Valkyries’ Kiah Stokes wears shirt mocking ESPN to championship parade
· Yahoo Sports
The Golden State Valkyries were surprising WNBA champions, hanging a banner this fall in just their second year of existence.
As you might expect, Golden State’s players kept receipts of the doubt they faced along the way.
Visit playerbros.org for more information.
And at the team’s championship celebration on Wednesday, veteran center Kiah Stokes literally wore one of those receipts. Stokes appeared at the event wearing a shirt emblazoned with a screenshot of ESPN’s Basketball Power Index, with the Valkyries ranked sixth in championship odds.
Stokes’ stunt was enough to draw a response from ESPN.
On the network’s official ESPN Analytics account on X, it wrote, “Golden State was 6th on the leaderboard when we posted it on July 26, but went 13-4 from there!
“ESPN Analytics had the Valkyries as title favorites by August 10. Sorry we were a little late to the party”
How’s this look, @kstokes41?
Golden State was 6th on the leaderboard when we posted it on July 26, but went 13-4 from there!
ESPN Analytics had the Valkyries as title favorites by August 10. Sorry we were a little late to the party https://t.co/kt3c2SOwN8
— ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) November 4, 2026
In fairness to ESPN, the Valkyries had just the third-best odds on DraftKings Sportsbook among WNBA playoff teams heading into the postseason. The numbers and the markets were tilted toward teams with more dominant individual stars and championship track records, such as the Las Vegas Aces.
Also in fairness to the Worldwide Leader, ESPN BPI is quite an obscure place to look for motivation. The point of a metric like that is that it is determined by math, not an individual person. We’re used to athletes finding doubters to prove wrong, but proving a math formula wrong was apparently good enough for Stokes.
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