The Golden State Valkyries are WNBA champions.
They achieve such a feat in just their second season, behind an all-time defense and an ensemble cast of two-way players. They took down the Atlanta Dream, who were unbeatable for weeks and weeks until the Valkyries found a way to beat them four times in seven games.
How did they do it? How did they slow down the Atlanta buzzsaw and keep Angel Reese from ascending to the top of the mountain?
They did so by beating the Dream at their own game.
The Dream had a winning formula
The Atlanta Dream were a very good regular season team. They transformed into a great postseason team, sweeping the Washington Mystics and New York Liberty en route to the WNBA Finals. But as they did so, they were not dominant on either end of the court.
Good, not incredible. They didn't shoot better than everyone else, but they did outscore most of their opponents. How did they do so? Extra possessions.
On defense, the Dream were built to steal the ball. Generate a turnover, and the other team doesn't get to take a shot. Do that enough, and you win merely by having that many more shots than the other team -- before you even get into how valuable transition opportunities can be after a steal.
Once Atlanta had the ball, they took care of it, limiting their turnovers to ensure they got a shot off. More than that, they crashed the offensive glass to keep the possession alive and give themselves another shot at a basket. Angel Reese is a monster rebounder simply by herself, but her gravity around the basket opened up rebounding space for her teammates.
Add all of that together, and the Dream averaged significantly more shots than their opponent all time. Per automaticnba, during the regular season, the Dream had 8.5 more true shot attempts than their opponents, on average. During the first two rounds of the playoffs that number surged to +10.8.
That changed during the Finals.
The Valkyries took away the Dream's greatest strength
Like Superman and Kryptonite, when you can identify someone's greatest strength and entirely take it away, suddenly you have the upper hand. And the Valkyries did exactly that to the Dream.
Atlanta went from averaging significantly more true shots than their opponents to averaging less than the Vlakyries during the Finals, a mind-boggling statistic given how good they are at all of the little things that generate extra possessions and thus extra shot attempts.
For the series, the Dream had 1.4 fewer true shot attempts than the Valkyries. Golden State gang rebounded to keep Reese from destroying them (she occasionally did anyway), took care of the basketball, and kept pressure on the Atlanta ball-handlers to generate turnovers of their own.
There are many reasons why the Valkyries won the championship. They are a world-class organization and have set the standard for how modern teams can operate to set their teams up for success.
And one way they win is through coaching, and scouting, and execution. One piece of that coaching plan was to take the Dream's biggest strength and neutralize it. Angel Reese was bottled up in Game 7, and no other Atlanta player was able to step up. The Valkyries accomplished their goal, and now they are WNBA championships.
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