WNBA Finals in the Stars: What Astrology Tells Us About Dream-Valkyries

Angel Reese the marketer. Gabby Williams the entertainer. Astrologist Chani Nicholas looks to the sky and birth charts to unpack how the Finals could play out.

According to their birth charts, Mars and Saturn play crucial roles in how Dream teammates Allisha Gray and Rhyne Howard (left to right) tick as players. | Joe Nicholson/Imagn Images

To win a WNBA championship, almost everything has to go right. Teams know every detail and advantage matters in a game of slim margins, so they go to great lengths to control the variables they can. Others point to the intangible and inexplicable, citing fate when they mythologize their path to the league trophy—an act of divine intervention that crowned them the winner. So, why not also consider the stars and what’s transpiring in the ether as an important element in determining success? In other words: What can astrology tell us about the WNBA Finals?

​Chani Nicholas, the New York Times best-selling author of You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance and co-founder and president of the CHANI app, is also a WNBA fan. Attending Liberty games with her wife and daughter, she was struck by the feeling of freedom radiating from Barclays Center. “I am so invested in women’s sports and in the paradigm shift that it can create and that we need to help create in women’s sports,” Nicholas says.

​Her astrological work, she says, is “about literally reading the language of the sky, of the planets.” But it’s also deeply rooted in humanity. When reading a birth chart (which is a “map of what the sky looked like from the precise moment and location of one’s birth”), Nicholas aims for it to be a healing process. “My main goal in the session is to have people feel seen,” Nicholas says. “It has a lot to do with being correct, because the sky is witnessing you. But it also has to do with actually witnessing the person that you’re with.”

​So, let’s turn our attention upward to the stars and planets and see what we can learn about the WNBA Finals through an astrological lens. 

​Venus retrograde

First, the weekend around Game 4 on Oct. 24 is slated to be astrologically eventful, with things feeling pronounced and dramatic.

​“Game 4 is happening during such intense astrology … the day before, during and after,” Nicholas says. “It’s just intensity and drama. And this feeling of rising from the ashes, like being really triumphant.”

​All of October is focused on Venus retrograde, which Nicholas says is a planet focused on women. Since it’s happening in a Mars-ruled sign, she notes that this Venus retrograde is particularly potent and that it’s a lot about “how we fight, how we get energized, what it is we need to win at.”

​With Venus and Sun exactly together, Nicholas circles Oct. 23 and 24 as a moment of rebirth. “It does feel like there’s a particular person, maybe they were not doing great, and then they do something that’s great,” Nicholas says. “[Game 4 is] this moment to really focus on this, a player having a kind of resurgence or this potent infusion of energy.”

Nicholas also highlighted Oct. 24 as an astrologically significant day to win, as it plants the seeds for future victory. “It feeds something for the next 18 months for that team and that player or those particular players,” Nicholas says.

​Mercury in retrograde

​Mercury stations retrograde on Oct. 24. Nicholas explains that Mercury relates to information dissemination. That could mean technical glitches at Game 4, discrepancies between players and teams or a dispute with the referees.

​”The day it retrogrades, that’s when you really want to make sure about details and data and facts and numbers and things adding up,” Nicholas says.

​Full moon

​On top of the Venus and Mercury retrograde, the full moon also peaks on Oct. 25, which Nicholas says will spotlight the event.

​“This full moon is sitting in this exact square to Pluto, so it’s really intense,” Nicholas says. “It just goes really deep. It’s like people digging into the reserves of what they’ve got.”

​She equates the full moon to riding a wave, so there is a feeling of leaving it all on the field at its apex, building to a crescendo. Then, immediately following the full moon, people may feel like they need to pick themselves up again. If the series goes beyond four games and extends late in the month, that could come into play.

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Players’ birth charts

​So, what does all of this mean for the players? Using publicly available information (not including players’ birth times, which help with a deeper reading of a natal chart), Nicholas was able to unpack what makes each athlete tick.

​Rhyne Howard (Taurus Sun, Pisces Moon)

​With the upcoming full moon in Taurus, Game 4 (and the weekend around it) could be a pivotal moment for Rhyne Howard. Nicholas explains that this full moon is happening around three to four degrees of Taurus, and Rhyne has her Sun at nine degrees.  

​Nicholas says to circle Game 4, as Howard could potentially get a small boost, because “the moon will be passing over her Venus and Mercury” in a quick transit. (With Howard struggling throughout the postseason, and her coach, Karl Smesko, confident a Howard game is on the way, maybe the second Atlanta home Finals contest is where she shines.)

