This is not the sort of noise a reigning champion wants hanging around its title defense. The Golden State Valkyries are supposed to be building momentum off a championship season, not fielding public warnings from their first-ever first-round pick about whether she wants to come back.
And yet here we are. Justė Jocytė, selected No. 5 overall in the 2025 WNBA Draft, has made it plain that she would prefer a WNBA future outside Golden State. That is a blunt, awkward development for a team that needs improved shooting and was supposed to view her as part of that answer.
Jocytė’s frustration is not coming out of nowhere. In the summer of 2025, she shot better than 45 percent from 3 for Lithuania in EuroBasket Women. Last winter, she followed that up with a serious workload for Spar Girona, playing 17 EuroLeague games and 33 Lige Feminina de Baloncesto games. The shooting resume was real. The promise was real. That is exactly why the rookie year in Golden State now looks so disappointing.
A shooter who did not feel trusted
This season, Jocytė played 140 WNBA minutes across 18 games and made 12 of 27 3-point attempts. On paper, that is not nothing. In practice, it was clearly not enough for a player who expected a larger role and a clearer path to development. Her complaint was not subtle: she said she could not understand why she spent practically the entire season sitting on the bench.
That is the heart of the fallout. Jocytė said she felt as if she was being judged as hopeless on defense and therefore denied a chance to play. She also pointed to games where Golden State were winning by 20 points and still did not use her. That is the kind of detail that invites an uncomfortable question: if a team believes it can develop a young shooter, why is that player not getting the minutes that make development possible?
She was even more direct about the personal side of it, saying it was hard to imagine returning to the same coach, who she felt did not communicate well and did not seem to like her very much. That is not a small gripe. That is a player publicly describing a relationship that looks broken before it has really had a chance to begin.
The response that says plenty
Jocytė also said the organization’s reaction did not exactly inspire confidence. After telling the club she did not want to come back, she said Ohemaa Nyanin replied, “Okay.” That is a startlingly flat response to a No. 5 overall pick saying she wants out.
There is a way to spin that as calm professionalism. There is another way to read it, and it is the harsher one: the player felt unheard, then felt dismissed. For a franchise trying to establish itself, that is not a healthy look. A young shooter does not need theatrical promises, but she does need a clear sense that she matters.
Kenzo Fukuda of ClutchPoints cross-checked the Lithuanian-to-English translation with multiple sources, so this is not a case of one loose quote being blown out of proportion. Jocytė’s meaning is clear enough. She does not want a return to Golden State, and she has tied that stance directly to her rookie season experience.
None of this changes the fact that the Valkyries are coming off a championship season and will still be judged on whether they can repeat. But it does complicate the picture. A team chasing another title should not be dealing with this kind of public fallout from a player drafted to be part of its future.
That is the uncomfortable truth here. The Valkyries did not just lose a season of development with Jocytė. They may now have to confront the possibility that a first-round investment no longer wants to be part of the project at all.
