400,000 Fans Turned the Bay Violet for the Valkyries' First Parade

Four days after they won a title, the Golden State Valkyries took it for a ride. Wednesday's championship parade started in Oakland, crossed the bay by ferry, and rolled down San Francisco's Embarcadero in front of an estimated 400,000 fans — a number that would be a strong week for most teams, delivered on a weekday afternoon for a franchise that did not exist three years ago.

The image of the day belonged to Gabby Williams. The Finals MVP hopped off her double-decker bus and danced through the street, blowing a whistle and slapping high-fives, her MVP trophy tucked under her left arm the whole time. She waved Kiah Stokes over, and the two of them popped champagne in front of the first buses while the crowd chanted "MVP." Four days earlier, Williams had scored 28 of her 30 points in the second half of the first Game 7 in WNBA Finals history, a 68–63 win over Atlanta. This was the victory lap, and she treated the whole route like her stage.

The route itself was the point. The Valkyries are a two-city team — practice facility in Oakland, home court at Chase Center in San Francisco — so the celebration began with a rally at Oakland's Jack London Square, boarded a ferry across the bay, and started rolling from the Ferry Building at noon, finishing near Oracle Park. Oakland mayor Barbara Lee and San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie rode along. Singer Kehlani was part of the parade. Fans chanted "GSV" as players threw beads from the violet buses and, in several cases, simply got off them: Veronica Burton, Kaitlyn Chen and Tiffany Hayes all climbed down to work the rope line and sign autographs.

Hayes had the bus everybody wanted to be on — beads flying, a bubble machine running — and the best story on it. At 37, in her 14th WNBA season, two years after coming out of retirement, she finally held a championship trophy. "They all came out," she said of the crowd. "The streets are flooded." Stokes, meanwhile, was celebrating her fourth title, the first three won with Las Vegas, which is a quietly absurd sentence to be able to write about a second-year expansion team's center.

Head coach Natalie Nakase kept returning to the fans. "All season long, our fans have proven over and over again why they're the best in the world," she said. "This is as much theirs as it is ours." Burton sounded like the run still hadn't fully landed: "I believed it early, and we continued to get better. And I think that's when it was like, 'OK, this is real, we're going to do this.'" Owner Joe Lacob had promised a championship within five years when the franchise was granted three years ago. It took two — after Golden State had already become, in 2025, the first expansion team ever to reach the playoffs in its inaugural season. Williams had also heard from Michael Jordan during the week, and the team was honored on the court at Chase Center during Sunday's Warriors game.

One champion was missing. Janelle Salaün, the league's Sixth Player of the Year, told fans on Instagram that morning that a family commitment would keep her away: "Sadly, I won't be able to join the parade today... I'll be celebrating with you in spirit." Salaün averaged 12.7 points off the bench this season but fell out of the Finals rotation, not playing in Games 5, 6 or 7 — a storyline that follows her straight into a fascinating offseason.

And because no Bay celebration is complete without a little petty, the parade had a villain, and she wasn't there. Former Warriors big man Festus Ezeli held up a shirt showing Reese's Game 3 taunt — the thumb-and-finger "too small" gesture Reese had aimed at the Valkyries' bench — with the Crying Jordan face pasted over hers. Fans handed out pink pacifiers whose paper tags, in the fans' own wording, read "if found return to: ATL." Hayes had already returned the "too small" gesture on Instagram Live from the locker room. Stokes wore a shirt reproducing ESPN's late-July title-odds chart — the one that didn't have Golden State in its top five and gave the Valkyries at most a five percent chance. ESPN Insights answered on X: "Sorry we were a little late to the party." Golden State went 13–4 after that chart posted and was the analytics favorite by August 10.

The parade also drew the kind of fan this franchise keeps producing: Cynthia Cheak, who has gifted some 26,000 wristbands to fellow fans since July, was invited to ride in it. That is what 400,000 people on the Embarcadero actually means — not a market being introduced to a team, but a community that already considers itself part of the roster. The audience records told the same story all week, as the Finals' viewership, attendance and merchandise numbers reset the league's record book.

The harder part starts now. Kayla Thornton, Cecilia Zandalasini, Hayes, Chen and Laeticia Amihere are all headed toward free agency, with Golden State holding about $3.64 million in cap space and seven players under contract for 2027. Somebody has to decide which pieces of a championship parade get to ride in the next one. On Wednesday, though, nobody in violet was thinking about the cap sheet. The streets were flooded, and for one afternoon, that was the whole job.