The Golden State Valkyries finished the Atlanta Dream 68-63 in Game 7 on Saturday at Chase Center, and with that, Golden State won the WNBA championship in its second season. For Atlanta, the loss extended a title drought that has now survived another Finals run, and for DeWanna Bonner it brought a familiar kind of scrutiny after she played 14 minutes off the bench and scored four points.
Gabby Williams scored 30 points and took Finals MVP honors for Golden State, while Atlanta had the better opening half before the Valkyries flipped the game after the break and outscored the Dream 44-33 the rest of the way. Bonner’s layup midway through the third quarter gave Atlanta a 37-28 lead, its largest of the night, but the lead did not hold and the Dream finished on the wrong side of another close Finals game.
That is why the conversation around Bonner sharpened so quickly after the final horn. She shot 2-of-6, but her on-court plus-minus was Atlanta’s best in the game, with the Dream outscoring Golden State by eight points while she was on the floor. Fans, though, took aim at her recent moves more than the box score, turning the loss into a verdict on a player who arrived in late August after a buyout from the Phoenix Mercury.
Bonner’s path to Atlanta helps explain why the reaction landed so hard. The Mercury drafted her fifth overall in 2009, she spent the first 10 seasons of her career in Phoenix, then returned in 2025 after stops with the Connecticut Sun and the Indiana Fever. She was 39, a two-time champion and six-time All-Star when Atlanta added her, and the team was already 25-13 and had clinched a playoff berth. reported that she sought a buyout in 2026, Indiana waived her on June 25, Phoenix was eliminated on August 22, and two days later she agreed to a buyout before Atlanta announced her signing after she cleared waivers on August 26.
The friction now is that the numbers and the noise point in different directions. One fan wrote that Bonner left two separate teams in two different seasons to ring chase, and that both teams lost in the finals; another said she had quit on her team in back-to-back years and that basketball’s “gods” would not reward that. Bonner, for her part, said she did not know what the future holds and that she was grateful to the Mercury for giving her what could be one of her final postseason chances. After a Game 7 loss that left Atlanta without a title again, the larger question is not what fans said, but whether this was her last run in a place that never got the ending it wanted.
