Golden State Valkyries announce full schedule, in-season tournament, playoff format changes
Get ready to cheer against Caitlin Clark
The Valkyries announced the following:
Home opener
The Golden State Valkyries have announced the team’s 2025 inaugural season schedule, featuring a home opener on May 16 against the Los Angeles Sparks at Chase Center.
Full season schedule
The 2025 Valkyries season, presented by Kaiser Permanente, features 44 total games, including 22 home games at Chase Center. Over the course of the season, the Valkyries will face each of their opponents either three or four times. At home, the Valkyries will host 14 weekend contests (four on Friday at 7:00 p.m., five on Saturday either at 12:00 p.m. or 5:30 p.m. and five on Sunday at 5:30 p.m.) and eight weekday home games (at 7:00 p.m.). The team will also enjoy two five-game homestands: the first from June 19 - June 29, and the second from August 30 to September 6.
The Valkyries will unveil the team’s complete broadcast schedule at a later date.
For the downloadable Valkyries 2025 season schedule, please CLICK HERE.
WNBA In-Season Tournament
During the 2025 season, Golden State will compete in their first-ever Commissioners Cup, presented by Coinbase. Every team will play one game against each of the other teams in its conference – a total of six games for Valkyries and the six other Western Conference teams. The Valkyries will play three games each at home and on the road. All intraconference Cup games will count toward a team’s regular-season win-loss record.
The team from each conference with the top record in Commissioner’s Cup games will compete for a $500,000 prize pool in the Commissioner’s Cup Championship presented by Coinbase. The title game will be played on Tuesday, July 1 at the arena of the team with the best winning percentage in Cup play unless that team has an arena conflict, in which case its opponent would host the game. The Commissioners Cup runs from June 1 through June 17, a span of which includes three Valkyries games at Chase Center, against Minnesota (June 1), Las Vegas (June 7), and Seattle (June 14).
WNBA playoff format changes
Starting with the 2025 WNBA season, the WNBA Playoffs format will undergo changes, which now features a best-of-seven series for the WNBA Finals presented by YouTube TV. Additionally, the First Round of the WNBA Playoffs, presented by Google, will adopt a 1-1-1 structure for the best-of-three series. In this new setup, the higher seed will host Games 1 and 3, while the lower seed will host Game 2. This marks a departure from the previous format, where the higher seed hosted Games 1 and 2, and the lower seed hosted Game 3.
Run_TMC wrote: [[ I have a question. So I read that next year there will be a big free agency event (something to do with the new Tv Deal/CBA?). So it would make sense for the Vs to keep some of their financial powder dry until that happens in case they can snag someone special on the FA market flood next year. Assuming they are considering that, how might that affect their choices this year (expansion draft, draft, and FA)?
The obvious answer is that they will probably not overpay anyone or select anyone they consider overpaid but, in my quest to understand the nuances better, are there any more subtle choices the looming FA event might affect? ]]
My understanding is that because the CBA will be re-negotiated after 2025, everyone is expecting salaries to go up, so almost every free agent is signing deals that expire at the end of 2025. So I assume GSV will be in the same position for their free agents (leaving only rookies and existing contracts as multi-year contracts).
I guess there could be some 3D chess where GSV avoids drafting multi-year contracts in order to keep max financial flexibility. On the other hand, these multi-year contracts have the potential to be really great deals when the cap goes up.
play-off format changes are a big improvement, especially the switch from 2-1 home vs away - that was nice for travel but too big an advantage and also meant in practice one team's fans often had no home game in the series.