Juste Jocyte Told the Valkyries She Does Not Want to Come Back

LAS VEGAS

There were no WNBA games on Monday, and there will not be another one for months — the season ended on Halloween night at Chase Center, where the Golden State Valkyries beat the Atlanta Dream 68-63 in Game 7 of the Finals. But the champions' offseason stopped being quiet on Monday. Nine days after the parade, the first crack in Golden State's winter came from the very end of its bench, and it came with a name the franchise once announced as its future. Here is the WNBA on November 9.

Nine days after the parade, Jocyte wants out

Juste Jocyte was the first draft pick in Valkyries history, taken fifth overall in 2025. This week, speaking with media in her native Lithuania, she said she does not want to be a Valkyrie anymore. Per BasketNews' reporting, carried in the United States by Yardbarker, Jocyte has told general manager Ohemaa Nyanin that she does not want to return next season, and her relationship with head coach Natalie Nakase is strained.

Her words are not the quotes of a player negotiating through the press. They are blunter than that. “It's fun for the team, but on the other hand, I didn't contribute much,” Jocyte said, in BasketNews' translation. “It's both very fun and partly sad because you don't feel the same way. You don't care as much. And I don't even know my position, whether I would like to go back next year. It's a very ambiguous feeling … I still haven't fully understood why I didn't play, and those excuses are ridiculous.”

The numbers explain the frustration, even if they do not settle who is right. Jocyte, still only 20 and a two-time Lithuanian Women's Basketball Player of the Year, stayed overseas in 2025 for national-team commitments, then appeared in just 18 games total in 2026. She averaged 3.1 points and 1.1 assists in 8.1 minutes a night in the regular season, and her entire postseason was five minutes across two garbage-time appearances. In the Finals games that decided the title, Sportradar's rosters list her as a coach's-decision DNP. Meanwhile, all four players drafted ahead of her in 2025 — Paige Bueckers, Dominique Malonga, Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen — have already become All-Stars.

High Post Hoops, which reviewed a second Lithuanian interview, heard the same grievance with the volume up. “I wanted time and a role to feel like part of the team,” Jocyte said. Of a possible return, Jocyte added in the same LRT interview, per High Post Hoops: “I don't know anyone who would want to come back with a smile after a season like this.” And she left the door open to skipping the league entirely: “I am young and I am not in a hurry to return to America, because my dream country is not there.”

Wanting out and getting out are different things. Jocyte is under contract through 2028 on her rookie deal — $395,428 in 2027 and $434,971 in 2028, with a $491,517 team option for 2029, per Spotrac figures reported by Sportskeeda — so Golden State holds the leverage, and any exit runs through a trade the Valkyries choose to make. A championship usually buys a front office a quiet winter. Golden State's first problem of the offseason is a 20-year-old who would rather be somewhere she actually plays.

The same halftime talk, heard two ways

On Monday morning, the other voice from that locker room was on national television saying the opposite. Gabby Williams used a CBS Mornings appearance to walk through Game 7 again: Golden State trailed Atlanta 30-24 at halftime, Williams had scored two points, and Nakase addressed it directly. “Coach Nat [Natalie Nakase] came in and definitely let us hear it a bit to motivate us,” Williams said. “But I was kind of thinking like, well, 'We're only down six, and I only have two points. So if I get going, then we're actually okay.' So I felt pretty good going into the second half.”

She got going. Williams scored 28 points after halftime — 15 in the third quarter, including back-to-back three-pointers, and 13 more in the fourth — to finish with 30 points, four blocks, two steals, three rebounds and two assists and the Finals MVP trophy. The 28 are the most any player has scored in a single half of a WNBA postseason game, and the 30 tie the record for a winner-take-all Finals game, per Pro Football Network. Williams also told CBS Mornings, per Pro Football Network, that the parade was “one of the best days of my life,” and she passed along the text Michael Jordan sent her on the morning of Nov. 2 congratulating her on the season — stay hungry, do not settle — per Roundtable's account of the same CBS interview.

Both players are describing the same coaching staff, and both accounts can be true at once. The halftime talk that lit up the Finals MVP is, from the end of the bench, a season of explanations that never added up. The difference between the two stories is not honesty. It is minutes.

