SAN FRANCISCO -- Three years ago, during a press conference to officially introduce the Golden State Valkyries as the WNBA's first expansion franchise since 2008, Joe Lacob took the microphone and gave the rest of the league a warning. "First press conference with the Warriors, I said we will win a championship in the first five years," said Lacob, who has owned the NBA's Golden State Warriors since 2010 and paid a then-record-setting $50 million expansion fee for the Valkyries in 2023. "I'm telling you right now, we will win a WNBA championship in the first five years of this franchise." At that point, the Valkyries were little more than an idea.
They were seven months away from hiring Ohemaa Nyanin as their general manager, a year away from hiring Natalie Nakase as their coach and 14 months away from having any players on their roster. Lacob's success in turning the Warriors into one of the premier franchises in all of sports made it hard to completely write off his proclamation. The Warriors had won 29 and 26 games, respectively, in the two seasons before he bought the team.
Five years later, they won their first championship since 1975, and have since added four more titles in the Steph Curry era. Still, few outside of the Bay Area thought the Valkyries, who will host Game 1 of the WNBA Finals against the Atlanta Dream on Saturday, would actually follow suit. And even the most strident believers, including Lacob himself, never imagined they could do so as soon as their second season.
"It's just a perfect confluence of events and people and experience and timing. It's just a lot of things that have all come together at the right time," Lacob said this week. "I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I am shocked by this, I'm not.
I think all the ingredients were there and I made that prediction knowingly and understood what I was saying. Now to do it in two years, no one could sit here and tell you that would be something they would predict. No one, not even me." Put this in your bookmarks. @wnbagoldenstate owner Joseph Lacob vows that once play begins, they will win a championship in the first 5 years of their existence 🙌 pic.twitter.com/Xxa5limkMz Lacob's boldness may have set him and the franchise up for possible ridicule down the line, but it also established high standards and a competitive culture.
During Nakase's introductory press conference after her 2024 hiring, she recounted her first conversation with Lacob. "Like the first 10-15 minutes, he's just telling me, 'I'm about achieving goals,'" Nakase said. "And he's like, 'What I do is I set my goal really, really, really high, and then I create a plan and then I work obsessively toward that plan, over and over again until I get that goal.'" Nakase was so fired up by Lacob's passion and enthusiasm that she pounded her fist on a restaurant table and told him, "Hell yeah, we're gonna win a championship." "I just like the challenge that he wants to be No. 1," Nakase added back in 2024.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
