It’s time to bring back WNBA Tuesday as the league’s regular season has begun in earnest, and we were there on Sunday night for the Golden State Valkyries’ home opener against the Phoenix Mercury. The team waived oddly popular guard Kate Martin before the start of the season, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt the squad at all (as we will explore below). Sometimes we may not know what the team’s front office is doing, but Head Coach Natalie Nakase knows what she is doing even if it doesn’t make math sense.

Currently, the Valkyries are just one of two teams in the WNBA to remain undefeated so far, the retooled Atlanta Dream being the other one. Golden State won its season opener on the road in Seattle on Friday and then beat the tired Mercury on Sunday night at Ballhalla in San Francisco (i.e. the Chase Center). The Valkyries have outscored their two opponents by an average of 13.5 points per game despite not really changing their crazy penchant for throwing up three-point attempts with a strange urgency. Go figure.

In the opener against the Storm, the team took half its shots beyond the arc, making a very solid 40.5 percent of those attempts. Against Phoenix, who had played the night before in Las Vegas and then had to travel, the Golden State players made 50 percent of their long-ball shots, while also taking the majority of their shots from inside the arc for once. Last season, the Valkyries shot just 32.5 percent from outside, to finish 11th in a 12-team league for that statistic. Clearly, the team has gotten better overnight.

Against the Mercury, it was encouraging to see Golden State take 32 shots in two-point range and “only” 22 attempts from three-point land. The team needed to get more efficient on offense while maintaining its defensive prowess from its inaugural season last year when it became the first-ever expansion team to make it to the postseason. One reason for this improvement was the choice to eject Martin from the team’s game plans: she played just 16.4 minutes per game last season, but she was a mediocre shot at best.

That’s ironic, as somehow fans labeled her “Money Martin” last year despite her 31.0-percent conversion rate from beyond the arc—and her overall 32.3-percent conversion rate, both of which were unacceptable. The fact she chucked up the fifth-most three attempts per game on the team despite playing the 13th-most minutes? Yeah, do the math. Fans may have liked Martin due to her minimal association with the 2024 champions and her more-famous college teammate, but she was a pretty bad shooter in reality.

Her overall game last season—she rated out 12th on the team with 0.6 Win Shares overall and 15th overall in WS per minutes played—really didn’t warrant a roster spot, and the team will be better off for it in 2026. We don’t mean this to sound like we’re ripping on Martin or the odd popularity she experienced in Ballhalla (also in part due to her jersey being on the few mass produced before the inaugural season last year), but the team’s coaching staff and front office are going to care less and less about popularity.

Which brings us to Kaitlyn Chen: she was a negative contributor to the team last year, after the firestorm of social-media backlash forced the front office to bring her back early in the season. But she was 17th on the team last year for sabermetric value (minus-0.1 WS), and she really isn’t that great of a player, despite flashes of fun here and there. For example, in the opener against Seattle, Chen played 16-plus minutes and scored 14 points, but on Sunday at home, she played nine minutes, scoring just two points there.

It’s not just about scoring, of course, but even if Chen has improved from last year, her main value to the team is associative popularity due to her college career at Connecticut and other demographic appeals to the Golden State fan base. It’s early in the season, but if she can’t play at a higher level overall—and a more consistent one—she will find herself in the same situation as Martin soon, fan popularity withstanding. Time will tell, although injuries to the Opening Night roster already are in play here.

Now in her 14th season, Tiffany Hayes was hurt in Seattle, as was fifth-year player Cecilia Zandalasini. Last year, these two were Top 10 players on the roster in terms of WS/40 sabermetric value, but without them in the healthy rotation now, the team will have to look elsewhere to fill valuable on-court minutes as the season progresses. This may give Chen a lifeline for awhile, although the team’s addition of Gabby Williams, last season’s steals queen, will look better and better as time goes on. So be it.

Either way, team stalwarts Veronica Burton and Janelle Salaün are leading the way, and despite the team letting Carla Leite go in the expansion draft—she already looks ten times better than last year, while now playing for the Portland Fire—the roster is playing well in the absence of so many names the front office has touted strongly: top picks of the last two drafts, Justė Jocytė and Flau’jae Johnson. We can’t pretend to understand how the WNBA roster management works, but still, why isn’t this duo playing?!

The team spent high draft picks on them, and expansion teams need to nail those picks. Only time will tell if it all works out here. Makes you wonder why Chen is still on the team when the Golden State front office seemingly wasted those premium draft picks.