Sometimes, sports fans get a little too set in our ways. We refuse to adjust our expectations of certain players and teams until it's too late, and then we just get mad at ourselves for not recognizing what we were seeing.
The Atlanta Dream are a great example of this. They're a legitimately good basketball team that should be discussed as one of the league's top contenders, but it really seems like people just tend to forget about them.
But Atlanta just keeps winning. The team has now won six in a row and eight of their past nine games, which has moved the Dream in front of the New York Liberty for the moment in the race for the No. 2 seed. We really gotta talk about the Dream more.
The Atlanta Dream are legitimate contenders
I was skeptical of the Dream at the start of the season because their roster construction didn't make sense to me. The team hired former Florida Gulf Coast head coach Karl Smesko, signaling with that move a desire for a spread-out, shooting-focused approach, but then the team's two biggest offseason additions were a pair of non-shooting bigs in Brittney Griner and Brionna Jones. Add in that point guard Jordin Canada has struggled to shoot throughout her career and it just felt like the Dream were prepared for a year of things not really meshing before trying to build a stronger group this upcoming offseason.
But whew, I was wrong, as were, like...every person involved in WNBA media. The consensus was the Dream were a fringe playoff team. Instead, they're a viable title threat.
The Griner and Jones pairing hasn't gone particularly well, with the Dream posting a -2.7 net rating in the 313 minutes they've shared the floor, but a positive net rating any time just one of the pair is on the court.
But the team has made up for that by simply asking Allisha Gray to transform into the WNBA's best guard. It's a bold strategy, but it's somehow worked, with Gray playing by far the best basketball of her career.
Naz Hillmon has made a major leap this year as well. The Smesko system needs shooters and the Dream roster didn't have a ton of shooters, so Hillmon just decided to figure out how to be a 3-point scorer, and her uptick in shooting skill has earned her a big role on this team. One concern with Hillmon coming out of college was that she didn't have the size to be an interior threat in the pro game, but extending her game to the 3-point line has really shifted her trajectory.
Atlanta has head-to-head wins over Minnesota, New York and Phoenix, the other top four teams in the league, so it's not like the team is just beating up on bad teams. This Atlanta team is legitimately capable of beating anyone in the league.
And that's something we need to acknowledge more often. The WNBA title race isn't just about two teams. Sure, a Lynx/Liberty Finals still feels the most likely outcome at the end of the season, but with how Atlanta is playing, it would only be a mild upset to see them there over New York.