The WNBA arrives at the San Francisco Bay. Golden State Warriors stars go to debut, the team reaches a subscription record and female basketball lands in a key market in the US Valkyries ask for the way and the WNBA continues its unstoppable expansion.
Last Friday, May 16, Steve Kerr, the Golden State Warriors coach, and several of his players went to the San Francisco Chase Center.
Only two days before they had been eliminated from the NBA playoff by the Minnesota Timberwolves so they were already on vacation, but Kerr and players like Buddy Hield, Jonathan Kumina or Kevon Looney went to the stadium not to compete on the track but as fans from the stands.
The occasion deserved it: the debut in the WNBA of the Golden State Valkyries, the franchise number 13 of a league in full ‘boom’ promoted, to a large extent, by the phenomenon of Caitlin Clark.
The Chase Center lived a very special night with 18,000 spectators, Kayla Thornton sealed the first basket in the history of the team and rapper E-40 starred in the show of the break.
The Black and Violet could not close the evening with a victory since they fell 67-84 against Los Angeles Sparks of a bright Kelsey Plum with 37 points, but this Wednesday they did get their first victory in the WNBA winning by 76-74 to the Washington Mystics.
In any case, these results are actually secondary to the illusion of having WNBA in a crucial market for basketball in the United States such as San Francisco Bay.
De Warriors a Valkyries
The Stephen Curry dynasty, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green with Kerr to the baton from the bench has not only achieved four rings with the Warriors, but has also turned this franchise into a gold mine.
For example, Forbes magazine placed Golden State last October as the team with the highest economic assessment in the NBA, with an estimate of 8.8 billion dollars.
Joe Lacob, the main owner of the Warriors, had already achieved practically everything in the NBA, but in San Francisco and Oakland there was an important hole in relation to the WNBA. The closest were the Sacramento Monarchs, which competed from 1997 to 2009.
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Until October 2023, this strange vacuum was not solved, when the WNBA officially announced that the Warriors would have a new female league franchise from 2025.
“The San Francisco Bay is the perfect market for a WNBA team and we are excited that this opportunity has finally come true,” said Lacob.
In 2024 it was announced that the Golden State Valkyries would be called and only two months ago exceeded 10,000 subscribers for the 2025 season, a figure that no other WNBA team had reached before in a campaign.
WNBA wants more
The Valkyries, under the orders of coach Natalie Nakase, are the first team that opens in the WNBA since in 2008 the Atlanta Dream debuted. But it will not be the last.
In 2026 the entrance to the league of two new sets is expected: the Toronto Tempo -Primer Canadian team in the history of the WNBA- and a franchise in Portland that has not yet announced its name.
In addition, the Sport Business Journal specialized portal said February that the WNBA number 16 points to Cleveland and that the number 17 has many ballots of being for Houston, although there are also other cities with options such as Philadelphia.
Cathy Engelbert, commissioner of the WNBA, is in charge of this golden era of the WNBA in terms of audiences, repercussion, talent on the track and also business, for example with the new television agreement that will give the league 200 million dollars a year for eleven seasons.
But Engelbert will also have to deal with an important topic on the table that has not yet been resolved: the new league agreement, for which the players demand forceful improvements that give them an important part of the cake.
With EFE information.
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