Valkyries weekend recap: two Dubs in the house

Steph Curry joined Podz in appearing at Ballhalla! More importantly, the defense also showed up.

I invite everyone to marvel at the WNBA standings page, where the Golden State Valkyries are 9-7, the sixth-ranked team in the league by record. Their defensive rating is 96.8 (points allowed per 100 possessions), second in the league. Their net rating (offensive rating minus defensive rating) is 2.7, seventh in the league but also 14 points higher than the 2008 Atlanta Dream, the league’s most recent expansion team.

Speaking of expansion… more of that is coming to the league in 2028, 2029, and 2030, with teams coming (in some cases, back) to Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. (Less great, for Valkyries fans, is that it means a lot of expansion drafts on the other side of the table.) The Commissioner’s Cup Final, between Indiana and Minnesota, is happening this week. It’s a good week to be a WNBA fan.

Every week is a good week to be a WNBA fan.

Weekend recap: Valks making the right plays

Basketball is a very complicated game. Succeeding in such a complicated game is really just about making the right play. Sometimes the right play isn’t even the best play: it might just be a good play, or occasionally a better play (good < better < best). Good teams make the right play more often than they permit the opponent to do so. Great teams make the better play more often than they make the good play.

Let’s look at an example. In the post-game press conference after the 84-57 domination of the Storm, Coach Nakase praised Tiffany Hayes to the reporters, saying “she’ll always make the right play, no matter what the situation is. So, they go under, she’s going to shoot it. If they go over, she’s going to go downhill. If the low man pulls over, she makes the right read.”

Here’s Skylar Diggins going under (the screen)…

… so Hayes pulls the shot with space and drains it.

Here’s Gabby Williams going over…

… so Hayes drives, gets the backend defender to commit to her, and dishes to Monique Billings for an easy basket.

Here’s the low man helping over (this isn’t really traditional low help: in this case, Dominique Malonga is trying to switch Diggins out of a mismatch against the roller, but we know Diggins doesn’t like to switch)…

… so Hayes finds the open shooter off the help for three. I’m also going to add this clip, because it’s fun.

That’s just Tip.

It wasn’t just Hayes making the right play. Kate Martin had a big weekend: after scoring 21 against the Liberty, she scored 11 in the back-to-back wins. She’s never hesitant to shoot the ball, so when defenders go under screens against her, the right play comes naturally:

Here’s a direct example of making the right play more than the opponent. A mismatch pass is pretty self-explanatory: a pass made to someone with a mismatch. Golden State, over the weekend, didn’t always make the mismatch pass, but they made it more often than they permitted the Sky or Storm to.

In the first clip, the Sky run a nice double-drag that forces Golden State to switch the second screener’s defender, Laeticia Amihere, onto the ballhandler. That leaves Hayes guarding Michaela Onyenwere in the post, and Onyenwere wants the ball. But Hayes fronts the entry pass for just a second, so Rachel Banham looks away and doesn’t feed the post, and the Sky settle for an Angel Reese midrange (a win for the Valks). On the other side, Hayes snakes the pick-and-roll (there’s someone trying to go over again!) and forces Reese to switch onto her. That leaves the 6’4 Billings, the screener, to be defended by the 5’10 Ariel Atkins. Billings seals, Atkins tries to front, and Hayes lobs in a beautiful entry pass that earns a foul on Atkins. That’s the right play.

The Valkyries also generally made the right play on defense, where the right play is often about taking away the opponent’s better play.

Stephanie Talbot, always solid, doesn’t overplay either of these: she doesn’t try to beat Onyenwere to the ball, staying under the DHO instead of chancing a steal but risking a breakdown and easy layup. That enables Talbot to wall up the drive and force a contested, fallaway midrange shot: the exact low-value look the Golden State defense wants to give up. Then, against Seattle, she doesn’t bite (yes, she steps, but as a help measure without overcommitting) on a potential fake DHO by Nneka Ogwumike, instead staying in position to—stop me if you’ve heard this before—wall up and force a contested, fallaway midrange shot: the exact low-value look the Golden State defense wants to give up. All the bodies in the paint. (Steph also made me look against against the Storm, so, thanks!)

The defense wasn’t always perfect:

You can see the blitz of the empty side pick-and-roll put the defense into rotation. Billings just runs back to the paint, however, instead of finding her new, rotated matchup, which gives up a three. (I just added the second clip for comparison—look at Veronica Burton, such a high IQ defender, read the same problem and start to jump out to the open shooter. Reese settles again for a middie.)

There’s still room to make some better plays, to take one tiny example:

We’ve seen Thornton make these double-clutch layups, so it’s not a bad play, especially with the dwindling shot clock. But what’s a better play here? The low helper (Reese) rotates over, and Onyenwere rotates down from the wing to help the helper. But no one covers the cutting Amihere, to whom an extra pass would almost certainly net two points.

Then again, making the right play only gets you so far if you can’t convert it. Here, KT and Mo make the really smart move to improve the offense’s spacing, but ultimately Thornton has to resort to a tough step-back.

Mark Jackson’s “that’s just better offense” rings in my ears.

Golden State did flash some moments of making not just the right or better play, but the best play.

Chicago runs horns flare, a play very familiar to the Valkyries. Billings could just tag the flare, enabling Chen to recover to the flare while holding the slip, but she instead makes the great read and creates a live-ball turnover that she turns seamlessly into a bucket. That’s the best possible play, and it sparked the decisive scoring run in the Valks’ win.

Speaking of Chen…

The simple, good play here is to make the extra pass to the corner to keep Chicago’s rotation behind the ball. But Chen makes a great play, faking the corner touch and driving into the wide-open space her fake created. She could have dumped it off to Amihere for an easy bucket, but she instead takes it all the way for an and-one, which is the optimal outcome. Her decisiveness and aggressiveness offensively was a big reason she played 25 and 23 minutes in the weekend wins.

Three-point shooting is back

After a quick dip in three-point bombing, the Valks are back:

Golden State is back in first place in three-point rate, with 44.5% of their field goal attempts coming from beyond the arc. They’re making just 28.7% of them, worst in the league, so it was nice to see 11/30 (36.7%) fall against Chicago, and even the 8/27 (29.6%) against Seattle felt like more.

Well wishes to Kayla Thornton, who left early against Seattle but, according to Nakase (and, by proxy, Marisa Ingemi) will be fine. That’s good, because Thornton has been the Valkyries’ most potent offensive weapon—and for more on that, check back on this space tomorrow!