Natalie Nakase, the Valkyries Coach Who Reached the Finals by Outworking Her Own Limits

Natalie Nakase

Photo: U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Alvin Reeves, 28th Public Affairs Detachment / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 18, 1980 Anaheim
Occupation	Basketball Coach
Honours	WNBA Championship ×2 · FIBA Women's World Cup
Individual awards	WNBA Coach of the Year Award

With a hundred seconds left in a win-or-go-home playoff game at Chase Center, in the middle of an argument with a referee, Natalie Nakase’s legs gave way. The Golden State Valkyries head coach folded onto the hardwood and stayed there, curled up, for about ten seconds. Then she got up and coached the final stretch of a comeback that sent her team to the semifinals. Becky Hammon, her former boss, later described her in a line meant as pure praise: “She’s a little mighty mouse workhorse.” That line holds the question her career now carries into the WNBA Finals. Everything Nakase has, she got by outworking the room, and the habit that lifted an expansion team into contention had just put her on the floor.

The habit has a source, and she names him often. Her parents, Gary and Debra, are both second-generation Japanese Americans who raised three daughters in Huntington Beach, California, and Gary nurtured the youngest one’s love of basketball from the start. She grew to five foot two, which did not stop her from becoming the best high school player in Orange County at Marina High. She then turned down a full scholarship from UC Irvine to walk on at UCLA, and tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee before playing a game there.

Nakase was born in Anaheim on April 18, 1980, and the UCLA years set the pattern. The walk-on recovered, started three seasons at point guard and earned honorable mention on the All-Pac-10 team in 2002. No WNBA team drafted her. She became the first Asian American player in the National Women’s Basketball League, with the San Jose Spiders and the San Diego Siege, was waived by the Phoenix Mercury after a 2007 tryout, and went to Germany, where a second knee injury at Herner TC ended her playing days. She chose to retire rather than go through another surgery.

The next stretch reads least like a plan. After two seasons coaching the Wolfenbüttel Wildcats in the German women’s Bundesliga, she went to Japan hoping to play, only to learn the women’s league there did not admit foreign players. A friend got her into a Tokyo Apache practice run by the former NBA coach Bob Hill; she watched, then wrote a scouting report on the next opponent that nobody had asked for. Hill made her a volunteer assistant, and later steered her to the Saitama Broncos. When their head coach stepped down midway through the 2011-12 season, Nakase took over, the first woman to coach a team in the bj league, then Japan’s top men’s league. Her father talked her out of going back. The goal, he reminded her, was the NBA.

She started again at the bottom. In September 2012 the Los Angeles Clippers took her on as a video intern. At the 2014 NBA Summer League she sat on the Clippers’ bench as an assistant coach, the first woman to do so. She coached for the G League affiliate, the Agua Caliente Clippers, from 2017, spent two seasons on the NBA staff as a player development assistant, and in 2022 was a finalist for the Phoenix Mercury head coaching job, which went to Vanessa Nygaard.

Hammon opened the next door. When she took over the Las Vegas Aces in February 2022, she brought Nakase with her; at that point they were the two longest-tenured women coaches in the NBA. “I got a lot more confident because I found someone like me,” Nakase has said. The Aces won the title in her first season, making her the first Asian American coach to win a WNBA championship, and won it again in 2023. Her father saw neither. Gary Nakase died in 2021, aged 79, of complications from heart surgery.

On October 10, 2024, the Golden State Valkyries named her the first head coach of a franchise that did not yet have a single player, making her the first Asian American head coach in WNBA history. Nakase knew she could not copy Las Vegas, where she had A’ja Wilson and Chelsea Gray to lean on. “I can’t take everything then pour it into GSV,” she said. Her answer was defense, depth and a locker room built on selflessness. The Valkyries went 23-21 and became the first expansion team in league history to reach the playoffs in its debut season, and she was named 2025 WNBA Coach of the Year.

The story told about Nakase leans on firsts, and the firsts are real. They also flatter a method that has costs. That debut playoff run ended in a sweep by the Minnesota Lynx, the second loss by a single point after Golden State had led by 17, and she was fined for criticizing the officiating. In June of this season she faced reporters visibly ill and explained why: “It’s because I’ve been exhausting myself.” Four months later she collapsed. Her father had warned her about exactly this: “do not let your career ever get involved in your mental health.” Hammon’s affectionate verdict that “that little sucker popped right back up” captures the admiration and misses the warning. Nakase called the fall “a wake-up call” and said she would wear a heart monitor from then on. In Game 2 a team built on defense committed a season-high 18 turnovers, and Nakase openly questioned whether she had prepared it the right way.

The season itself was a leap. With nine returning players and the free agents Gabby Williams and Kiah Stokes, the Valkyries went 32-12, took the No. 2 seed, set a WNBA record for bench scoring and finished with the league’s best defense. In September Nakase was also on Kara Lawson’s staff for the United States team that won the FIBA Women’s World Cup in Berlin. In the playoffs Golden State came back from 16 points down to eliminate the Dallas Wings, then swept Hammon’s defending champions, closing the series 87-77 in overtime in Las Vegas. “This is a dream come true to be going to the Finals in a second year,” she said.

The Finals against the Atlanta Dream stand at one win apiece, after a 68-64 home win and a 79-65 loss driven by Angel Reese’s 30 points and 16 rebounds. Game 3 is in Atlanta on October 21, Game 4 there on October 24. During the semifinals her assistants Landon Tatum and Kasib Powell at times took turns on the sideline in her place. Whatever the next week brings, Nakase is attempting something her career never asked of her before: winning a championship while letting someone else carry part of the load.

Tags: sports, athletes, Los Angeles Clippers, basketball coaches, Golden State Valkyries, Natalie Nakase, WNBA