The 2026 WNBA Finals reach their historic conclusion on Saturday with the league’s first-ever Game 7. The Golden State Valkyries and Atlanta Dream will face off at Ballhalla, with one franchise claiming its first-ever championship.
The Path to Game 7
The Atlanta Dream forced the winner-take-all showdown on Thursday with an 11-point victory at State Farm Arena. According to CBS Sports Headlines, the Dream built a 25-point lead in the first half and withstood a late push from Golden State. In the postgame press conference following the 80-69 loss, Veronica Burton of the Valkyries addressed her team’s slow start by stating, “My body language is bad. But at the end of the day, we feel good. Yes, we lost. It was a bad game for us. We had a terrible first quarter. We cleaned it up. We found a way. We didn’t quit.” Burton added, “Games … 2 and 3 were ugly. We quit. We looked bad, and we didn’t quit on this one.”
Analyst Predictions and Team Breakdowns
CBS Sports Headlines writers offered contrasting picks for the decisive matchup. Gibbs is backing the Atlanta Dream, pointing to the recent offensive output from Rhyne Howard—who averaged 19 points per game over the last four contests—and Allisha Gray, who scored 23 points in Game 6 despite playing with eight healthy fingers due to a semifinal injury. Gibbs noted trust in Atlanta’s trio of offensive options alongside Angel Reese, maintaining a pre-series prediction of the Dream winning in seven games.
Maloney is sticking with a pre-series pick for the Valkyries to take the title, noting that winner-take-all Finals games historically favor a slow-paced, low-scoring, and physical style. In the last five winner-take-all games in the WNBA Finals, only the 2019 Washington Mystics managed to reach 80 points. Previous decisive game scores include the Liberty defeating the Lynx 67-62 in 2024, the Mystics defeating the Sun 89-78 in 2019, the Lynx beating the Sparks 70-68 in 2017, the Sparks edging the Lynx 77-76 in 2016, and the Lynx defeating the Fever 69-52 in 2015.
Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase emphasized the need for maximum effort after Game 6, stating, “This is win or die. This is do or die. This is it. You want to have that physicality. You want to have that fight. You want to lay it all out there. That’s what the Finals is about is just an empty-the-tank mentality, and shoot, we didn’t do that.”
Both teams will take the floor on Saturday night in front of a sold-out home crowd in Golden State to decide the 30th WNBA champion.
