Valkyries GM Nyanin relishing WNBA Finals run with her handpicked roster

SAN FRANCISCO — Valkyries general manager Ohemaa Nyanin smiled Thursday as she reflected on the experience of this season and her career more broadly. Her team was about to play in the WNBA Finals against the Atlanta Dream in their second year as a franchise and her second year as general manager.

Six months earlier, the same Zoom setting with reporters felt far different. Nyanin had just traded the Valkyries’ first-round draft pick, LSU star Flau’jae Johnson , and had few answers for the public as to why.

Beyond that whirlwind night, she has done some big things right.

“A lot of people would like to say, just because you’re a first-time GM, you’re going to make errors,” Nyanin said. “Or they start negative, and what we’ve been able to accomplish in this organization in a very short amount of time is, yes, those things happen, and what can we do together to shine?”

In the days following the bizarre WNBA draft day trade where the Valkyries sent the rights to Johnson to Seattle for a 2028 selection and second-round pick Marta Suarez – who didn’t make the team out of training camp – there was a lot of confusion about what kind of team the Valkyries were going to be.

Nyanin, who joined the Valkyries in 2024 after working as the assistant general manager for the New York Liberty, made key free-agent signings in the offseason to bring in Gabby Williams and Kiah Stokes , two essential pieces to the Finals squad.

But it’s been the smaller moves that have made the Valkyries who they are. Kaila Charles, who was cut by Dallas midseason last year, or Kaitlyn Chen, a third-round pick who was a bit of a surprise to stay on the roster after being cut and re-signed early last season.

“The athletes did just as much work as myself and the staff have in turn, in trying to get to know one another on a deeper level and not trying to be surface (level),” Nyanin said. She also lauded “the unexpectedness of the amount of time that they put in with each other, both on and off the court.”

Late this season she brought in center Aminata Gueye, who played in just one regular-season game before suddenly averaging nearly 11 minutes per game in the playoffs. Long before that, she identified Janelle Salaun as a must-sign player out of Europe and she convinced Tiffany Hayes to be the franchise’s first free agent signing.

“A lot of us bounced around, and that’s what makes it special,” said Valkyries forward Kayla Thornton, who won a championship with Nyanin in New York in 2024. “A lot of us have been denied. … When you bring this group together, we create something big. We do it for each other because we know what we’ve been through.”

For all the talk about not having a “star,” Nyanin still put together a team that has reached the Finals quicker than any team in WNBA history.

“I haven’t really reflected on the unexpected because we’ve been so intentional about how we put this team together,” Nyanin said. “What I would say is maybe the timing around how quickly they came together as a team. The foundation of signing our core players back, and then the openness to having different athletes on the team. I think that you just never know if it’s going to work out right.”

The Valkyries had a lot of question marks early in the season, between the Johnson saga, 2025 first-round pick Juste Jocyte having little playing time and, at times, an offense that has struggled to get going.

But somehow it’s worked well enough to get them somewhere no team in its second season has been before, and it’s been Nyanin’s vision that brought the Valkyries this far.

“Everybody,” Nyanin said, “was legitimately handpicked to be here.”