Valkyrie front office exit interviews: Nakase, Nyanin and Smith; Can the European strategy be stolen by other teams?

Eloquent, uncertain and often vague

The front office interviews are an enjoyable listen. Coach Natalie Nakase, GM Ohemaa Nyanin, and President Jess Smith are all eloquent and passionate, even when they are dodging questions.

• Ohemaa and the gang was in a difficult situation in that almost all of the questions that people would have would be about team building, but the WNBA hasn’t given any details about how the expansion draft will work, and nobody knows what the next collective bargaining agreement is going to look like. So that just leaves philosophy.

• Even given that, Ohemaa definitely stayed on the vague side in discussing what would happen with Juste Jocyte and even replacing Vanja Cernivec, the recent VP of Basketball Operations, who was hired by the Portland Fire to recreate the Valkyrie expansion magic.

• I thought the most interesting answer was to a question from Kelsi Thorud, who anticipated my question about how the Valkyries would keep their edge in European scouting after the loss of Vanja. It is pretty clear that GSV leaned hard into an under-appreciated set of European players, influenced heavily by Vanja’s extensive background in Eurobasket.

Q. I‘m curious. I know you said earlier that you would never share kind of the secret sauce strategy, which of course is understandable. But I think one big storyline this season, especially for the Valkyries, was international players, bringing in international players. We haven’t seen that as much on other teams. And I’m just curious if you’re worried now that maybe some of the players overseas that you were looking at at maybe bringing in in years to come that they might become more attractive to other teams seeing the success that you guys had now and kind of how you feel about that mark that you’ve made on the league in looking elsewhere outside the US.

Ohemaa: Yeah, I don’t think that I’m worried… We did what was needed to be done in year one based off of what was given to us, right? And the athletes that we got from the international arena were the exact athletes that we needed in year one and so I don’t think that what we created internally can be replicated, if that makes sense….

I honestly am not 100% sure what Ohemaa means but it’s very interesting to think about. The direct meaning is that it was a strategy out of necessity for the first year only and that they were drafting for other features and it’s not all intentional that there were so many international players.

But one can also argue it’s a strategy that only an expansion team could pull off, and that it will be hard for future expansion teams to do it.

The expansion draft was

US Players

• Monique Billings, UCLA/USA

• Veronica Burton, Northwestern/USA

• Kate Martin, Iowa/USA

• Kayla Thornton, Texas-El Paso/USA

Non-US

• María Conde, Spain, 0 yrs WNBA experience

• Temi Fagbenle, United Kingdom, 4

• Carla Leite, France, 0

• Iliana Rupert, France, 3

• Stephanie Talbot, Australia, 6

• Julie Vanloo, Belgium, 1

• Cecilia Zandalasini, Italy, 3

Then GSV added in free agency and the draft:

• Janelle Salaun, France, 0 yrs WNBA experience

• Laeticia Amihere, Canada, 0 years 2 yrs technically but 147 and 83 total minutes

• Kyara Linskens, Belgium, 0

• Migna Touré, France, 0

• Chloe Bibby, Australia, 0
  

• Juste Jocyte, Lithuania, 0

In short, GSV took non-US players that a Year 1 expansion team could afford to wait for, but contending teams can’t.

• 5 of them had <= 3 years, which (good) put them under team control for free agency but (maybe bad) this means they were young but not clearly promising enough to be protected;

• It was not clear whether draftees Juste Jocyte, Maria Conde or Carla Leite would even come play in the WNBA.

  • Juste wanted to prep for Eurobasket. Carla and Maria had already previously turned down a chance to play in the WNBA.

  • Carla did come of course, and we’ll never know what Maria would have done as she had a season-ending injury.

• All of the Europeans left for a month in the middle of the season to play Eurobasket, except Carla Leite. (And as you may recall, they were all top players in the tournament… good scouting.)

  • This affected GSV way more than other WNBA teams. 9 players went to Eurobasket: 4 GSV, 2 DAL, 1 NYL, 1 LAS, 1 MIN.

• Most of them had not much WNBA track record, so it was going to be a crapshoot to see who could translate to the W. Only an expansion team with a wide open roster could afford to run through 11 foreign players in preseason/season and end up waiving 6 players.

  • As it turned out, the internationals that made the biggest splash were Carla, Janelle, Iliana and Cecilia, who had no or very little WNBA experience. But they did have European club / national team experience, which was underrated in the W.

So that’s a good argument why the GSV strategy can’t be reproduced by non-expansion teams. Now, could Portland or Toronto do the same?

Maybe, but those players would…

• have to be left available in the expansion draft

  • This is a bit less likely now that GSV has put a spotlight on Euro players.

• or have to be gettable in free agency

  • in open competition with every other team unless they have a secret prospect

  • and particularly in competition with GSV which has experience and reputation supporting their French players, as well as the existence of a critical mass of them to welcome new French speaking players.

  • Yes yes, GSV has a little anti-reputation with Belgium due to waiving Linskens and, dramatically, Vanloo.

So, no matter how much secret sauce Vanja C steals away to the Portland Fire, there are still some advantages left for the first-mover Valkyries. It will be a very interesting expansion draft to watch…