The Indiana Fever will open their 2026 WNBA regular season home stretch of early play on May 22 against the Golden State Valkyries, and the matchup already carries the feel of a test. It will be Indiana’s sixth game of the season, and it comes against the team that swept the Fever in all three meetings last year.
Golden State beat Indiana by 12 points, 19 points and 11 points in those games, a run that made the Fever’s matchup with the Valkyries one of the harder ones on the schedule. Caitlin Clark was active for two of those three games and scored 10 points in one and 11 in the other, but Indiana never found a way to break through.
The size of the challenge would have sounded different a year ago. The Valkyries were still in their first WNBA season then, a year that ended with a 23-21 record and a playoff berth after they built their roster through an expansion draft. Many around the league expected Golden State to spend the season near the bottom of the standings. Instead, it finished above.500 and kept winning when teams were still figuring out how to play it.
That is why Thursday evening mattered too. Golden State beat the New York Liberty 87-70, another result that underlined how quickly the team has moved past the idea that it should be treated like an expansion afterthought. The Valkyries have one of three back-to-backs on their schedule this season, and the one against the Fever is the one that involves the most travel, adding another layer to a game that already asks plenty of both teams.
For Indiana, the date on the calendar offers a clean chance to change the tone of a series it has not controlled. For Golden State, it is another opportunity to show that last season was not a one-off. The Fever vs Valkyries matchup has already produced a clear edge for the new franchise, and the first meeting of 2026 will tell whether that edge still holds when the calendar turns and the games start counting for real.