Olivia Miles spent Monday night shooting — with a camera

The best rookie in the league spent Monday night at a football game, working. Olivia Miles was at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis as the Minnesota Vikings' celebrity photographer of the week for Monday Night Football against the Buffalo Bills, wearing a brown photographer bib on the field and shooting warmups, including photos of receiver Justin Jefferson, per USA Today. Miles gave USA Today her early review of her own work: “I'm still a work in progress. As the game goes on, I'll get better.” The game itself went Buffalo's way, 23-6 — Previously's account of it is here.

Miles, nicknamed “Spectacle” for the goggles she wears on the court, earned the celebrity part honestly. She was the unanimous 2026 Rookie of the Year, led Minnesota in scoring at 19.8 points per game and assists at 6.0, finished eighth in the league in scoring and seventh in assists, and was the only rookie named a starter in the All-Star game before adding a first-team All-WNBA selection, per USA Today. The Lynx went a league-best 33-11 and took the No. 1 seed, then lost in the first round to the No. 8 seed New York Liberty, an ending Miles said in her October exit interview taught her plenty about expectations. This fall she has been a spectator in her own town — courtside at Target Center for a Timberwolves-Warriors game last month, and now on the Vikings' sideline with a camera. The offseason suits her. It is just a different kind of shooting.

Cunningham calls the 3-point contest ‘so clearly political’

Sophie Cunningham's loud week continued. A day after Sunday's roundup led with the follower study that counted 2.9 million new Instagram followers for her this year, the Indiana Fever guard used her No Hesitation podcast, co-hosted by Drew Hanlen, to air a grievance: she was not invited to the 2026 All-Star 3-point contest despite ranking in the top five in the league in three-point percentage. She shot 41.9 percent from three this season, per Athlon Sports.

“Oh, I'm going to get in trouble either way,” Cunningham said. “I think the 3-point competition is just so clearly political. They're going to choose random people. So it doesn't matter how good I do. I probably will never get chosen for that, which is eh.” Given the choice, she said she would rather win Dancing with the Stars: “I have full control over that. I know votes matter, whatever, but I have full control over my dancing. And so I think I'm going to go 'Dancing with the Stars.'” Competing on the show is “not out of the question,” she added, though its filming schedule overlaps the WNBA season — which is, in the end, the actual obstacle.

Cloud goes into a Hall of Fame, and back onto the market

Natasha Cloud's offseason began with an honor back home. The Chicago Sky guard was inducted into the Cardinal O'Hara High School Hall of Fame over the weekend in Springfield, Pennsylvania, and the Sky wrote on social media on Sunday, in a post reported by Athlon Sports: “A well-deserved honor. Yesterday, Natasha Cloud was inducted into her high school's Hall of Fame! Congrats, Tash!” Cloud graduated from Cardinal O'Hara in 2010 as a two-time First Team All-Delco selection, per Athlon Sports.

The basketball question follows her into the winter. Cloud played 40 games for Chicago in 2026, starting 27, and averaged 11.1 points, 3.4 rebounds, 4.8 assists and 1.1 steals — leading the Sky in steals on a team that finished 16-28 and missed the playoffs. Chicago picked her up just days before the season after she drew little interest in free agency, and she is a free agent again now. A Hall of Fame weekend is a good way to start a job hunt.

Sunday decides who gets to dream about JuJu

The next date that matters is Sunday. The lottery for the 2027 WNBA Draft runs Nov. 15 at 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN, following the UConn-Louisville game, and two teams sit on top of it: the Houston Comets — the relocated Connecticut Sun, back under the Comets name — and the Toronto Tempo, each holding 329 of the 1,000 combinations and a 32.9 percent chance at the No. 1 pick, per the Associated Press. Houston cannot fall below the third pick; Toronto is guaranteed at least the fourth. Washington holds the third-best odds at 16 percent with Chicago's pick, followed by Seattle at 9.3 percent, Portland at 5.2 percent and Los Angeles at 3.6 percent, with the Sparks also owning Phoenix's pick.

The prize everyone is doing math on is USC's JuJu Watkins, who is returning from the ACL injury that cost her last season. Whether she is actually in the 2027 draft is not settled — the NCAA's fifth-year eligibility means she could stay at USC, and the same uncertainty hangs over a class that also includes Notre Dame's Hannah Hidalgo and Texas' Madison Booker. The draft itself is set for April 12, 2027. Previously ran the full lottery picture in Friday's roundup; Sunday night, the ping-pong balls replace the projections.