The Golden State Valkyries just won five straight games, and frankly, some of them have looked terrible. That’s the point.
Tuesday night’s 62-49 win over the Washington Mystics was a slog. The Valkyries scored a season-low 11 points in the first quarter. They shot 35 percent from the field. They went 6-for-34 from three. Their All-Star, Gabby Williams, finished 1-of-6. The entire starting five combined for 23 points on 9-of-35 shooting. It was not a masterpiece.
And they won by 13.
“For tonight, we found a way,” head coach Natalie Nakase said afterward. “Sometimes it’s going to be ugly, and what I was really proud of, I told them this in the locker room, is that we stayed positive through the adversity.”
Defense never has an off night
Golden State’s identity is defense, and when everything else breaks down, that’s what holds. The Valkyries held Washington to 30 percent shooting and 3-of-24 from deep. The 49 points were the fewest any team has scored in the WNBA this season. The Mystics had nowhere to go.
“Our defense is something that’s all effort and sort of a mental thing,” backup point guard Kaitlyn Chen said. “It’s something that you can control, and we take pride in our defense. So it’s something that we put all our focus on in every game. And if we can’t score, they can’t score.”
Chen backed that up with a team-high 14 points off the bench. The second unit put up 39 points total. Tiffany Hayes added nine with a +18 plus/minus. Kaila Charles chipped in eight points and five boards and led the team at +19. That group swung the whole game.
“They’re all potential starters, they all know that you know they could start,” Nakase said. “Tonight, I thought they were the more connected unit, and you could feel that. You could hear it. They were speaking so loud, and we talked about taking another step with listening and receiving. Credit to our second unit, they played with a little bit more fire and passion.”
Control the controllables
The Valkyries are 15-7 and sitting alone in third place. Their defensive rating is second-best in the league at 100.9. Over this five-game run, opponents are averaging just 68 points a night. The league average is 86.2. That gap is not an accident.
For this team, the phrase is “control the controllables.” It’s not just talk. It’s how you win a game you had no business winning on paper.
“We are emphasizing the things that we can control,” Charles said. “Defense, energy, effort, and we just want to get better every single game. So today wasn’t pretty, but it was a good way to learn. We’d rather learn from a win than a loss.”
The Valkyries might not shoot straight every night. But they’ve built something that doesn’t depend on it. And that’s how you stack wins in a league where everybody can score.
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