SAN FRANCISCO — Through five games of the WNBA Finals, the Golden State Valkyries and Atlanta Dream have treated fans to 200 minutes of grinding and grating basketball, sometimes, agonizingly so. Only twice through these games has either team shot better than 35 percent (and that was not in the same game). They’ve averaged a turnover every minute and a half of play and a foul almost every minute. The fans have learned they can’t just cheer for the SportsCenter-type highlights in these games.
Shall we enter into the record: Ballhalla exploded when the Valkyries’ defense forced an over-and-back violation off an inbounds play.
At times, this series has looked a lot like what James Naismith probably imagined when he nailed that peach basket to the wall, trading pace and space for guts and grind.
No, these WNBA Finals games have not been pretty. Yet Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase has never seemed happier.
Through all the mess and muck, she has been in her element: Loving the process of finding ways to win. Ugly or not, and it has often been the former, the Valkyries — after going down 2-1 in the series — have grinded out two consecutive wins to take a 3-2 lead. Their 64-55 win over Atlanta on Monday pushes Golden State to the cusp of a WNBA championship.
Two years ago, Golden State didn’t have a roster. On Thursday, the Valkyries will play for a WNBA title. It’s been a meteoric rise, and still, too slow for Nakase, who says being an “obsession extremist” is a part of her DNA. She is fine with repetition in the aim of perfection. Because for her, it’s less about doing something until she can do it right, and instead, doing it over and over until she can’t get it wrong.
That’s what made the first few games of this finals so frustrating for the coach. She worked until she thought she had the perfect game plan. And then, she didn’t. In Games 1 through 3, Nakase graded herself at an F-. Her players pulled her back from the edge and reminded her that in a seven-game series, you can’t win fast. By design, it’s a marathon. It’s grueling and exhausting. You’re meant to crawl over the finish line, not sprint.
“Sometimes being an extremist doesn’t work well in a seven-game series,” Nakase said Monday night.
The Valkyries players probably wouldn’t call themselves that in the same way as their coach, but their connective tissue almost matters more. Though great teams often take on the personalities of their coaches, the Valkyries have managed to reverse engineer the franchise’s DNA a bit. When Golden State entered the expansion draft before the 2024 season, every team could protect five players. The Valkyries knew they weren’t getting any starters that way.
That was fine by Nakase. She didn’t care about starters. She cared about mentality. Hungry lions hunt better, right? So, she and her staff scoured rosters for players that would come to the Bay Area with a chip on their shoulders, ready to fight. They were looking for a team of Nakases.
She is, to her core, the 5-foot-2 former walk-on point guard who eventually started 58 games for UCLA. Give her one look, and you’d think she had no business in doing that. Spend five minutes with her, and you’ll immediately re-think your notions.
Last week, Nakase was asked what fuels her.
“Winning,” she said plainly. “I want to win.”
Did she want to expand on that at?
“No,” Nakase said. “Just win.”
Nakase came from Becky Hammon’s staff in Las Vegas, where a roster of Olympic gold medalists won multiple WNBA titles. She has seen how it can be done. But in the Bay, she had a different arsenal. And she knew it. She’s obsessive, not delusional. Expansion teams aren’t supposed to be in the hunt for a title in their second year, and rosters composed of reserves aren’t supposed to be the best in the league.
But here we are. Not as quickly as Nakase would like because she wants to do everything faster, but here nonetheless. It’s exhausting and grueling and an absolute slog of a journey.
And Nakase is smiling. This is the part she loves. There will be film sessions — individual, group and team-wide — and recovery and rest, and there’s so much to plan and execute and tinker. If she can be better and take a beat, her team can find the joy in the game, and that’s when they play best. She wants joy to be her team’s fuel.
But Nakase herself?
“I don’t need joy,” she said this week.
Joy is not her fuel of choice. That would be winning. That’s all she needs.
Now Nakase is 40 minutes away from her first WNBA title as a head coach. It’s what she wants and no doubt, if she crawls across that finish line with her team, she would revel in her players’ joy. Maybe she’d even smile.
But when the confetti gets swept up? That’s when Nakase can start planning for 2027 — the tweaks, the changes, the adjustments. That’s when the process starts all over again. Only this time, with a target on her back.
It’s hard to get to the top of the mountain, but it’s harder to stay there. The wind blows more harshly and there’s nowhere to take shelter when it’s just you up there. It’s cold and lonely and miserable.
And Nakase wants to get there as fast as possible.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Golden State Valkyries, WNBA, WNBA Finals, WNBA Highlights
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