The Valkyries Have a Champion’s Blueprint. Their Shooting Is Another Story.

The Golden State Valkyries are sitting at 17-7 with a seven-game winning streak, the best defense in the WNBA, and a net rating that would make any contender jealous. They’re in the conversation. That much is real.

But if you’ve watched them closely, you’ve also seen the other side. The scoring droughts that kill momentum. The losses to Minnesota and Las Vegas, the two teams ahead of them in the standings. And the fact that nobody on this roster has been through a real WNBA playoff grind.

So how seriously should we take them? One way to answer that is to look at how the Valkyries stack up against the last ten championship teams, not just in vibes but in the numbers that actually matter.

I pulled data on every WNBA champion from 2016 through 2025 — shot diets, efficiency stats, advanced metrics — and lined them up against Golden State’s numbers through July 14. The goal wasn’t to predict anything. It was to see where this team fits alongside teams that actually finished the job.

Here’s what the data says.

The Defense Is Legit

Golden State’s defensive rating sits at 100.4, best in the league. They’re giving up just 76.2 points per game, also a league low. That’s not a fluke. Nine of the last ten champions finished in the top six in defensive rating, and six of those teams were top three. The Valkyries check that box with room to spare.

They also have the second-best net rating in the WNBA at plus-7.0. Among the last ten champions, only two had a net rating outside the top two: the 2021 Chicago Sky and the 2025 Las Vegas Aces. Both of those teams got hot in the playoffs after coasting through the regular season. So there’s a precedent for winning it all without dominating the net rating leaderboard.

The Shot Diet of a Modern Champion

If you watch the Valkyries, you know they live and die by the three. Forty-five percent of their field goal attempts come from beyond the arc, and 38.7 percent of their points are from threes. Both numbers lead the WNBA. They’d also lead every championship team of the last ten years in both categories.

That’s not as weird as it sounds. The last four title winners all ranked in the top five in three-point attempt rate. The league has moved this way. Golden State is just the most extreme version of it.

The problem is that they’re not making enough of them. Or enough of anything, really.

The Efficiency Gap

The Valkyries rank 13th in true shooting percentage at 53.5 percent. Eight of the last ten champions finished top three in that category. The other two were no worse than seventh. Golden State is dead last in the league in raw field goal percentage. Only the 2021 Sky and 2025 Aces — both teams with perfectly mediocre regular seasons — ranked outside the top three in FG% among champions.

Offensive rating tells a similar story. The Valkyries sit eighth at 107.4. Nine of the last ten champions had a top-four offense. And they’re 12th in points per game at 82.0. Those aren’t death sentences by themselves, but they’re not championship numbers either.

What the 2024 Liberty Tell Us

The most statistically similar champion to this Valkyries team is last year’s New York Liberty. Both teams lived at the three-point line. Both had elite defenses and elite net ratings. Both avoided the midrange like it was a tax audit. But the Liberty shot 56.1 percent in true shooting, second-best in the league, and 44.8 percent from the field, third-best. They converted the looks that Golden State is currently leaving on the floor.

Some of that might be about shot quality. The Valkyries don’t have a player like Breanna Stewart or A’ja Wilson — someone whose gravity warps a defense and creates open looks for everyone else. They run their offense through committee, and sometimes that committee runs out of ideas.

Still, the structure is there. The Valkyries have the right process. They’re aggressive with threes, they defend like hell, and they cut out the low-value shots. The missing piece is the finishing. If that comes around — and there’s no reason it can’t with this group — they could be the weird team that nobody saw winning it all until they did.

Time will tell whether the shooting holds them back or they become the outlier that proves the blueprint works even without elite efficiency. Either way, they’re more watchable and more dangerous than anyone expected.