By, KACE KIESCHNICK, Tiger Rag Staff Reporter
2023 LSU women’s basketball national champion Angel Reese is just 40 minutes away from possibly being crowned queen of the basketball world yet again. Her Atlanta Dream square off against the Golden State Valkyries in Game 7 of the WNBA Finals at 7 p.m. Saturday (USA Network) at the Chase Center in San Francisco.
It will be the first championship for either franchise. The Dream is in its first Finals since coming up short in three appearances from 2010-2013. The Valkyries have ascended to the league’s highest stage in just their second season as a franchise.
Reese, of course, has experience in bringing home a championship to a program that previously never sat atop the mountaintop. In her first season at LSU after two years at Maryland, the “Bayou Barbie” led the Tigers to the program’s only national title and coach Kim Mulkey’s fourth as a head coach. The first-team All-American averaged 23 points and 15.4 rebounds during the 2022-2023 season and had 15 points, 10 rebounds, five assists, three steals and a block in LSU’s 102-85 win over Iowa in the national championship.
“I’m not surprised that she is in this position,” Mulkey said of her former star after the Tigers’ final exhibition on Thursday. “She wills herself to do things to compete with the good-looking jump shooter or the 6-5 kid that can leap out of the gym. Angel will figure it out and be able to compete with those types of players.”
Before Reese arrived at LSU, the Tigers had enjoyed an incredible turnaround in Mulkey’s first season at the helm, posting a 26-6 record and reaching the second round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2014. But they did not get past that second round. LSU was a good program on an upwards trajectory under a newly acquired hall of fame coach, but Reese helped them become great ahead of schedule.
She has facilitated a similar development in her first season in Atlanta. After spending her first two WNBA seasons with the Chicago Sky, she was traded to the Dream for two first-round picks in April. Atlanta, like LSU, was coming off an excellent season under a new head coach – Karl Smesko. The Dream were 30-14 in 2025, but they could not get past the first round of the postseason.
Reese has already replicated her effort in helping her new team make a deep playoff/tournament run. At LSU she led the Southeastern Conference in scoring and rebounding. For Atlanta, she set a WNBA record with 521 rebounds in a single season and was named the WNBA Defensive Player of the Year. Her Dream teammates have often described her as the missing piece.
The Angel Reese Effect is already apparent, All that is left is for her to help her team bring home historic hardware like she did at LSU.
“Angel is a winner at every level that she has played basketball,” Mulkey said. “She’s won championships from high school, summer AAU to college and now she’s playing for a championship in the WNBA. She’s a winner.”
In addition to the NCAA title, Reese won four straight Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference basketball championships at St. Frances Academy in Baltimore, Maryland. She also won an AAU Nike Elite Youth Basketball League championship in 2019.
Atlanta has gone 8-3 this postseason while Golden State is 8-4. Reese and the Dream swept their way through the first two rounds of the playoffs before dropping Game 1 of the Finals. They then won two straight to take a series lead before going on a two-game slide of their own and took Game 6 at home 80-69 to force the winner-take-all finale.
Reese has averaged 15.8 points, 13.3 rebounds, 3.3 assists, 1.3 steals and 1.2 blocks a game through the first six games of the series. She has shot 40.3% (31-of-77) from the floor and 73.7% (28-of-38) from the free throw line.
The 24-year-old became the youngest player in league history to record three straight double-doubles in the finals, with dominant performances in the first three games of the series. As Golden State stormed back, Reese did not look like herself, scoring just 15 points on 4-of-20 shooting over the two losses. She returned with her fourth double-double of the series in Game 6, scoring 15 points and grabbing 14 rebounds. That put her just one double-double shy of the WNBA Finals record held by LSU legend Sylvia Fowles in the 2017 Finals.
“She’s in the top three all time of the kids I have coached on being one that absolutely hates to lose, and she takes it upon her shoulders that when her teams lose it’s her fault,” Mulkey said. “She takes it hard.”
Reese will need to tap into that motivation again on Saturday night. In the Dream’s three wins in the series, she has scored 66 total points on 22-of-46 shooting. In the three losses, she is 9-of-31 for 29 total points.
“Very, very proud of her,” Mulkey said. “In fact, she’s supposed to come see all of us when it’s over. So hopefully it’ll be soon, and we’ll have a good reunion. And she can go to one of our games and maybe a football game, and we can all celebrate her. And hopefully she’ll win that championship.”
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