“Year five to win that championship”: Valkyries owner Joe Lacob talks

with Tim Kawakami

Tim Kawakami had a nice little interview with Joe Lacob the night of Dec 15 2024. The whole thing is interesting, as TK grills Lacob on the Schröder trade, re-signing Kuminga, maximizing Steph, and more.

Most relevant for this site are Lacob’s comments as the owner of the Golden State Valkyries, which I have transcribed below.

First, here is a link to the full podcast:

Here’s the transcript of the GSV part:

Let’s talk about the Valkyries. Obviously, they had the expansion draft. There are players now, although I don’t know how many of them are going to actually be playing. Do you expect something interesting to happen? I know you. You want big names. You want the best possible.

Well, we can only do what the system allows us to do. So the teams get to protect six players. We take the best that are out there. We think we’ve got some really good ones. We’re pretty excited. We think there are four or five people that are legitimate starters that we could have on our team that we drafted. 

But we have free agency coming. Hopefully, we’ll nab a few there. 

And then the college draft—we’ll get a pretty high first-round pick. Maybe not as high as I would like, but a high first-round pick. And then, of course, next year there’s going to be a lot of free agents as well.

I don’t expect Rome to be built in a day here. I think we’ll try to be competitive. We’ve got a great young woman who’s our coach, who I really, really like a lot. The philosophy meets what we want to—objectives that we would like to do to build the team around. And we’ll try to be the best we can for the first year, provide a great experience for our fans, and then over the next few years build the team up and hopefully get to be very competitive.

People keep mentioning—they’re waiting to see—they know the way you do business. You’re going to want a star or two. When will you be able to get a star? 

I mean, free agency is probably our best shot to do that. We’ll give it the best shot we can this year. Certainly, next year we’ll be even more available.

Because of the CBA.

Yeah, and then the CBA is gonna change. So I think, you know, I would expect that over the next couple of years, we’ll start to get some really good players in here. And, you know, give us till year five to win that championship.

You said Rome wasn’t built in a year. It’s five years? 

I’ve set a goal for five years to get to be an elite team. I think that’s fair when you’re starting from scratch. But, having said that, I’d like to be competitive early on, and so we’ll try to do that. A lot of that is culture and coaching, and we’ll make the best with what we do have.