Golden State Valkyries Tip Off WNBA's Expansion Era

“This is something that those of us that have been in it have always believed,” Reeve told Athlon Sports. “If things were done a certain way, then our time was coming, I’ve always believed.”

Reeve, who has been on a WNBA sideline since the league’s fifth season in 2001, saw two original franchises she was a part of — the Rockers and the Charlotte Sting — dissolve after a few years of operation.

After that, she was an assistant coach for four years with the Detroit Shock, a team that moved twice and then rebranded after original owner and former Detroit Pistons owner Bill Davidson passed away in 2009. The Detroit Shock became the Tulsa Shock in 2010, and then five years later, new majority owner Bill Cameron moved the Shock to Dallas, where the franchise took on its current name of the Dallas Wings.

By 2009, over seven seasons, the league had lost five teams, relocated three and added two — the Chicago Sky and Atlanta Dream, the most recent expansion team before the Valkyries. The WNBA shrunk from as many as 16 teams in 2000 to 12 going into the 2010 season.

Given that turbulent history, what is behind the WNBA’s current expansion boom? And how has the league learned from its history so that it doesn’t repeat it?

A Complicated Journey

The WNBA’s expansion road hasn’t always been smooth.

Initially, eight NBA owners financed the original eight WNBA teams, including the three that remain today (Los Angeles Sparks, Phoenix Mercury and New York Liberty). The others were the Rockers, Sting, Utah Starzz (which, after moving twice and changing ownership hands twice, became today’s Las Vegas Aces), the Sacramento Monarchs and the league’s first dynasty, the Houston Comets.

After the inaugural 1997 season, the WNBA added eight more teams in three seasons. By the turn of the century — when the WNBA was still considered a novelty — the league had grown by 100%. In just three years, the league added the Shock, Washington Mystics, Minnesota Lynx, Orlando Miracle, Indiana Fever, Miami Sol, Portland Fire and Seattle Storm.

In hindsight, the league expanded too quickly, and two years later, in 2002, the league’s business structure changed as a result of the burst of the dot-com bubble.

In October of that year, the NBA Board of Governors voted to allow outside ownership groups to buy and run WNBA teams. Also, instead of the league paying the players and finding corporate sponsorships, that onus now fell to the team owners. A little over a year later, three WNBA franchises folded — the Fire, Sol and Rockers.

Simply put, the return on investment wasn’t happening quickly enough, especially after the financial markets had been rocked.

“I have invested in it now for seven years trying to find a business model for it to work in our marketplace,” former Rockers owner Gordon Gund said at the time. “The fans we had were very enthusiastic and very supportive. We just didn’t have enough.”

Reeve says that not all NBA ownership groups were sold on Stern’s long-term vision, adding that the former NBA commissioner “twisted arms” to get the league up and running.

Just six years later, in 2008, the Great Recession hit. The crash of the housing market and investment banks led to the eventual fall of the Comets and Monarchs, two more original WNBA franchises.

“The WNBA was not valued during that time,” Reeve says. “Those years, it was an afterthought. It was, get it off the books, get it clean.”

In addition to the decrease in the total number of WNBA teams, rosters also were chopped to aid the flailing business model. Teams initially had 13 players per roster, but in 2009, that number dwindled down to 11.

The 2010s in the WNBA saw zero expansion and two franchise relocations and re-brands. Dynamic college talent — including Brittney Griner, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Elena Delle Donne, Breanna Stewart, Kelsey Plum and A’ja Wilson — all entered the league, but narratives still focused on the league’s lack of mainstream appeal and viability. Also, there often was a marketing and coverage gap when those players moved from college to the pros.

Talk focused on why the league continued to struggle financially and why its ratings fell. Former NBA players even suggested that the rims should be lowered so that women could dunk and draw in more fans. (Those suggestions unfortunately are also still made today.)

The Turning Point

During the WNBA’s adolescence, the league cycled through five presidents, including two interims, before hiring former Deloitte CEO Cathy Engelbert as the league’s first official commissioner in the middle of the 2019 season. And since her first WNBA All-Star Game as commissioner on July 27, 2019, she has fielded questions about expansion.

Engelbert’s first priority, though, was to overhaul the league’s business model and make sure each franchise could produce a return on investment. “If we’re successful in growing the league and the brand and getting our 12 franchises where they need to be from a financial model perspective, certainly that’s something that we’d talk about and is on the list,” she said at her first WNBA All-Star Game.

But after the league raised $75 million in capital from investors inside and outside the league, Engelbert turned her eyes to expansion in 2022. The league used many market research methods to begin its expansion process, including what Engelbert referred to as “psychographics, demographics, NCAA fandom, current WNBA fandom, merch sales and viewership” in cities without WNBA franchises.

The league continued to drop hints about expansion throughout the 2023 season. The WNBA held a preseason game in Toronto between the Lynx and Sky that sold out. Was that the first test of how a WNBA franchise could perform outside of the United States? It sure was. Flashing forward to July, Engelbert revealed at the All-Star Game in Las Vegas that she’d have expansion news later in the season.

The Athletic reported in late September that the owners of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors were closing in on bringing a WNBA team to the Bay Area. Days later, the league made it official.

On the day that the WNBA officially announced that Golden State would be the spot for the league’s 13th team, there were rumblings about how Portland most likely was going to get the next expansion franchise. The Next’s Howard Megdal reported that discussions about Portland had reached the board of governors level. But then, less than a month later, the plans fell through, and reports surfaced about disagreements between Engelbert and prospective owner Kirk Brown over team branding and a conflict of interest involving a basketball training center Brown owned.