Howard also shares something with many other players competing in the Finals, including her teammate Angel Reese: a Saturn-Mars conjunction that brings out their toughness. Per Nicholas, Saturn and Mars are the two hardest planets in our charts: Saturn represents discipline, order, and structure, while Mars indicates drive and energy. “Both planets do things that are hard when they’re together; it signals something that’s like, ‘Oh, that’s really tough.’ It creates such an incredible fortitude.”

According to Angel Reese’s birth chart, she is apt at dealing with challenging situations. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

​Angel Reese (Taurus Sun, Pisces Moon)

​Reese also has a Mars-Saturn conjunction, but unlike Howard’s, Nicholas says Reese’s is in Gemini. Reese has almost everything (four of the seven traditional planets) in Gemini, so she may feel more like a Gemini than a Taurus.

​What does that mean? Think communication, dispensing information, selling things and being witty. “It’s like she could be a marketer if she weren’t an athlete,” Nicholas says. In many ways, Reese is a marketing extraordinaire, with her appeal extending far beyond the WNBA and across industries. (She has her own Barbie doll and even trademarked “Mebounds,” a diss popularized by online trolls criticizing the Dream star.)

​The Mars-Saturn conjunction that she shares with Howard also means that she has “a gift for dealing with really tough, extreme, challenging situations and setups,” Nicholas says.

​Allisha Gray (Capricorn Sun, Gemini or Taurus Moon)

​While Reese and Howard have Mars and Saturn together, Nicholas highlights that their teammate, Allisha Gray, has the two planets 180 degrees apart.

​“I call this the Michael Jordan aspect.” Nicholas says, describing his unique ability to single out an adversary on the court. “If I was coaching her, I’d want to be like, ‘O.K. who’s your enemy today? How are we going to war?’ Because this signature is like in a battle.”

​At the same time, Gray has a Venus-Jupiter conjunction, which Nicholas calls the two good planets.

​“She’s got the two hard planets opposing each other,” Nicholas explains, “so it gives her that kind of need to be at war… But then she’s got the two planets that bring about beauty and joy and abundance and faith and all good things.”

​Since those two good planets are together and in a “super powerful sign”, Nicholas calls this part of Gray’s chart blessed, noting she has a signature of luck.

​“So she’s the kind of person that’s able to bring the party, is able to get things going,” Nicholas says. “Everybody’s going to love her. There’s just going to be something stylish or enthusiastic or cheerleading about her.”

​Gabby Williams (Virgo Sun, Leo Moon) and Tiffany Hayes (Virgo Sun, Gemini or Taurus Moon)

​While Gray has a Mars-Saturn opposition and Howard and Gray have conjunctions, Gabby Williams and Tiffany “Tip” Hayes have Mars-Saturn squares. “It’s the planetary kind of setup that makes being on the court such a good place to channel the energy.

​“They need setups that are going to give them a reason to focus, to go at something really intensely and to channel this energy of like ‘I’ve got to meet my match.’”

MORE: Welcome to the Ballhalla Blast Powering the Valkyries Through the WNBA Finals

​If Williams was born close to noon, then she has significant placements in Leo, making her a bona fide luminary. “She has the moon and Venus in Leo and so that is like superstar quality,” Nicholas says. “That is like, it’s captivating. It’s entertaining. It’s charming. It’s charismatic. It’s bold.”

​That magnetism, Nichlos says, comes from people with these types of charts’ tendency to buck the system and color outside the lines, imbuing her with an untamable energy. If she were reading her birth chart, Nicholas says she’d encourage Williams to follow that verve.

​Williams and Hayes are both Virgos, meaning they share earth-sign qualities with Gray, Reese and Howard. All earth signs emphasize practicality and reliability but in different ways. Nicholas described Virgos as asking how they can be useful, Taureans as wondering how they can best show up and Capricorns as pondering how the team will win.

According to Nicholas’s reading of her chart, part of Hayes’s power comes from her ability to “engender trust” with the people around her, and she has a unique ability to make people feel like they belong.

Given the Valkyries’ underdog mentality and the team’s band-of-misfits origin story, as a group of players coming together to succeed in Golden State after feeling undervalued elsewhere, Nicholas’s descriptions of Williams’s and Hayes’s charts feel particularly apt.

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Of all the predictive measures and analytics models in sports, maybe there is room for one more framework to consider. While there is no real way to forecast who will emerge from the 30th WNBA season as champion, if we look closely enough, maybe there are some telling truths in the sky. Perhaps the WNBA Finals really is written in the stars?

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