’ you sprint to the huddle. Everything that I’ve done since I was a little kid, my dad was like, ‘You have to be the best.’”
She is wise enough to delegate more than she did in Year 1, for the sake of her own health. And Nakase drives players only on their terms; she asks them how they like to be pushed, and she pushes them that way. “It’s just pure honesty,” Nakase says. “Why am I finding something? Why am I trying to guess? Just tell me.” But she is who she is. She tore her anterior cruciate ligament as an undersized, non-scholarshipped freshman and wound up starting three seasons for a power conference college program. She coached in Germany and Japan before her career trajectory took off via an internship with the Los Angeles Clippers in 2012, working under the team’s video coordinator. She wasn’t sure she’d ever abdicate her spot on the Las Vegas Aces bench until Aces head coach Becky Hammon convinced her.
“I’m like, ‘Why would I leave?’” Nakase says now. “She said, you’re ready for this. And I’m like, ‘Am I?’”
So the Sephora Performance Center might as well be a junior high school gym. The Chase Center could be a court at the park with chain nets. There is no coming to work with an eye on perks. Entitlement is an infection.
“It’s a phrase here that we have: ‘No a–holes,’” Stokes says. “That’s not my words. That’s Natalie’s words.”
Informed of this specific appraisal from a 12-year vet on her roster, Nakase smiles and throws her head back. She wouldn’t prefer to put it that way on the record.
Also … she absolutely would put it that way. Her players may deserve all of this. Anyone who acts like it won’t enjoy it for long.
“That’s not a philosophy, that’s just our culture,” Nakase says. “That comes from Joe Lacob. He told me in terms of how you hire, starting with my staff — hire good people. So that’s another way of saying ‘no a–holes.’ Hire good people, and then you’re gonna enjoy working here. Because everyone works hard.”
Tiffany Hayes listens to head coach Natalie Nakase on the sideline. (Adam Hagy / NBAE via Getty Images)
Four big, gold balloons are taped to the kitchen island countertop inside the Valkyries’ offices on a Tuesday in downtown Oakland. The team’s Instagram account reached 300,000 followers the previous night. As a result, there is a catered spread from Ben’s Fast Food, a local health-and-nutrition-focused restaurant, and literally inflated praise for all to see: a three, two zeroes and a K.
Every number for an expansion franchise is a milepost, but they all count here. Because they’re worth celebrating, and also because there’s always a 300,001st follower to get. “The thing I say a lot to our team is, last year was not a movie premiere,” Smith, the team president, says. “We cannot take our foot off the gas.”
As of April, there’s a league-wide mandate to do things better. Parts of the Valkyries’ natural advantage have been collectively bargained away, in that sense. Indeed, a $75 million capital raise in 2022 and an 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal in 2024 were tablesetters for a Bay Area WNBA team in the first place.
So the only way to stay ahead, now, is to go forward.
The Valkyries are examining the “personality” of various seating sections to determine if there’s a unique way to brand them or create game-day traditions that deepen fans’ connections to the franchise. They conducted a study on men who attend Valkyries games and found a large portion are not Girl Dads but 20-somethings, and they spend more per transaction on merchandise, thereby identifying fertile ground to till. Exploration of the international scene, too, is near the top of the agenda. “The exciting part as a new team that has a growing fan base is how do we invest in that?” Smith says. “To win that global market and really prop this team up even further in a big way?”
Anyway, the repeatability of this is debatable. It could be that the Bay Area was ripe for WNBA mania in ways no other community will be. Just please make it awesome, was the message Smith received from the community before the brand even launched.
Initial season-ticket holders — the “Founding Guard,” as they’re called — received a varsity jacket if they used a Chase card to buy their seats. Enough did that the club had to put in a second jacket order. Giveaway jerseys disappeared in 30 minutes on Valkyries Day at a San Francisco Giants game. On a visit to the San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center in June, point guard Veronica Burton and assistant coach Sugar Rodgers were known quantities to their young audience before they arrived. “Frankly, as someone who grew up here, I didn’t know whether there was room for more,” says Yoyo Chan Murphy, the team’s senior vice president for community relations. “Clearly there is. There’s something about this market where people are loyal and rooting for the underdog.”
When the Valkyries compete along the shore of the San Francisco Bay’s Central Basin, there is a sort of exaggerated delight that sets the mood apart. A fan brought out for pregame drum-banging is hailed as “a Founding Guard member since 2025,” which is amusing, since there’s no way to be a Founding Guard member any earlier. Upon her return to Chase Center, Los Angeles Sparks guard Kate Martin receives a pregame tribute video and a standing ovation; Martin played one season for the Valkyries before being cut in training camp this year. One guy leaves his third-row seat to dance with members of The Flock hype team during a timeout. When Kaitlyn Chen banks in a 3-pointer, it’s as if no one in the building has ever seen such a thing in their lives.
It’s funny. Maybe a little try-hard. But then some WNBA teams and fans haven’t tried enough, period.
Meanwhile, all’s a riot on the western front. “I can’t walk around in this,” Nakase says, tugging at her Valkyries practice shirt, “or I’ll get mobbed.”
That supporter affection, the head coach and her players say, is a call to give as good as they get. A reminder to use what they have to give the people what they deserve.
As motivating philosophies go, it’s a bit on the saccharine side. But sugar seems to go with salt here. The Golden State Valkyries are early in the second half of the 2026 season with a 20-9 record, just four games out of first, and they have legitimate championship aspirations, thanks in no small part to a defense ranked first. There has been no letup. They still lead a pack that’s been directed, by that new collective bargaining agreement, to sprint toward the front. They presumably can stay there as long as it’s never good enough to have it so good.
“You’ve got to always be hungry,” Lacob says. “You always have to have an ethos in the organization that you want to be the best in everything you do. Everything. The way you treat players, the way you pay players, the way that you have lunches on the road, the ways you take care of their cat, the way you treat fans when they come in the door. Every single thing. That’s the way we view this place.”
