The second half of the regular season starts today on WNBA Tuesday, as we look to predict what the Golden State Valkyries’ final win-loss mark will be at the end of the campaign in September. Right now, the team sits in second place overall with a 19-8 record, one half game better than the defending league champions, the Las Vegas Aces. Sometimes we think the team does it with smoke and mirrors, and other times we may be convinced it is voodoo. Honestly, we just don’t know much beyond what the data suggests.

This much we know is true: the Valkyries appear to be headed to the postseason for the second year in a row, as the league standings themselves show a clear demarcation line between the top eight teams and the next seven franchises. Golden State has an eight-game cushion over the ninth-place team right now, with 17 matchups left on the schedule, so the math there is pretty good. It would take a monumental collapse for the Valkyries to miss the playoffs in 2026. Stranger things have happened, but …

They don’t seem to happen to this team, which has a longest losing streak of just four games in its brief existence. And even that slide came in the first seven contests of the franchise’s existence. Don’t bet on Golden State taking that kind of dive in the second half of this season; it’s just not likely, particularly with an L2 being the worst the Valkyries have experienced this year. Using sabermetric math to predict future performance generally comes down to one thing, as well: scoring margins, so let’s start there.

With a plus-5.5 advantage so far, on a per game basis, Golden State ranks third in the league there, behind first-place Minnesota and fifth-place Indiana. Using the data for each team, this is how we see the final 17 games going for the Valkyries, factoring in home-court advantages based on established analytics:

  • Wins (14): @ Phoenix, Toronto (2), @ Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, @ Chicago, @ Connecticut, @ New York, @ Portland, Portland, Seattle, @ Portland, @ Los Angeles
  • Losses (3): @ Dallas, Minnesota, @ Minnesota

This initial projections puts the Golden State franchise at 33-11 by the end of the regular season. Not everything will go as planned, of course, but the math does tend to even itself out over the long haul. We’ve given the edges to the Lynx for the matchup in Ballhalla on August 19 and to the Valkyries against the Liberty on the road on August 27 based on home court, but both those games generally are mathematical coin flips. The game in New York is a probable loss, however, based on common sense, really.

It’s the second of back-to-back road games for Golden State—and it’s the fourth game of a five-game road trip. So, we will adjust our quantitative calculations above with some qualitative input. Even with a 32-12 mark, though, at the end of the regular season, we feel it’s rather optimistic and rosy for the Valkyries. It still would take a lot of good fortune for Golden State to finish with 30-plus victories on the season. Yet it’s a nice goal for the team at this point, to finish the second half with an 11-6 record. Therefore …

We split the difference: the Valkyries will finish 31-13, based on math, common sense, and reasonable expectation. We aren’t going to run the simulations 1,000 times like other media outlets might, although we will point out that 31 wins would have clinched the second overall playoff seed for a team in 2025, and Golden State should be aiming for at least a top-four seed this postseason to secure home-court advantage for the first round of the playoffs. That could be huge against a team like Dallas or Indiana, for reals.

So, that’s our call: the Valkyries are well coached, and they have the depth, currently, to ride out slumps and keep streaking to mathematically probably wins. Would we bet $1 on this projection? Sure. Would we bet the farm? No, because that’s just crazy.