Veronica Burton didn’t sneak up on anybody this season.

After winning the WNBA’s 2025 Most Improved Player award for the upstart Golden State Valkyries, Burton entered the year with external expectations for the first time in her career. As the Valkyries' leader and one of the league’s fiercest competitors, she welcomed them.

Last season, Golden State knew what it had in Burton, naming her its starting point guard from the outset despite her limited starting experience in her first three WNBA seasons.

This year, she’s been even better. And for Burton, it still isn’t enough.

“There’s so much to improve on,” she said before the Valkyries' loss against Washington on Monday. “You don’t lose sight of that.”

That mentality is part of why Burton and head coach Natalie Nakase have fit so well together. Both demand more from themselves than anyone else does.

“I said you get no days off, so you have to understand what hard is, and you have to be able to play through hard, and you get no off days, and we talked about that, maybe like a month ago,” Nakase said at the end of June. “And she says I got it, and I said, because we need you to do that for us to continue to move in the right direction, so her understanding, she has to take on the challenge of if they're not listening, you better figure out how to get your teammates to listen.”

Burton’s rise has become one of the WNBA’s best comeback stories. After being cut by Dallas in 2024, she joined Connecticut, carved out a key role off the bench during the postseason, and was then left unprotected in the expansion draft.

A star at Northwestern and the 2021-22 Big Ten Defender of the Year, Burton was selected seventh overall by Dallas in 2022 as a projected defensive specialist. But opportunities were scarce behind Arike Ogunbowale and Allisha Gray with the Wings and later Courtney Williams with the Sun.

When Golden State was built from scratch, Nakase quickly identified Burton as her point guard and believed she could become the team's leader despite being one of its younger players.

“So, I just appreciate her, because it's more energy, it's a lot more difficult conversations to call your teammates out within a tone that every player needs something different,” Nakase said. “That's why she's built for it.”

Much of Burton’s impact doesn’t show up in the box score. She ranks ninth in the WNBA in defensive rating at 102.9, according to Basketball Reference, and seventh with 1.6 defensive win shares. She is also the Valkyries' vocal leader on both ends of the floor.

“She's someone who thinks about her teammates before herself, and sometimes that's a gift and a curse, because it can feel heavy,” her backcourt partner Gabby Williams said. “I just want to make sure that you know it doesn't have to feel that way.”

Most nights, Burton draws the opponent’s toughest perimeter assignment, helping fuel a defense that has become known for taking away opposing stars. Even alongside elite defenders like Williams and Kayla Thornton, Burton remains the guard opposing teams prepare for.

“There's an underdog kind of mentality to her that I love,“ Sparks head coach Lynne Roberts said. “I respect that so much, you know. She's been told you're not good enough, and you know human nature is to buy into that, right? Or to believe it, and she didn't believe it, you know, worked on herself, worked on her game, that's what I mean, and plays with a little bit of a chip on her shoulder.”

Burton has never shied away from discussing how being cut in 2024 affected her confidence. Before signing with Connecticut and establishing herself as a reliable backup during the postseason, she questioned where she fit in the league.

Joining the Valkyries revived her career, and now she tries to do the same for others.

“She even was coaching Kaitlyn at tough moments, and so that's her,” Nakase said. “She's caring about every single person before herself, that's the V that I saw (against the Mystics), and she's going to continue to grow and get better and better.”

This season marked the first time in Burton’s WNBA career that she entered training camp expecting to make the roster and projected to be the starting point guard. After establishing herself in Golden State's inaugural season, her challenge became finding another level.

“You look at her motor and how hard she plays,” Gray said when the Dream visited Golden State. “I think that's something I would take from a game, just her hard work and how she never gives up on plays. She’s just been like that her whole career.”

The Valkyries have won nine of their last 10 games and are on pace to secure home-court advantage in the postseason. As they head into the All-Star break, expectations for the second-year franchise are higher than ever.

That also means more pressure on Burton.

No one, though, expects more from her than she does herself.

“We want to learn from our wins, but there's a humility in that for sure,” Burton said. “We have the personnel to understand that and understand that we want to be playing great basketball. But this isn't it. We're not at a championship (level). We're not in the playoffs right now, and so just not letting (the win streak) get bigger than our end goals.”