But then, in 2024, the two cities that had seemed out of the picture came back into it. On May 23, the WNBA announced that Larry Tanenbaum, the chairman of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, would own and lead Toronto’s new WNBA team. Tanenbaum would operate the team now known as the Toronto Tempo via a new group called Kilmer Sports Ventures that Tanenbaum founded himself. After internal disagreements with other MLSE shareholders, Tanenbaum decided to take matters into his own hands and preserve his goal of bringing a WNBA team to Canada.

Less than four months later, a Portland franchise was back on the table, but this time it would be awarded to Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal of RAJ Sports. The Bhathal family are investors in the Sacramento Kings and own the NWSL’s Portland Thorns.

There are criteria that these three new WNBA ownership groups and their cities all meet. First, all three cities have a vibrant women’s sports community. The San Francisco Bay Area, which had embraced Stanford women’s basketball, was a community that had been starved for a WNBA team. In 2023, Toronto sold out a single preseason game at Scotiabank Arena, which has a capacity of around 20,000 people. Portland is not only home to the Thorns but also to The Sports Bra, the first-ever sports bar that is dedicated to showing women’s sports.

Second, these ownership groups made bids that have included promises to build practice facilities in addition to home arena availability in spaces that are up to professional standards. Unlike the days of teams flying commercial, there’s now an arms race among current WNBA franchises when it comes to having the best player amenities and team-specific practice facilities.

And third, these ownership groups have experience running professional sports teams. Joe Lacob, the primary owner of the Golden State Warriors, has overseen a men’s professional basketball dynasty. Tanenbaum is the chairman of the NBA’s board of governors and played a major role in bringing the Toronto Raptors to the NBA. The Bhathal family of RAJ sports has been in the professional sports space since 2013.

The WNBA’s current round of expansion after a 17-year hiatus has been intentional and strategic. There’s now an understanding that investment from ownership and developing corporate sponsorship matters when trying to grow a successful business venture. The league has learned from its past mistakes.

“There’s a much better opportunity because the doors have been opened, the eyes have been opened to what’s possible,” Reeve says. “How many commercials do we see with female athletes in them now? That never happened before, right?”

What to expect from the Golden State Valkyries in Year 1

When the Golden State franchise announced the hiring of former Angel City revenue chief Jess Smith as team president, there was already an expectation that the WNBA’s first expansion team in 17 years was going to make a deep impression. Angel City FC, the NWSL Los Angeles franchise, had become a hot ticket in L.A. When Angel City debuted in April 2022, the new NWSL franchise had sold more than 15,400 season tickets before its first kick. The franchise created its momentum by leaning heavily into branding, investing in team staff, community building and aggressively seeking corporate sponsorships.

Golden State wanted Smith to bring that successful approach to the Bay Area, and so far she has. On March 26, the Valkyries announced that they had passed the 10,000 season-ticket mark prior to the start of their inaugural season in May. Previously the Valkyries had become the first women’s sports franchise to surpass 15,000 season-ticket deposits.

On the branding front, the franchise has applied to trademark the term “Ballhalla,” a direct reference to the term Valhalla. The team nickname of Valkyries, warrior women who fly through the air and sea, comes from Norse mythology, and Valhalla is the main dwelling place of Norse gods. The branding also includes the franchise’s bold violet color.

On the basketball operations side, Lacob hired former New York Liberty assistant general manager Ohemaa Nyanin as general manager, and then Nyanin hired Las Vegas Aces assistant coach Natalie Nakase as the franchise’s first head coach.

The hires were lauded around the WNBA, as both Nyanin and Nakase came from the two franchises that have won the past three WNBA championships. But regardless of how qualified both Nyanin and Nakase are for the work ahead of them, not many WNBA executives have experience building a team from the ground up.

Lacob has made it very clear that he wants the franchise to win a championship within the Valkyries’ first five seasons, something that no WNBA expansion franchise has ever done before.

Nyanin and Nakase’s strategy in December’s expansion draft, the first in almost two decades, was to draft players who could play a more modern style, were athletic, could shoot 3-pointers and play with grit on defense while also embodying competitiveness and character. Their options were limited, as the other 12 franchises had lists of protected players. As a result, Golden State selected a lot of role players and international talent, including Kayla Thornton, Kate Martin, Julie Vanloo and Temi Fagbenle.

Golden State’s top player will be 12-year veteran Tiffany Hayes, a two-way wing with boundless energy and athleticism. Hayes spent the 2024 season playing for the Aces and won the Sixth Woman of the Year Award. Watch for Hayes to have an excellent season with an offense built around her.

Can the first expansion franchise in 17 years have a record above .500? Historically, that’s been difficult to achieve. The Atlanta Dream went 4-30 in their inaugural season. The Sky debuted in 2006 with a 5-29 record.

But that won’t dampen the energy and excitement surrounding the Valkyries in Year 1. “The enthusiasm in Golden State is going to be off the charts,” Reeve said. “People will remember when a team is awarded a franchise, how incredibly exciting and exhilarating it is for the city.”

Athlon's 2025 WNBA team previews:

Aces | Dream | Fever | Liberty | Lynx | Mercury | Mystics | Sky | Sparks | Storm | Sun | Valkyries | Wings