There’s finally a big name on the roster of SF’s women’s pro basketball team (kind of?), as the Golden State Valkyries just shocked the women’s basketball world by selecting Lithuania’s Justė Jocytė with the No. 5 overall pick at Monday’s WNBA Draft.

The 2025 WNBA Draft is now underway, and even though our new hometown WNBA team the Golden State Valkyries are an expansion team going into their first season, they did not get the No. 1 overall pick. What’s up with that? For whatever reason, the women’s pro basketball league WNBA does not give the top pick to expansion franchises, and there was a lottery for the top four picks (those picks went to the teams with the four worst records, with two teams having traded their picks).

The Valkyries also had their expansion draft this past December, but that was all just cast-offs from other WNBA teams, so they did not get any noteworthy players. In fact, their current roster does not have any recognizable games, even to people who watch a ton of women’s basketball.

Until now. With the Number Five overall selection in the 2025 WNBA Draft, your Golden State Valkyries selected Lithuanian star Justė Jocytė, completely shocking WNBA analysts who largely expected them to take LSU’s Aneesah Morrow, a consensus much-safer pick.

Who on earth is this person named Justė Jocytė? I just watched at least two dozen women’s March Madness games over the last four weekends, and I have never heard of her.

Jocytė grew up in Lithuania, though she was born in Wahsington DC, and she’s 19 years old. Her father, Alvydas Jocys, played college ball in Nebraska, and she’s been playing professional basketball since she was 14 years old. So there's certainly some argument that she’s more experienced than her American counterparts who played NCAA basketball.

But this remains an incredibly risky pick. Yes, the Valkyries have always said in their brief history that they wanted to focus on international players. But they just passed on a proven commodity in Aneesah Morrow, in favor of the little-known Jocytė, a decision that will either haunt or catapult the franchise for the next several years.

Those aforementioned terrible teams that won (or traded for) their draft picks got the more highly rated players. UConn superstar and new National Champion Paige Bueckers went at No. 1 to the Dallas Wings, the Seattle Storm selected France’s Dominique Malonga (known as the woman who can slam-dunk) with the No. 2 pick, and the Washington Mystics had both the No. 3 and No. 4 picks, selecting Notre Dame forward Sonia Citron and one-time Stanford Cardinal Kiki Iriafen.

The Valkyries had two more draft picks Monday night, and they were Shyanne Sellers out of Maryland, and UConn's Kaitlyn Chen.

OK, so to bring you new women’s basketball fans up to speed on this thing called the WNBA, the defending champions are the New York Liberty, with a star-stacked roster including Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu. They knocked off the defending champion Las Vegas Aces, who are co-owned by Tom Brady, and were going for a three-peat after their mini-dynasty had notched two consecutive championships. Big star Caitlin Clark plays for the Indiana Fever, a barely-.500 team that only made the playoffs last year by the skin of their teeth.

The Valkyries are expected to be an even crappier team in their inaugural season. But even though they have not played a single game yet, the Valkyries are already the first WNBA team ever to sell 10,000 season tickets. So this coming season, which starts May 16 at the Chase Center, is already a financial success, even if the team is terrible on the court.

And that may be part of the calculation of why the Valkyries made a stunning shocker with their pick. They will likely suck this season, but once this season is over, 21 of the current 24 WNBA All-Star players will be free agents. (Sorry, but Caitlin Clark will not be one of them.)

So these Valkyries seem built on the notion that their jackpot will come in the second season, not their first. And that’s apparently why they picked a little-known Lithuanian woman, instead of a sure-fire WNBA star, with the first pick in the franchise’s history.  

Related: SF’s WNBA Team Now Has a Name and Logo: They’re the Golden State Valkyries [SFist]

Image: MADRID, SPAIN - JULY 21: #04 Juste Jocyte of Lithuania during Round 16 match of U19 Women's Basketball World Cup between Lithuania and Spain at Wizink Center on July 21, 2023 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Borja B. Hojas/Getty Images)

This post has been updated with the Valkyries other draft picks, and corrected to show thta Jocyte is Lithuanian.