- Natalie Nakase was named WNBA coach of the year after a historic season for the Golden State Valkyries.
- The Valkyries were the first WNBA expansion team to make the postseason in its inaugural season.
- The Valkyries finished the season with 23 wins, marking the most by an expansion team in its inaugural season.
The Golden State Valkyries reached new heights in their inaugural season and set the standard of success for expansion teams, under the tutelage of first-year head coach Natalie Nakase.
Nakase led the Valkyries to the team’s first playoff bid, the first expansion team to make the postseason in its inaugural season. Nakase was named the WNBA 2025 Coach of the Year as a result on Wednesday, but if you ask the California native, her team did what ‘we’re supposed to do.’
‘That’s my mentality. I told the girls that we intentionally picked you guys for this reason, to do things for the first time,’ Nakase said after the Valkyries punched its postseason ticket on Sept. 4. ‘We’re not done yet.’
Nakase cultivated the Valkyries’ culture from scratch and built a roster with a ‘never satisfied mindset’ through the expansion draft, WNBA draft and free agency. The grittiness of Nakase can be seen in her team, which allowed the fewest overall points (76.3) and finished with the third-best defensive rating this season.
WNBA MOST IMPROVED PLAYER: Golden State Valkyries guard Veronica Burton wins
The Valkyries put the league on notice after jumping to a 10-9 record to start the season, becoming only the third expansion team in WNBA history to pick up its 10th victory in 20 games or less. But after All-star forward Kayla Thornton went down with a season-ending knee injury in late July, many assumed the Valkyries would fade into fade into obscurity.
Not on Nakase’s watch. She continually got the most out of her players and transformed previous role players to main characters, as evidenced by Veronica Burton, who was named the 2025 WNBA Most Improved Player on Monday after improving from 3.1 points per game last season in Connecticut to averaging 11.9 points in a career-high 44 games (all starts) this year. The Valkyries finished the season with 23 wins, marking the most by an expansion team in its inaugural season.
‘I’ve been an underdog my whole life,’ Nakase said. ‘I think all of our players have that type of mentality. They like to be doubted, to prove people wrong and that’s what connected us too. I think that’s the beauty of our season is that we’ve been connecting on all different levels of past experiences, past trauma, past everything.’
Nakase has always had a chip on her shoulder. The 5-foot-2 guard wasn’t highly recruited out of high school. She received a full-ride scholarship from UC Irvine, but ultimately turned it down to walk on at UCLA. After recovering from a knee injury, Nakase went on to become a starter for three seasons, averaging 5 points, 3.7 rebounds and 1.5 steals.
Nakase played two seasons in the now-defunct National Women’s Basketball League (NWBL) and competed overseas in Germany before another knee injury ended her playing career. Nakase transitioned to coaching, with stints in Germany and Tokyo, and landed with the Clippers in 2012 and Aces in 2022.
Nakase served as an assistant coach under Las Vegas Aces head coach Becky Hammon the past two seasons and was a key piece in the Aces’ back-to-back WNBA championships (2022, 2023). Before that, Nakase spent 10 seasons with the Los Angeles Clippers, working her way up from a video coordinator to an assistant coach and player development coach for both the Clippers and G League affiliate, the Agua Caliente Clippers.
‘Tyronn Lue taught me that you have to be able to communicate with every single player,’ Nakase told USA TODAY Sports in December, following the WNBA expansion draft. ‘The best thing (Becky Hammon) taught me was to coach with an open heart. She has such a big heart. When you have a conversation with her, you feel like you can lean into her and tell her anything because of the way she approaches everything. Having an open heart is huge, that’s why we had quick buy-in with the Las Vegas Aces.’
Nakase not only got complete buy-in from the Valkyries this season, she also got it from the community. The Valkyries sold out each of their 22 regular-season home games at Chase Center and set an all-time WNBA attendance record, welcoming 397,408 total fans and an average attendance of 18,064 this season.
Nakase will face her biggest challenge yet on Wednesday. The No. 8 seed Valkyries host the No. 1 seed Minnesota Lynx for Game 2 of the best-of-three first-round WNBA Playoffs series on Wednesday (10 p.m. ET) at SAP Center at San Jose in San Jose, California, where Golden State must win to keep their season alive.
Nakase received 53 of the 72 votes for coach of the year. Dream coach Karl Smesko got 15 votes, Hammon got two votes, as did the Lynx’s Cheryl Reeve.
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