Happy Monday, Ball-Knowers!

Playoffathon has officially come to an end on our YouTube channel and we would like to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for being a part of it. This WNBA postseason, we crossed the 10,000 subscriber threshold and marked off a few goals we had when we set out on this journey of independent women’s basketball coverage a little over two years ago.

There’s some ‘3.0’ changes to NCS on the horizon, but it doesn’t mean the content you know and love is changing. No, we’re evolving here at No Cap Space. Our mission statement has always been rooted in equitable and fair coverage of women’s hoops and part of that sacred pillar is also paying it forward for the next group of creators in the game. Thanks to your support and continued patronage, we’re able to do just that.

In the meantime, stay locked in with us as the NCAA women’s basketball season begins. There’s never been a better time to be a fan, and never a better time to subscribe to No Cap Space.

Now, onto the column!

A Halloween Postgame Live of Game Seven with Chauny, Tyler & Greer…

Tyler gave his postgame thoughts on South Carolina’s opening win vs Maryland…

Today’s column focuses on five major implications of the Valkyries WNBA championship win. The first is a pretty simple concept but one that really solidified this postseason.

Every sports league has a stratification of ownership groups that spend to win and others, who are content to ‘moneyball’ their organizations and see it purely as an appreciating asset and nothing more. In past years, those WNBA owners who didn’t invest in facilities, travel or push the envelope on quality of life improvements for their employees could still make a Finals run or even win it. But in the last three to five years, we’ve started to see that baseline change. Whether it’s the Las Vegas Aces, the Phoenix Mercury of last season, the Atlanta Dream of this season or the Golden State Valkyries, the theme has been clear: the teams that are winning are one whose owners are willing to open up their checkbook.

Joe Lacob deserves a lot of credit here. While bad faith actors might look at the Valkyries title and immediately think “this is an indictment on every other ownership group in the WNBA”, I believe this says more about Lacob’s willingness to invest and get out of the way than it does a perceived lack of initiative from other owners. While legacy franchises are, in some cases, trying to modernize their facilities or look for new arena options, Lacob didn’t try to nickel-and-dime his municipality. Instead, he leveraged what he already had built with the Warriors, treated his WNBA franchise with the same care he gave his NBA team and then allowed the smart basketball people to do what they do best (more on that in a moment).

At the same time, the Valkyries finals opponent did the same. For around a half a decade now, Dream owner Larry Gottesdiener and his group have tirelessly worked to make their franchise much more an active part of the Atlanta community. That came not just in the form of tangible investment, but repeated effort that was more than capitalistically-driven performative gestures. In short, the money spent was meaningful and intentional.

Maybe ‘spending to win’ is a bit reductive. ‘Spending with intention’ might be a better tagline here. But you aren’t going to get away with half-assing it anymore. That era of the WNBA is certainly over.

This was a great championship in that Ballhalla really deserved it. From the very first announcement of a franchise in Golden State, the community in the Bay Area has rallied around the organization in more ways than one. Many day-one diehards would tell you that the type of atmosphere in the Chase Center is markedly different for a Valkyries game than a Warriors game. The fanbases have very little crossover, and that’s partially by design.

The teachable moment for future expansion franchises is in understanding the fanbase that drives the bus and allowing them to do that. It could’ve been really easy for Golden State to try and adopt a more homogenous set of fans. It could’ve been easy to get pulled into the siren song of AI money, to appeal to a more soulless (but deep-pocketed) version of the city and allow the longtime critique of WNBA growth — “They’ll strip the soul out of the game for a few bucks!” — to be proven correct.

Instead, in a moment in time in which doing that would’ve been extraordinarily easy, the Valkyries went down another road. They fully immersed themselves in Bay Area culture, highlighting the marginalized communities that have defined and shaped it for decades. It’s an arena environment that is unapologetically queer-led, that pulls in every community of San Francisco, be they Black-American, Asian-American, Latin-American or otherwise. While every consultant or strategist in the world would advocate for homogeny and pushing those communities to the side, Golden State (and Atlanta, similarly) have done the reverse, leaning into the quirks of their area as a means of personalizing the game experience. As a result, the franchises have rapidly become reflections of their community and standard bearers of the cultures that have defined their cities. While I don’t live under the illusion that every expansion team is going to move that way in their first few years, the Valkyries have proven that there is a model where you don’t have to leave your most-supportive groups in the dust in order to make some money.

Part of this new post-CBA era in the WNBA is the prioritization of head coaches and front office staff with experience in the NBA. I’m not quite sure what the calculus is that leads executives to believe that experience with the men is more valuable than time spent in the WNBA, but Golden State has pretty roundly proven that there are good voices already in the league worth listening to. Ohemaa Nyanin was Jonathan Kolb’s number two in New York, helping create the roster that brought the Liberty their first ever championship. Natalie Nakase was a key part of the Las Vegas Aces staff that became a dynasty in the first half of this decade.

They each had their experience with the NBA, either through direct employment or mentorship outside of it. But ultimately, Nyanin and Nakase were WNBA people when Golden State pulled them up. Now, the two are undeniably near or at the top of their respective professions and deserve all of the praise they’ve gotten over the last 48 hours. It also is a bit of a shot across the bow at the many organizations that seem to believe that the pipeline of talent in the WNBA is a little bit thin.

