Golden State Valkyries general manager strategizes game plan for expansion draft

For Ohemaa Nyanin, it felt like the perfect ending and best-case scenario. 

As the New York Liberty celebrated its first WNBA championship in franchise history Oct. 20 in Brooklyn, New York, across the country the former Liberty executive stood screaming at the TV and crying tears of joy in her new Bay Area apartment.

Nyanin spent five years with the Liberty organization, first as director of basketball operations, then as the assistant general manager beginning in 2022. 

In May, Nyanin was named general manager of the Golden State Valkyries, the WNBA’s first expansion team since 2008.

Since her hiring seven months ago, Nyanin has been charged with getting the basketball side of the newly formed Golden State organization off the ground. Her next big step in that process will come Friday when she selects the first group of Valkyrie players through the WNBA expansion draft.

A few weeks before New York became champion, Nyanin was in Brooklyn for Game 2 of the Finals after her old Liberty front office colleagues implored her to return to Barclays Center. 

“I just wanted to kind of see the evolution of what we built in 2019 at the Westchester County Center to where we are today,” Nyanin said. 

Nyanin thought she would see that evolution completed in 2023 with the Liberty competing for a WNBA championship against the Las Vegas Aces. Instead, she and her family watched as the Aces celebrated after defeating the Liberty on their home floor.

“I needed to go back to kind of cleanse that experience,” Nyanin said. 

To see the team that she had played a major role in constructing reach its ultimate goal brought a fulfilling end to a momentous chapter for Nyanin. Now, Nyanin can officially retire her Liberty seafoam green.

“I’m strictly Valkyrie Violet moving forward,” she said. 

Nyanin has a vision for the growth and development of the Valkyries organization. Before a job candidate joins the franchise in any capacity, Nyanin is intent on knowing one thing: Do they want to build?

The answer to that question hasn’t always been what Nyanin has expected.

“What I don’t think that I gave a lot of credence to probably in the beginning is not everybody wants to build,” Nyanin said. 

Nyanin said that her vision hasn’t come together quite as quickly as she anticipated. While the job has required an extra dose of patience on her end in the interim, she’s reminded of what she came from in New York in 2019 and what she was able to ultimately yield in 2024. It’s all a process.

“I knew that it would be complex.” Nyanin said. “Knowing that it’s complex and then being in the complexity, I think, are two different things.”

Though navigating her early tenure has come with its challenges, Nyanin says she’s close to the goals she first set when she began the job.

“I’m allowing for all the small wins to kind of keep me going, to getting to all the things that we need to get to,” Nyanin said. 

Two of those wins came in the form of her first front-office hires. In July, she hired Vanja Černivec to be Golden State’s vice president of basketball operations. In October, she hired standout Las Vegas Aces assistant Natalie Nakase as the Valkyries’ first coach.

With the expansion draft, Nyanin and her team are navigating unfamiliar territory. Though the Atlanta Dream previously participated in an expansion draft, that was 16 years ago. It’s unlikely that any current front office personnel have experience with the process.

“I would say on a daily basis, I read the rules to make sure that I’m not missing anything,” Nyanin said. “It’s been a journey. I don’t want to put a pejorative or something, like, that’s super-fluffy and exciting around it. It’s just been a journey. I guess people can determine how hard or not hard the journey has been, but it’s something that our league is going to go through.”

While a front office hasn’t participated in an expansion draft in recent history, it will soon be explored by many in the seasons to come, whether that’s with the newly announced Toronto and Portland franchises slated to begin in 2026 or expansion franchises the league is expected to announce in the future.

“It’s always interesting to be the first in a really long time because I think this group of GMs and coaches will probably be around for the next iterations of expansion,” Nyanin said.

When it comes to personnel and players who might become the first to play for the Valkyries, Nyanin and Nakase share an emphasis on constructing a team with a defensive identity.

“If you’re looking at successful teams for the past three seasons, more specifically, if not four, they ranked in the top five of the defensive rating,” Nyanin said. 

Last season, the Liberty ranked third in defensive rating. 

“I think it is important to emphasize because I think people, the average person, is really looking at offense,” she said. “It’s a prowess of select athletes and, oh, my gosh, since you have this athlete, you’re definitely going to win basketball games because they know how to do X, right? I think what isn’t really talked about is how defense can lead to offense, right? Like, are we always in transition offense because we’re getting all of these steals and blocks or deflections?”

For much of their preparation for the expansion draft, Nyanin and Nakase have had to work under a cloud of hypotheticals. As of Nov. 18, Nyanin hadn’t received the list of designated players from which the Valkyries would be choosing. The WNBA announced in late September that the deadline for teams to submit their roster lists to the league would be “approximately 10 days” before the expansion draft.

“If they don’t protect this player, should we go and get that player? And why or why not?” Nyanin said of her discussions with Nakase. “We’ve both acquiesced that we are kind of like geniuses from our previous locations. So, you know, kind of like whatever I say about New York and whatever she says about Vegas, fine.”

As a general manager, Nyanin believes one of her differentiating strengths is her ability to tap into the human aspect of WNBA players. It’s a big part of what she brought to the Liberty’s front office and is something that she believes has been missing from the general manager dynamic today.

“At the end of the day, these athletes are humans, first and foremost,” Nyanin said. “If you’re not able to understand what motivates an athlete to walk in the door every day, to go to practice, to play the sport, to want to win or to just be happy to be there, you have to understand the motivations of an athlete.

“I think it’s just an area that, collectively, we have to do better in to make sure that we’re providing a safe environment for these athletes to thrive.” 

For Nyanin, it’s about going beyond simply what a player can do for a franchise on the court. It’s about whether the player wants to build and share in the vision of the franchise: Is this the market they believe they can be a part of, not just for a season but for the future?

While Nyanin is looking for a certain level of investment from whoever joins the Valkyries, it’s not a one-way street. When deciding whether she would take the job with Golden State, Nyanin said she felt comfortable leaving the Liberty only if, at her core, she knew the team had what it needed to win.

“The big thing for me was to make sure that the athletes felt like I wasn’t abandoning them,” Nyanin said. “that, like, my growth wasn’t going to come at a cost to what their dreams were.”

With Černivec and Nakase contributing experience constructing championship-level winning teams, Nyanin believes they are equipped to build a competitive roster.

“I think that that’s exactly how I wanted to build. Like, yes, I’m the decision-maker. And I have very capable decision-makers that all have one common goal. And that’s how we’re going to kind of, like, attack everything moving forward.”

Nyanin is one of only two Black general managers in the WNBA. With the exit of Natalie Williams as the Aces’ general manager Oct. 24, she’s also the only Black female general manager in the 13-team league. (Three teams currently have vacant general manager positions.)

“I’ve opted not to think about it,” Nyanin said when asked about the significance of being in the job and being a representative for Black general managers. “It’s so daunting to think about currently being the only Black female GM.”

Nyanin added that her storyline and viewpoint are quite different from the experiences of Black Americans. Nyanin was born in Accra, Ghana, and grew up as a third-culture kid who has lived in five countries.

While her perspective may be different, she still understands the weight of her presence in the league and hopes her impact can create opportunities for other Black women.

“If you just look across the board, we’re still working toward it as a league,” Nyanin said. “I’m just happy to hopefully be a positive influence in that area so my success will hopefully continue to open doors for others.”