With great expansion power comes great offensive responsibility

The Golden State Valkyries' offense isn't world-beating, but it is world-changing.

Here is the recap of the Golden State Valkyries (87) vs. Connecticut Sun (63) game:

Thank you, WNBA.com. The Valks blitzed the Sun with a 36-12 second quarter, running away with the game and cementing their place in a comfortable echelon well above the league’s bottom-feeders. You can read some recaps here (Marisa Ingemi, San Francisco Chronicle) and here (Eric Apricot, Valkyrie Nation).

Rather than show a lot of clips from the blowout, ranging from wide open shots to the Sun’s befuddlement at the Valkyries’ patented 2-3 zone , I wanted to circle back to some familiar (and unfamiliar) offensive charts and dig a little deeper into a point of offensive philosophy (see also this piece from Matthew Coller at HerHoopStats). I talk a lot about Golden State’s philosophical engagement with the three-ball; I don’t talk enough about the expansion Valkyries’ philosophical inevitably of increased responsibility.

Team shot selection

Let’s start with the basics. If you’ve been reading this Substack, this will be a familiar graph: where are teams getting their shots?

Teams like the Liberty, Valkyries, and Dream are famously perimeter-oriented, although New York and Atlanta—who rank second and first in offensive rating, respectively—are much better at getting the highest-value shots at the rim. Golden State ranks 11th in offense with 98.2 points per 100 possessions (the Dream, by contrast, are at 108.5).

The individual Valkyrie splits looks pretty sensible. Most players take a lot of threes. Temi Fágbénlé and Kayla Thornton get to the rim most. Janelle Salaün, when not at Eurobasket, takes more midrange shots than pretty much everyone else combined.

Speaking of Eurobasket, Golden State has seen a serious uptick in scoring reliance on the paint with Salaün and others gone (and, perhaps, with increased focus on the paint, natural regression to the mean, and admittance of their poor three-point shooting). Most notable was the paint dominance Sparks and Storm, the only times this season Golden State scored more than half their points in the paint:

Here’s how that looks across the league:

This isn’t so different from the team shot selection graph: you can see how much the Mystics and Sky lean into the paint, for example. These show game-to-game change, because the sample size is small enough that the change is pretty muted when approached cumulatively. We’ll check back on these at the end of the season.

Interestingly, it hasn’t been a universal uptick in three-point rate for the Valkyries. Key offensive pieces Kayla Thornton, Veronica Burton, and Tiffany Hayes are actually shooting threes at a lower rate than they did in 2024, although the bigs—Fágbénlé, Monique Billings, and Laeticia Amihere—and some role players have jumped a lot, as expected, to match the Valkyries’ increased desire for spacing.

(If they could actually hit those threes—see the second graph—it would be great, please and thank you!)

The responsibility of scoring

Where Golden State players have really had to change year over year is in responsibility, for which I’ll use (scoring) usage rate as a proxy. (“Scoring” usage rate, which everyone just calls usage rate, doesn’t take into account facilitation, but does represent what percentage of a team’s possession a player uses—shot, turnover, shooting foul-ish—while on the floor.)

The average Valkyrie veteran has seen their usage rise by nearly 3%, which is by far the most of any team’s change year over year; Connecticut is second at 2%, and only three teams have averaged an uptick in individual usage. Rookies have also been a key source of new usage. Carla Leite (21.7% usage) and Salaün (20.1%) are two of just six WNBA rookies to average more than 20% in 5 or more games at 10+ minutes per game. That’s newfound responsibility at a high level, and both rookies have flashed.

Why are key offensive pieces Thornton, Burton, and Hayes not shooting even more threes despite having the ball in their hands even more than last year?

The Valkyries have seen their qualified players (i.e. they’ve actually played a bit this year) shoot the three at a 4.1% rate increase, on average, from 2024. That’s right in the middle of the league, and nowhere near the top dog, Karl Smesko’s Atlanta Dream, whose average qualified player’s three rate has jumped 13.7%. (The Dream, for what it’s worth, had the worst offense in the league in 2024 at 96.6 points per 100 possessions, about 12 points worse than this season.)

Players who up their usage rate, by small correlation, have taken threes at a lower rate than previously as they try to expand their scoring repertoire. That increased responsibility, typified by Thornton, Hayes, and Burton, is part of why the Valkyries don’t quite have the highest three-point rate in the league. Golden State has also had to contend with teams obviously cluing on their early three-point shooting and adjusting their defense around it.

It’s instructive to look at the Dream and the Valkyries in conjunction because their full embrace of three-point shooting acts as a countermeasure to the general moderate drop-off in three-point rate as usage increases. The real outlier is Atlanta’s Naz Hillmon: she took 3 threes on 163 field goal attempts last year; this year, she’s at 31 3PA in 62 FGA!

Despite mostly upping their usage, the Valkyries—especially breakout star Kayla Thornton—have held fairly steady in their true shooting percentage (TS%). Conventional wisdom (see Dean Oliver’s opus Basketball on Paper) holds that after a certain increase in workload, a player’s efficiency will drop. The Valkyries have held that off so far. Getting to the free throw line, which they do at the fourth highest rate in the league, has helped.

(How much “skill curves” actually apply to the WNBA bears further discussion. It’s far from a perfect carryover, but we’ll save that for another time. For now, the Valkyries took many teams’ less desired players and have cobbled together a real offense out of it, and the team, and those players, should be commended.)

The Valkyries are 7-6 and stand to hit more three-pointers and get more talented players back from Eurobasket. High-level offense may just be a teardrop jumper away.