While Lacob very much got out over his skis by saying that his franchise was going to win a championship within the first five years of operation (he was right but let’s not pretend that wasn’t a wild shot call), part of why he looks like a genius in hindsight is that he did the smartest thing an owner could do: sign the checks, trust the vision of your people and let them do the work. Because, in reality, there was a stubbornness to all of this.

The idea that you could win without a clearly definable 1A star, playing a more defensive oriented brand of basketball, with a roster comprised largely of castoffs and European scouting successes, was pretty far fetched two seasons ago. Now, it seems insane that everyone hasn’t been doing it this way the whole time. Visionaries often start off looking a bit crazy, but that’s the beauty of getting it right. When you do, it all was so obvious in the first place. But you do need to be a bit crazy to zag to such a degree, and Golden State has given a permission structure for other organizations to double down on their visions. Sometimes, that will work and other times it’ll flame out in spectacular fashion (word to Jeff Pagliocca). In this case, the trust was warranted and now the Valkyries get to be a model for wise governance.

In that same vein, I’m curious how many organizations decide that they’re going to adopt a Golden State order of operations. European scouting has already changed drastically since Nyanin built a playoff team with what many thought were bargain bin players. She learned it in New York, where international flavor was a key part of the Liberty’s 2024 title team. Her number two in Golden State, Vanja Cernivec, went to Portland and built the Fire’s roster in a very similar way. Is this going to be the new move for expansion franchises and even rebuilding WNBA teams? I don’t see how the proof wouldn’t be in the pudding.

Even when the strategy came under scrutiny, particularly on draft days in 2025 and 2026, Lacob didn’t panic. He allowed Nyanin to build her team as she saw fit and let Nakase coach in the same way. That culture also is what let Nyanin trust Nakase, and Nakase to trust her players. There was no eject button on this plan nor were there any addendums that were required. It’s one of the simplest lessons of sports ownership but also one of the most potent. Golden State trusted a vision and knew they had really smart basketball minds in the building. And they let them cook.

Sometimes, it really just is that easy.

Our friend Maya Goldberg-Safir at Rough Notes put it perfectly when discussing the Valkyries earlier this postseason: Golden State presents an aspirational vision of what the next era of the WNBA can be.

Look, let’s face it: there’s been a lot of exhausting things about the league this year. From officiating to Cathy Engelbert to the CBA to scheduling to Sophie Cunningham and culture wars to the actual product on the court, there’s been plenty of moments that feel like everything but the basketball was up for discussion.

But over in Golden State, it just kind of stayed about the hoops. The roster was an absurdly joyful bunch, from Kaitlyn Chen to Gabby Williams. Natalie Nakase is an impressively endearing hoops psycho and the folks in charge of the Valkyries in-arena experience did fantastic work making the game feel like a community block party. Instead of trying to constantly battle criticism and argue why the WNBA isn’t certain things, Ballhalla just sort of militantly kept arguing through action why it was worth paying attention to.

In the world of sales, there’s a regular theme of ‘Don’t be afraid of the price’. In essence, if you assume the person you’re selling to won’t agree with the price of the good then you spend the whole conversation qualifying various things because you don’t think it will overcome the sticker shock at the end of the call. But that’s not how you sell. Instead, you don’t argue price, you argue value. How will someone’s life materially change for the better when they engage with what you’re selling? That’s the key.

Which brings us to Golden State. Instead of trying to market from a place of fear — they don’t have a 1A big name superstar, they’re still new to the Bay, they’re not in Oakland but San Francisco and thus the culture may not be the same, etc — they marketed to needs. The area needed a women’s basketball team. They needed a community vector that tapped into the rapidly disappearing culture of ‘old’ San Francisco. They needed something fun and light and not regularly tied into the daily existential crises posed by the various industries that call the Bay home. It’s never been about what Ballhalla or the Valks lack, but instead what they have.

When you think about the WNBA and the broader direction its’ going in, that’s the winning message the next commissioner would be wise to adopt. Under Cathy Engelbert’s last two years at the helm, it felt like so much of the messaging around the W was about the things it didn’t have, or the fans it didn’t have or the things that it wanted. The reality is, there’s a litany of things that can be sold, very effectively even, without compromising the majority of the soul that has driven the league to this point. Golden State (and Atlanta, to an extent but in a different way) has reminded us of the idea that leading from a place of positivity is much more potent for a growing property than trying to constantly play defense against doubters.

So as I prepare to watch a parade down the Embarcadero in San Francisco this week, I’m reminded of why many of us care about the WNBA the way that we do. It’s because it’s dope. The games are fun, the environments are cool, and people care. It’s cool to care. It’s cool to fight for those things and do so without leaving anyone behind. And if that’s the broader fan lesson that comes out of this title, then the rest of the WNBA will be better off for it now, and in the long term.

Southern vs #22 Oklahoma State, 6:00PM ET, ESPN+

A lot of good matchups are going down early in the day today but our first look at Oklahoma State might take the cake for most interesting. A completely revamped roster via the portal has brought in two of the nations top statistical producers in Audi Crooks and Liv McGill. How does it all fit together is now going the question to see if they have the answer to. They get their first chance put it on display vs Southern.

With gutty WNBA Finals win, Valkyries cement themselves as Bay Area legends in record time by Marcus Thompson, The Athletic

Valkyries Insider: The night Gabby Williams became a legend by Marisa Ingemi, Valkyries Beat