Hello, hoopheads! Saturday was the fifth out of the last eight WNBA gamedays to go the way of the home teams, as the hosts went 3-0 and improved to 26-36 (.419) this season. That includes a 19-15 (.559) record since starting 7-21 (.250), capped off by the Portland Fire’s thumping of the Indiana Fever last night. You can catch up on that game and Saturday’s other action here. The first calendar month of the season comes to a quiet end today in the sense that there’s just one game on the schedule, but it should be a good one. There should also be plenty of eyeballs on the game when the Las Vegas Aces (4-3) visit the Golden State Valkyries (5-2) (3:30 ET, NBC/Peacock), thanks to the spotlight afforded by a Sunday afternoon spot on a broadcast network.
This is the first meeting this season between the reigning champion Aces and last year’s expansion darlings from the Bay Area, but there’s plenty of familiarity between the teams. That starts, of course, with the coaches, as Golden State coach and the WNBA’s 2025 Coach of the Year Natalie Nakase spent the 2022 through 2024 seasons on three-time WNBA championship-winning coach Becky Hammon’s staff with the Aces, taking part in the first two Aces titles. Two key members of Nakase’s current Valkyries squad were also members of the Aces during her time in Sin City. Kiah Stokes, thrust into the starting center role with Iliana Rupert sidelined due to pregnancy, signed with the Valkyries this offseason following a four-plus season stint with the Aces (she signed in July 2021). Tiffany Hayes came out of a retirement that looks more and more like it may just have been a creative way out of Connecticut (I sure wouldn’t blame her!) to play with the Aces in 2024, then was the Valkyries’ first marquee free-agent signing last February.
Golden State memorably took the first Aces-Valkyries encounter by a 27-point margin last June at Ballhalla, but the Aces won all three subsequent meetings in 2025. Two of those wins came early last August and are notable, if not rising to the level of historic, because they were the first two of the Aces’ 16 straight wins to finish the regular season. The first of them was a 24-point Aces home win the day after they’d suffered a 53-point home loss to the Lynx which famously spurred A’ja Wison to send a text to the team’s group chat essentially saying “get your shit together or don’t show up to the gym tomorrow.” Las Vegas would then close out the season series against Golden State with a 78-72 win at Ballhalla three days later. Something that’s perhaps been a bit lost in the incredible story of the 2025 Aces is that the GOAT didn’t actually have one of her best games the day after the group text — in perhaps the most important win of them all, as it turned the page on the Lynx blowout. Wilson finished that game with 14 points on 6-for-17 from the field, although she did have 14 rebounds, 4 steals and a block, while Jewell Loyd scored 27 points and Jackie Young had 20. The second game, on the other hand, was vintage Wilson, as she scored 27 points on 8-for-11 from the field and 11-for-11 at the line to go with 7 rebounds, 3 assists, 2 steals and 2 blocks. No one else scored more than 14 points in that fairly low-scoring game.
Golden State comes in having won two in a row after dropping two of its previous three, and would tie the Minnesota Lynx for the best record in the WNBA with if it pushes its streak to three straight. The Valkyries improved to 3-1 at home with Thursday night’s 90-88 thriller against the Indiana Fever, avenging their most recent loss and improving to 5-0 this season when they score at a rate of at least 100 points per 100 possessions in the process (they’ve had an offensive rating of at least 108 in all five of those games). The Valkyries held Indiana to an offensive rating of 102.3 points per 100 possessions in that win, a mark which used to be pretty good but doesn’t seem like it’s gonna win all that many games in the WNBA’s “freedom of movement” era. Teams which had an offensive rating of at least 100 but no higher than 105 had a 236-195 (.548) record from 2021 through 2025, including the playoffs. It’s obviously a very small sample, but teams with a rating in that range have gone 9-12 (.429) so far this season. That also tracks pretty closely with the fact that teams are averaging 85.4 points per game, which would beat the previous WNBA record by more than two points per game (the record is 83.1 in the Wubble, or 82.8 in 2018 for non-Wubble seasons).
Considering all of that, Golden State maintaining its defensive rating of 97.5 points allowed per 100 possessions (3rd-best in the WNBA) would be quite a bit more impressive than the mark of 97.7 that the Valkyries put up last season, when they finished third in the category and established a reputation as one of the league’s toughest defensive teams. At the heart of everything for the Valkyries is coach-on-the-floor Veronica Valkyrie (Burton), who leads the team averaging 15.9 points and 5.9 assists per game to go with a steal and a block per game (thanks to five swats against the Fever on Thursday) while committing just 1.6 giveaways an outing. No one has ever finished a WNBA season averaging at least 15 points and 5 assists per game along with fewer than 2 turnovers (Paige Bueckers joins Burton on pace this season).
Las Vegas has lost two in a row after winning its previous four games, with the defense having let it down in all of the setbacks so far. The latest loss was by a 95-87 margin at Dallas in the first half of Thursday night’s Bezosvision doubleheader and saw the Aces fall to 0-3 when allowing opponents to score at a rate higher than — wait for it — 105 points per 100 possessions, granted they’ve given up offensive ratings of at least 116 in all three of those games. If you’re playing along at home, you’ve already put together that this means Las Vegas is 4-0 when it holds opponents to an offensive rating under 105 (and three of those were under 95). While there’s been quite a bit of variance in the defense, the champs have been fairly consistent at the offensive end of the floor since laying an egg in the opener against the Phoenix Mercury. They’ve had triple-digit offensive ratings in five of six games since then and four ratings of at least 110 points per 100 possessions in that span. Their last two losses, however, came despite ratings of 110.5 and 103.6, because, again, the defense let them down.
What most certainly hasn’t let the Aces down so far has been the play of Wilson and Chennedy Carter, who looks like perhaps the single best addition of the chaotic speedrun that was the offseason. The GOAT is the league’s second-leading scorer with 24.3 points per game so far while adding 7.1 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 2.0 blocks per game, the last of which is also second in the league. She’s also hitting 52.5% from the field including 9-for-14 from deep (64.3%), which is honestly kinda comical given all the other things she’s fucking incredible at. She’s scored at least 19 points in every game this season and 20+ in each of the last five. Carter is the league’s 8th-leading scorer with 19.1 points per game despite exclusively coming off the bench (and not being in the league last season). She’s coming off of a 14-point outing in the loss to Dallas which was either her seventh straight double-digit outing or snapped a five-game streak with at least 18 points depending on how you choose to look at it. At this point it’s not even worth telling you that Carter has the record for the most points by a player who hadn’t started a game at this point in a season, because she’s been blowing past those marks in her sleep. For instance, Carter already had the seven-game record through six games, and now has it by a 16-point margin. She doesn’t quite have the eight-game record yet, but needs only three points today to match Bria Hartley’s mark of 137 points in her first eight games off the bench in the Wubble and would be second on the list with a scoreless outing. Given her production so far, it’s probably more likely that Carter scores the 13 points she’d need to not only blow past the eight-game record, but also match the nine-game record, which belongs to Candice Wiggins with 147 points in 2008.