Golden State needs a win on Saturday to bring a tied series back to Chase Center, after two games in which turnovers and cold shooting let the Atlanta Dream take control.
By Danny Fonoti
The Golden State Valkyries play the most important game of their second season on Saturday morning, Pacific time, and they will play it more than 2,000 miles from home.
The Atlanta Dream lead the WNBA Finals two games to one after a 97-71 win in Atlanta on Wednesday. Game 4 tips off at 10 a.m. Pacific at State Farm Arena, on NBC and Peacock. A Valkyries win would send a tied series back to San Francisco for Game 5 on Monday night. A loss would leave them one defeat from elimination, needing three straight wins against a team that has outplayed them for two games.
How the series turned
Golden State took Game 1 at home, 68-64, behind Gabby Williams. Since then, the Dream have scored more in each game, 79 in Game 2 and 97 in Game 3.
The main problem has been the ball. The Valkyries turned it over 19 times in Game 2 and 17 times in Game 3, and Atlanta scored 24 and 22 points off those mistakes, ESPN noted in its Game 4 preview. Atlanta guard Rhyne Howard became the first player in league history to record five steals in consecutive Finals games.
The offense has not compensated. Golden State has averaged 68 points in the Finals and has not shot 35 percent from the field in any of the three games, according to ESPN. Ms. Williams, the hero of the opener, has shot 30 percent or worse in each game since. The Valkyries led the league in transition scoring efficiency during the regular season and relied heavily on isolation plays; in the Finals, they are averaging less than one point per isolation possession, ESPN reported.
Atlanta’s Angel Reese, meanwhile, is averaging 21.7 points on 56.4 percent shooting and 13.3 rebounds in the series. In Game 3, the Dream shot 49.3 percent from the field, the kind of night Golden State’s defense, the league’s best during the season, had not allowed in the first two games, when Atlanta shot 32.8 and 33.9 percent.
The history problem
No team in WNBA history has come back from a multiple-game deficit to win the Finals, including in the years when the championship was a best-of-five series, ESPN reported. This is only the second year of the best-of-seven format.
The Valkyries have tried to keep the moment in proportion. “It would be silly to overreact right now,” guard Veronica Burton told reporters on Thursday. She also said the team understood “that there is a major sense of urgency, and we can’t necessarily wait for anything to change.” Coach Natalie Nakase has said she would seek input from players on a more efficient and aggressive game plan.
Dream coach Karl Smesko framed the stakes from the other side. “You want to finish the job,” he said. “You want to finish it.”
Watching from home
For fans in San Francisco, the team is again opening Chase Center for an away game. “Valkyries Official Finals Watch Parties, presented by Kaiser Permanente, are being hosted inside Chase Center for all Finals away games,” Marina Bain, the team’s communications manager, wrote in response to questions from the Inquirer. “Tickets are $25 for everyone, with net proceeds directly benefiting the Golden State Community Foundation to support local education and youth development.”
“We will be hosting our next watch party tomorrow, Saturday, October 24,” she wrote. “Tip off is at 10am, and doors will open to fans at 9am.”
The national audience has been large. Game 1 averaged 2.1 million viewers on NBC and Peacock and peaked at 3.0 million near the finish, according to NBC Sports, which called it the most-watched WNBA Finals Game 1 on record.
What a title run is worth
Deep playoff runs are often promoted as an economic windfall for host cities. Economists who study the question are more cautious.
“Generally any economic benefits from playoff runs are small or non-existent based on numerous studies,” Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of the Holy Cross, wrote in an email to the Inquirer. “I have not seen a WNBA-specific study, however.” Much of what fans spend on tickets and watch parties, he argued, is money they would otherwise spend on other entertainment nearby. “So the playoffs affect where in the Bay Area the money gets spent, but not really how much in total gets spent.”
Mr. Matheson said the clearest new money comes from visitors who book hotel rooms. He estimated that each NBA or Major League Baseball playoff game generates “roughly 1000 additional room nights” and “about $500K in additional hotel revenue.” If the WNBA were as big as the NBA, he wrote, a series with at least seven home games might bring about $4 million in additional hotel revenue and a similar amount of other new spending, “certainly not the hundreds of millions” that he said had been claimed for NBA Finals games in San Antonio and New York.
For the franchise itself, though, the run matters a great deal. “This year the Valkyrie became the first women’s sports team to earn $100 million in revenue (through the regular season – a figure that probably will come in closer to $120M or $130M thanks to their postseason run.),” Mr. Matheson wrote. He noted that the entire league’s estimated revenue in 2019 was $102 million, and that the cost of an expansion franchise rose from $50 million for the Valkyries in 2023 to $250 million for the three new teams announced in 2025, in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia.
The Valkyries would like Monday’s game at Chase Center to matter. That requires a win in Atlanta first.
Danny Fonoti covers Bay Area and California sports: the teams, the players, and the business and politics of the games. More from Danny Fonoti
