COLLEGE PARK — The Dream weren’t supposed to make the WNBA playoffs. They got here by doubling their win total from last season and setting the franchise record for most victories.
Then the Dream took a one-game lead over Indiana in the best-of-three first round, after which head coach Karl Smesko said the goal was to win a championship. The Dream had a five-point lead in the final moments of Thursday’s deciding Game 3, after which they blew it.
There was no way around that assessment after the 87-85 loss to the Fever at Gateway Center Arena. The Dream weren’t expected to make it this far, but they did, and then they fell apart when it mattered most.
Smesko’s postgame message to his team about a championship delayed, but not denied, was undercut by the squandered opportunity.
“I would have liked to be more encouraging, but I’m just really disappointed for our players,” Smesko said. “I know how much work they put in. I know how much they wanted this. For it not to work is always painful, and this was no exception.”
The hurt will follow the Dream into the offseason. They had Indiana down 85-80 with 2:32 to play. The Dream didn’t score again because of bad shots, bad passes and bad defense.
The Dream had six empty possessions to end the game, with three turnovers and three missed shots. The last miss was a desperation 3-pointer by Brionna Jones, the team’s worst shooter from that distance. The Fever won the series despite a long list of players out with injuries, including All-Star guard Caitlin Clark.
After scoring 56 points in the first half, the Dream managed only 29 in the second.
“We just got stagnant,” Dream point guard Jordin Canada said. “We weren’t moving the ball like we were in the first half. That’s basically it, to be honest.”
The Dream needed Allisha Gray and Rhyne Howard to be like Angel McCoughtry and Tiffany Hayes, who carried the Dream to the WNBA finals in 2013. That also was the last year the team won a multi-game playoff series.
The Dream faced elimination in this series after Gray and Howard played poorly in the Game 2 loss at Indiana. Howard and Gray also didn’t do enough at winning time during Game 3.
Gray missed a jumper after Indiana’s Kelsey Mitchell made a layup to trim the lead to 85-82. Smesko tried calling timeout on his team’s next possession, but neither the officials nor his players saw or heard him before Brionna Jones threw a pass out of bounds. Another Indiana layup, this time by forward Lexie Hull, made it 85-84 with 43.1 seconds to play.
Howard missed a rushed 3-pointer on her team’s next possession. The Fever scored yet another layup for an 86-85 lead with 7.4 seconds left. That was Indiana’s first lead since 33-30 in the second quarter.
“Unfortunately, we had some empty possessions where we were kind of staring at the ball instead of executing our offense,” Smesko said. “We would play great defense, then have a breakdown at the last second.”
The Dream still had a chance to win. Smesko called timeout to set up an out-of-bounds play. Howard couldn’t find anyone to pass to before calling another timeout. The second try wasn’t much better: Hull swiped Howard’s pass intended for Jones.
“We thought they were going to try to get ‘Bri’ Jones a touch on the interior,” Indiana coach Stephanie White said. “Lexie read it perfectly.”
The Dream got one more chance to tie or win after Indiana’s Odyssey Sims made a free throw. That out-of-bounds play didn’t go much better than the previous two. There wasn’t much movement or spacing by Dream players before Howard passed to Jones 25 feet away from the basket.
That was the final poor play for the Dream in a series of them over the final three minutes.
“In the fourth quarter, we started to slow down, and we were at our best when we were pushing the pace,” Smesko said. “That’s kind of the natural reaction, but that’s something we hopefully can learn from. Unfortunately, there’s no more opportunities to learn for this year and our goal this year was to win the championship.”
The Dream didn’t come close. That’s after they earned the No. 3 seed with a 30-14 record and drew the short-handed Fever. I didn’t see any way Indiana could come back to win the series after losing Game 1, but I should have known better.
This is Atlanta, after all.
It was a bitter end to a good year for the Dream. Smesko did great work in his first season as a pro coach. Gray and Howard were among the Dream players who had career-best seasons.
“The organization as a whole, it’s in a great direction,” Gray said. “Karl, he has so much faith in us. We proved a lot of people wrong this year. A lot of people didn’t expect us to play as well and be in the position we’re in.”
That’s true. But it’s also true that the Dream blew it at the end.
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