With their win over the Dallas Wings last night, the Golden State Valkyries clinched a spot in the WNBA playoffs, becoming the first expansion team to ever do so. Excitement has been at a fever pitch all year for the Valkyries, who despite being new on the scene led the league in attendance and sold out every home game.
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There’s no rowdier environment in the WNBA than the Chase Center, or Ballhalla, as Valkyries fans have taken to calling it. That’s why it’s so disappointing that Game 2 of Golden State’s first-round playoff series has been moved due to a scheduling conflict with tennis’ Laver Cup. Worse yet, that’s the only game the Valkyries will have a chance to host in the first round, which is a best-of-three.
Fans are upset, and rightly so, and they’ve directed their ire towards Valkyries owner Joe Lacob, who also owns the Golden State Warriors of the NBA. Surely few people expected the Valkyries to make the playoffs in their first year of existence, but being bumped for a tennis event isn’t a good look for a league and a team that has been so popular.
Draymond Green took to Threads to stick up for his boss, replying to an upset fan by saying, “Joe probably did everything he could to cancel that event at Chase. And is probably losing it on anyone who had something to do with that scheduling.”
Now that the game has officially been moved to the SAP Center in San Jose, it seems like any chance of moving the Laver Cup is gone. How did this happen in the first place, though? Let’s look at the timeline of events.
Cities interested in hosting the Laver Cup had to submit their bids before June 6, 2021, well before the Valkyries were even a twinkle in the WNBA’s eye. The league announced that Golden State would be awarded a team on October 5, 2023 and would play its first season in 2025, becoming the first WNBA expansion team since the Atlanta Dream debuted in 2008.
The Laver Cup announced that San Francisco would be hosting its 2025 event on March 7, 2024. That’s long before the WNBA schedule was announced on December 2, meaning if this is anyone’s fault, it has to be the WNBA’s. Joe Lacob had no control over the schedule, and the Laver Cup was already on the calendar well before this year’s slate was announced.
Other teams make accommodations for scheduling conflicts all the time. The San Antonio Spurs, for instance, take an extended road trip every February to make way for an annual rodeo that’s held at the AT&T Center. The NBA doesn’t schedule home games for them during that time, they build the schedule so that the Spurs are out of town when they need to be. This has been happening for over 20 years.
The WNBA will certainly learn from its mistake going forward, but that will do little to calm Valkyries fans who are upset over this. Making the playoffs as an expansion team is an incredible feat, and we haven’t seen anything like this since the NHL’s Las Vegas Golden Knights got all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals in their first season.
As of today, the Valkyries would be the sixth seed in the WNBA playoffs, where they’d meet the third-seeded Atlanta Dream. A lot can change in the season’s final three games though, as the Dream are tied with the Phoenix Mercury and the Valkyries are just a game back of the defending champion New York Liberty.
