Washington @ Atlanta

My writeup on this game is here at Swish Appeal. So go read it first, and come back.

This is the kind of game that gets WNBA coaches fired.  The Dream have hit the franchise low point in scoring (56) two times this season, once against Chicago and once in the first round of the playoffs.  The Chicago game set a franchise low in shooting percentage at 28.6 percent, and congratulations!  Atlanta just broke the record again.

The best thing to do about that game is to just forget it.  Treat it as a fluke, no one was ready, and move on.  Right now, I'm sure Atlanta fans have the feeling of a resident of Death Row.  You know that you're going to be executed, you just don't know when.  Will your stay be commuted on Saturday?  Or will the warden show up with the preacher and say, "It's time to go?"

What's the problem?  Here are the Eastern Conference standings before July 1:

Atlanta:  10-1
Chicago:  7-3
New York:  5-4
Washington:  5-6
Indiana:  3-7
Connecticut:  2-7

Here are the Eastern Conference standings since July 1, after we started 10-1.

Chicago:  17-7
Indiana:  13-11
Washington: 12-11
Atlanta:  7-16
Connecticut:  8-17
New York:  6-19

Yeah, a few of these things are not like the others.  Not only is the 7-16 (now 7-17 after last night's game) cause for serious alarm, but this puts Atlanta as tied with the Connecticut Sun for fourth place after July 1st.  How bad are we?  We'd be a lottery team, that's how bad we've been after July 1st.

Lottery teams don't win championships.  We don't even have the advantages of a lottery pick for all our sorriness.  We'll probably end up with a #8-#9 pick, if I've got it calculated correctly.  The 2014 draft might be deep, but it ain't that deep.

I have very little faith that we can get out of the first round, but they play these games for a reason.  If you shoot 26-point-something percent against the Mystics, how well do you think you'll do against Chicago?  Or Minnesota?  Richard Cohen stated that Atlanta's outcomes were very "variant", in that we have a 50 percent chance of shooting the lights out or shooting ourselves, depending on the day.  But I don't think that's true. He's looking at those first 11 games as well, but we've just been a very bad team after that, and now it's been exposed. 

If the Dream started 7-16, got Sancho Lyttle back after her being out all year, and went 10-1, we'd be calling Fred Williams a genius and Sancho Lyttle MVP.  But it's not going to happen that way.

(* * *)

The worst stat, however, is hidden somewhere in the box score.

Attendance:  3862

I know we've had a couple of games over the last six years where we had less than 3,000 in attendance.  So it's not the worst game attendance ever from the Dream.  But it is pretty low.  And for a playoff game, it's embarrassing.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that teams don't get the playoff schedules until very late in the year.  By the time a team learns if it's playing on Thursday or Friday, it's very difficult to promote the game or sell tickets to it. 

But the bigger problem stems from the nature of Atlanta itself.  I've made excuses for Atlanta for a long time but Atlanta is just a bad sports town, period.  You'll read a lot of posts from trolls on the internet about Atlanta sucking, and a lot of it is trolling.

But hey, Atlanta. Prove me wrong.  Show up at games. 

A lot of it is just plain ineptitude over the years.  The Braves went to the playoffs every year for a wild string of years, but only have one championship to show for it.  The Falcons and the Hawks have - historically - not been all that great.  We ran two hockey teams out of town.

I think another problem is where the arenas are located.  If you are building a sports complex in Atlanta, midtown Atlanta is a terrible place to put it.  Traffic is awful, making it a real ordeal to get to.  (It took me a full hour to travel the 13 or so miles from work to the game between 5 pm and 6 pm.)  There is mass transit but no one likes riding a subway - I lived in New York for three years and I didn't like riding the subway on good days. 

However, there are great advantages to life in Atlanta.  James Sinclair wrote:

Point is, if that's what it would take for Atlanta to turn its reputation around — stadiums and sports bars and message boards full of despondent, entitled assholes (and I think that is what it would take) — then I don't want to see it happen. Rob Parker is merely the latest member of the sports media to chastise Atlanta by rehashing the narrative that being a good sports fan means supporting your team with equal fervor win or lose (instead of behaving rationally by rewarding good management and punishing bad management), and being upset that your neighbor still pulls for the team in whatever city he's from (instead of being proud that he'd rather live in your city than his), and conflating on-field misfortune with real trauma (instead of displaying the emotional maturity of an actual adult).

Touche.  I'm going to borrow a footnote from Sinclair, slightly modified:

But still the game goes on. The in-bound pass goes to Le'coe Willingham and she surveys the court, looking for an opening, but in that place inside her where there should be strength and hunger and aggression there is only the unshakable feeling that nobody gives a shit — that on this court, in this city, there is no difference between winning and losing — and so she puts up a 12-footer that misses everything.

(* * *)

Naturally, my late return kept me from watching Phoenix @ Los Angeles.  Seems like Diana Taurasi was making a statement about whom she felt should be MVP.