A few years back, most NBA owners saw their WNBA teams as a drain, and some were looking for the exit. Joe Lacob, who owns the Golden State Warriors, went the other way. In 2023 he paid $50 million for the league’s first new team in more than a decade. This week his Golden State Valkyries are playing for a championship.
The Journal’s Rachel Bachman tells how he did it. Lacob opened his wallet where others had closed theirs. He hired three women who’d never held a top sports job and handed them the keys. Team president Jess Smith had built Angel City FC, a women’s soccer club, into a money machine. She refused to sell the Valkyries as a side dish for Warriors fans. She picked violet so the team wouldn’t wear the Warriors’ blue and gold. Today only 8% of Valkyries season-ticket holders also hold Warriors seats. “It’s not magic,” Smith said. “It’s investment.”
Built from the scrap heap
General manager Ohemaa Nyanin built the roster from players other teams had passed over. Coach Natalie Nakase came from the assistant’s chair in Las Vegas, where she’d helped win two titles. She stands 5-foot-2. In 2025, their first season, the Valkyries became the first WNBA expansion team ever to make the playoffs. Forward Gabby Williams, a late bloomer, scored a career-high 14.4 points a game this year. Every home game in two seasons has sold out.
Now the math. The Valkyries have generated $100 million so far this year. That’s more than the Indiana Fever, with Caitlin Clark on the roster. And the WNBA’s next wave of expansion teams is going for $250 million, five times Lacob’s price. Investors keep calling. Lacob wrote that he has “NO interest” in selling. He’s having too much fun.
Our read
This is an Investments/Risk · IN04 story dressed in violet. Lacob bought an asset the smart money had written off. Cheap and unloved is where the big returns live, when they live at all. But look at what came with the cheap price. A plan to build a new fan base. Real spending on people. And patient money. He never had to sell, so he never had to sell low. Most of us can't write a $50 million check we could afford to lose. The rule still scales down. The unloved bet only works if you can hold it through the ugly years and fund the plan while you wait.
The concrete thing in your plan is the fun-money sleeve, the slice you use for bets like this one. This week, find the one position you bought because it was cheap and hated. Write down what has to go right, and by when. If you can't write that sentence, you're holding a hope instead of a plan. Then size the sleeve so two bad seasons wouldn't move your retirement date. We'd rather check the roof while the sun is out. That's what a review is.