Valkyries star mocks ESPN with shirt at WNBA parade

Kiah Stokes mocks ESPN with shirt during Valkyries championship parade.

Golden State Valkyries center Kiah Stokes made sure to remind ESPN of the little chance it gave her team of winning the WNBA Finals by wearing a shirt emblazoned with a screenshot of its Basketball Power Index from earlier in the season.

Stokes, 33, was an absolute catalyst and the defensive backbone for the Valkyries during their historic run to the 2026 WNBA Championship, notably setting a new WNBA Finals record with 19 total blocks over the seven-game series against the Atlanta Dream.

In the winner-takes-all Game 7 classic against the Dream, Stokes also hauled in a team-high 13 rebounds to help Golden State to a 68-63 victory and secure the start-up franchise's first national title in just its second year of existence.

Across the season, the Valkyries put together a 32-12 record under second-year head coach Natalie Nakase, though it was only around August, with two months still to go in the regular season, that the franchise started to be taken seriously as title contenders.

That was evident from the fact that ESPN had the Valkyries only 6th on its WNBA BPI leaderboard on July 26, when Golden State was 19-8 for the season, and Stokes has made sure the network doesn't forget.

At the franchise's championship celebration on Wednesday, Stokes was spotted wearing a T-shirt with a screenshot showing ESPN's WNBA BPI championship odds graphic from mid-season on the front, in which the Valkyries were nowhere to be seen.

The graphic listed the top five teams most likely to win the title — the Indiana Fever (24%), Las Vegas Aces (23%), Minnesota Lynx (16%), New York Liberty (15%), and Atlanta Dream (13%) — but the model had left Golden State off entirely, having left them sitting down in 6th.

The stunt went viral enough to prompt a good-natured public mea culpa from the ESPN Analytics official account on X, which quote-tweeted a photo of Stokes at the parade alongside an updated WNBA BPI table showing the Valkyries at the top.

"How's this look, @kstokes41?" ESPN 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."

Stokes, however, pointed out that the Valkyries had been playing at a high level well before the network's model caught up.

The Valkyries' 32-12 regular-season record was the second-best in the league, trailing only the New York Liberty.

Their defense, anchored by Stokes, ranked first in the WNBA in points allowed per game during the regular season.

In the Finals, Stokes set a record that may stand for years: 19 blocks across seven games, including a Game 7 performance where she grabbed 13 rebounds and held the Dream's star forward, Angel Reese, to just eight points.

Reese had been a major storyline throughout the Finals.

In Game 3, with the Dream comfortably leading 94-69, Reese turned to the Valkyries' bench and made a pinching "too small" hand gesture at center Aminata Gueye.

Reese also referred to Gueye as a "bum" during the series.

After seven games, Gueye had the last laugh.

A clip from the championship parade shows Valkyries staff and players trolling Reese with a shirt that featured her "too small" gesture.

Another post showed a different shirt also mocking the gesture.

Reese announced she would step back from the spotlight to focus on resting, training and spending time with her family.

The Valkyries, meanwhile, celebrated with their fans in a parade that included multiple moments of trolling — both toward Reese and toward the media narrative that had counted them out.

Stokes' shirt was the most visible of those moments, because it directly called out a major sports network.

The WNBA Basketball Power Index, or BPI, is ESPN's proprietary metric that measures team strength and projects championship odds.

On July 26, the BPI had Golden State ranked 6th, meaning the model projected them as having less than a 13% chance of winning the title.

By August 10, after the Valkyries went 13-4 over the final stretch of the regular season, ESPN Analytics had moved them to the top of the leaderboard.

But the damage — or the motivation, depending on perspective — was already done.

Stokes, a veteran center who played for the Las Vegas Aces before joining the expansion Valkyries, was part of a team that had no history, no legacy, and no expectations from outsiders.

That made the championship even sweeter for the players and the fan base.

The Valkyries became just the second expansion team in WNBA history to win a title within its first two seasons, joining the Seattle Storm, who won in 2004 in their fifth season.