A 32-point, eight-rebound, seven-assist, four-steal, two-block performance is just the kind of thing you can expect from Napheesa Collier these days. She began the year favored to win MVP, and halfway through the WNBA season, she’s done nothing to sway voters in any another direction. Her Minnesota Lynx sit comfortably in first place; their biggest challengers will have to weather some time without Breanna Stewart, who left a recent Liberty game with a lower leg injury. The Lynx are still a model of steadiness, able to overwhelm opponents with sheer precision on both ends of the floor.
Which is why a 32-point, eight-rebound, seven-assist, four-steal, two-block Napheesa Collier performance in a loss at home is just not the kind of thing you’d expect from them. Before last weekend (and excluding the Commissioner’s Cup Final), Minnesota was 14-0 in their own building this season, a franchise-record home win streak for a franchise whose records are tough to break. But it came to an end Sunday in a 90-86 loss to the Atlanta Dream, who are finally, after many years, interesting.
Atlanta’s hero last night was Brittney Griner, though if you’d watched only this Dream game, you might come away with a mistaken impression. Griner left Phoenix and signed with Atlanta in free agency this offseason, a surprising departure from the franchise that drafted her in 2013. At first glance, it was an odd fit. Not long after the Griner signing, the Dream signed Brionna Jones, another starting-caliber traditional center. Neither of them was an obvious match for new head coach Karl Smesko, a coach known for his teams’ three-point volume and speed. And the pairing was indeed up and down. The Dream’s bigs can be a tricky matchup for teams without the frontcourt size to fight back. They’ve been tough on Indiana and clobbered a Chicago team missing Angel Reese. At 6-foot-3, Minnesota’s Alanna Smith is an undersized center with the instincts to make up for it most of the time. Even before Smith left Sunday’s game late with a leg injury, Griner was giving her fits: On 8-of-13 shooting, she scored a season-high 22 points.
By net rating, the Dream have actually lost their Griner and Jones minutes this season. Those two players are shooting more threes than they have before, but not really often enough or credibly enough to space the floor when they’re both on it. Griner has always been a better scorer than defender, but her declining speed on the defensive end feels especially noticeable this year. If she was the team’s splashiest acquisition, she hasn’t exactly been a perfect one.
But anyone who thought there was squandered potential in this Dream roster last year has been proven right. Tinker with some lineups and you get a team that’s gone from second-worst in offensive rating in 2024 to third-best this year, even if they’re far from the Smeskoball run-and-gun team one might’ve imagined. Jones is a cleaner fit next to Naz Hillmon, a 2022 second-rounder used so often in crunch time that she’s threatening her own Sixth Player of the Year odds. Wasted on bad Wings and Dream rosters for too many seasons, the rangy and explosive Allisha Gray looks poised to get MVP votes. Those veteran frontcourt additions get Gray cleaner looks off screens now; she’s also been able to find them inside for high-percentage shots at the rim. As a result, her scoring, rebound and assist numbers are all at career highs. Four seasons in, Rhyne Howard has yet to fully put it together as a scorer, but she’s been valuable as another playmaker next to point guard Jordin Canada, whose 18 points against the Lynx continued one of the hotter scoring stretches of her career. And Te-Hina Paopao, who slid in this year’s draft for no discernible reason, has not helped anyone discern the reason yet: She’s shooting 47 percent from three.
Threes on high volume leave a team a little more susceptible to variance. Atlanta's somewhat erratic performances—wins against New York and Minnesota, losses to Dallas and Connecticut—back this up. But variance is at least entertaining; it sure beats a slog.
