Golden State Valkyries general manager Ohemaa Nyanin has no plans to rent out a conference room for the WNBA expansion draft next week. There will be no need to cater dinner or fill carafes of coffee and tea. And you won’t find her waiting anxiously by the phone to take any last-minute calls.
When the time comes for Nyanin to officially submit her picks Dec. 6 — the official first step in building the Valkyries’ roster — she already will have made peace with those decisions.
Nyanin and her staff have put in countless hours creating mock drafts, exploring various scenarios and possibilities, all for next week’s expansion draft.
How many hours exactly? She won’t say.
“Just in case my therapist reads it,” Nyanin jokingly said to the The Post this week.
Nyanin finds herself in a unique situation. While most general managers inherit their predecessors’ teams, Nyanin, whom the Valkyries hired in May, gets to build her roster from scratch.
Not only does Nyanin hold the keys to the next phase of the WNBA offseason, but she also gets to pick what direction the one of the Valkyries go and whom they will build around.
The hype surrounding Golden State is real, too. Even before the WNBA’s 13th franchise has a team in place, the Valkyries are one of the hottest tickets in the league. Earlier this month, Golden State exceeded 20,000 season-ticket deposits.
It’s no secret Nyanin wants to get this right from the jump and give fans a team to rally around. That journey publicly starts next week.
No pressure, right?
“Being a pioneer in the very short team for the next kind of expansion drafts is exciting and daunting all at the same time,” Nyanin said. “One hundred percent, I want to do right by this organization.”
Warriors and Valkyries owner Joe Lacob’s lofty expectations for the Bay Area’s WNBA franchise have been well-documented. He wants Golden State to win a championship within its first five years.
When Lacob bought the Warriors in 2010, he set — and continues to maintain — a similar high bar of excellence with his NBA team, who went several years carrying the highest payroll in the league.
Lacob’s investment and passion paid off. The Warriors, led by Stephen Curry, have won four NBA championships and made six Finals appearances in an eight-year span. Second in the Western Conference standings, they are now in pursuit of their fifth title.
Nyanin welcomes Lacob’s passion and involvement.
“He wants to see us win,” Nyanin said. “He’s bringing his whole self to the conversation because it’s just in him. He’s like, ‘I just know that this can work out. Let’s work it out.’”
Warriors executive vice president of basketball operations Kirk Lacob helped with Nyanin’s onboarding process back in May. Since her arrival, he’s been inspired by her dedication to the day-to-day processes and believes the Valkyries future is bright with Nyanin at the helm.
“She’s definitely not afraid of the moment, her background has prepared her for this,” Lacob told The Post. “She really enjoys her conversations with [Joe Lacob] and enjoys the pressure because she feels like without pressure you can’t make diamonds.”
Success in Year 1 for the Valkyries is “undefined” at this moment, according to Nyanin.
Of course she wants to get off to a good start, but she also knows good things take time to grow and won’t always go to go according to plan.
Nyanin said her past five years working with the Liberty — first as a manager of basketball operations and most recently as an assistant general manager working alongside Liberty general manager Jonathan Kolb — have been “paramount” in sculpting her approach to creating a Valkyries team that fans can get behind.
“My whole life is consumed by this beginning part of the journey,” Nyanin said. “What’s giving me perspective is this is one area of how we’re building the team. Yes, it’s very public, [but] we have another opportunity during free agency, we have another opportunity during college draft and then any mid-season trades and that type of thing.
“So how I have allowed myself to just focus a lot of hours onto this is to be like, ‘Well, you have other opportunities in the future.’”
The WNBA, much like the NBA, is a league of stars. All three of the previous WNBA champions — the Liberty in 2024 and the Las Vegas Aces in 2023 and 2022 — boasted superteam rosters.
The Valkyries are unlikely to pick up any superstars in the expansion draft with each team allowed to protect six players, though the situation does give Nyanin some leverage to pick up future draft assets.
Golden State also likely won’t draft a franchise-altering player at No. 5 in the 2025 WNBA draft. That leaves free agency, the part of this whole roster equation that remains a pivotal piece in Nyanin’s roster construction.
“You can look at a challenge as an opportunity to innovate or you can look at a benefit as an impediment to growth,” Nyanin said. “I see it in both ways. Would I have liked a couple of rules to switch so that I could have a little bit more flexibility? Sure.
“… At the end of the day it’s a process that will be painstakingly slow, and I just hope people have enough patience to stay along on the ride for us.”
