Michael Jordan texted Gabby Williams to stay hungry after she carried the Golden State Valkyries to the 2026 WNBA title. By her account, she wrote back that she had never been hungrier.
Williams, the newly crowned Finals MVP, revealed the message on Monday, two days after her 30-point Game 7 beat the Atlanta Dream 68-63 at Chase Center in San Francisco. The six-time NBA champion congratulated her on the championship and the MVP award, she said. It topped a pile of congratulations that also included messages from Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and other Golden State Warriors players.
Why Jordan’s text lands differently
There is a business thread here as well as a fan moment. Williams has been a Jordan Brand athlete since July 2023, when the label introduced her in Paris during the Quai 54 streetball weekend, with Luka Doncic, Jayson Tatum and Zion Williamson welcoming her to the roster. She was a Seattle Storm forward then, coming off a concussion and a stop-start season. Three years later the brand’s founder is texting her as a champion.
Coming from a player with six NBA rings, an instruction to stay hungry reads less like a pat on the back and more like a challenge to go again.
The Game 7 numbers
Williams had two points at halftime, with Golden State trailing 30-24. Then she took over.
- 28 second-half points, the most any player has scored in one half of a WNBA postseason game.
- Golden State’s last 11 points of the third quarter, erasing a deficit that reached nine.
- 30 points, four blocks and two steals, a combination no player had recorded before in a Finals game.
- 18 steals across the seven-game series, a Finals record, with 137 total points.
Put another way: 28 of her 30 points came after the break, which is 93% (28 divided by 30). And her 30 points were 44% of Golden State’s 68, nearly every second basket the champions scored that night.
Only Penny Taylor, for Phoenix in 2007, had previously scored 30 or more in a winner-takes-all Finals game. This was also the first Game 7 the WNBA Finals had ever staged.
Year two, title one
The Valkyries joined the league as an expansion team in 2025 and reached the playoffs in that first season, the first expansion club to do so. Owner Joe Lacob had promised a championship within five years. It took two.
Williams signed with Golden State in April 2026 on a multi-year deal after four seasons in Seattle and spells in Italy, Spain, Hungary, France and Turkey. She grew up in Sparks, Nevada, spent childhood summers playing youth ball in the East Bay, holds French and American citizenship and has played two Olympics for France. In the regular season she averaged a career-high 14.4 points and led the Valkyries to a 32-12 record.
“I just walked into a group full of love,” Williams said after the clincher. “And that just changed the entire trajectory of my career.”
She has also been careful not to get ahead of herself. Asked whether she now counts as a Bay Area sports legend, she said she was “just kind of living in the moment” and focused on family, friends and teammates, because “we’ll never have exactly this group ever again.”
What comes next
That line is literal. Tiffany Hayes, who came out of retirement at 37 and scored 11 in Game 7, is among several Valkyries whose contracts are expiring, along with Kayla Thornton and Cecilia Zandalasini. Williams herself is booked for a different court soon: the 3-on-3 league Unrivaled signed her in June to a multiyear contract that begins with its 2027 season.
Further reading
Image: User:Zafer, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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