Signing Brittney Griner is exciting, but can the Dream make it work?

You don’t have to follow women’s basketball to know who Griner is. A star at Baylor and then over 11 seasons with the Phoenix Mercury, Griner has become a household name with her atypical size (she’s 6-foot-9) and dominating interior game.

The Dream undoubtedly will sell a bunch of Brittney Griner jerseys and reel in new fans to Gateway Center Arena. She’ll lend credibility to a franchise that needs it.

It’s all of the things that happen when a lower-echelon franchise brings in a big-name player.

Now the Dream just have to make it work to their advantage. That, however, doesn’t seem a given.

For starters, Griner is 34. Her best seasons almost certainly are behind her. For many years a constant in MVP and defensive player-of-the-year voting and the All-WNBA team, Griner was only a mere All-Star for the 2023 and 2024 seasons. To be fair, she missed the 2022 season being wrongfully detained in Russia for nearly 10 months, a trial that surely impacted her well being far beyond her conditioning or shooting touch.

Regardless, the Dream would love for her to show the form that has enabled her to finish in the top 10 in league MVP voting five times. Whether or how often she can be is questionable.

Another reason for uncertainty is the offense that she will be joining with the Dream. New coach Karl Smesko was hired in November from Florida Gulf Coast University, where over 23 seasons he won 84.5% of his games with an offense that played a five-out style without a center, Griner’s position.

Smesko’s scheme relied on smaller players and off-the-ball movement. Nearly exclusively, the shots were either 3-pointers or drives to the basket.

Griner’s game has been posting up with her back to the basket and working pick-and-rolls. It would not seem a clean match with what Smesko has done throughout his career.

One presumes this has all been thought out, but the likely outcome is that either Smesko will have to adapt an offense that he developed over 26 years as a college head coach to include a post player or Griner will have to play a style different from the one that has suited her best. Both would seem capable of the change, but on its face, neither seems like an optimal solution.

To that end, it feels a little bit like a gamble for the Dream. The contract is for one year, according to ESPN.

But Dream executives evidently believe it’s the right time to take a big swing and that Griner is the right player to take that swing on.

Understandably so.

It’s a franchise that has had its moments, making the WNBA finals three times, most recently in 2013. But on the whole, it has lacked stability.

Going into their 18th season, the Dream are on their fourth ownership regime, their sixth full-time head coach and their fourth home arena (counting two separate stays at Philips Arena/State Farm Arena). Besides having the league’s smallest arena, they do not have their own practice facility, as many WNBA teams do.

In 11 of the past 12 seasons (not counting 2020, when the season was played in a COVID-19 bubble), the Dream have been last or second to last in the league in attendance, according to the women’s basketball website Across the Timeline. (They’ve been in Gateway Center, the league’s smallest arena at 3,500 seats, for the past four seasons.) They’ve posted losing records each of the past six seasons.

There is a reason that ESPN women’s basketball writer Alexa Philippou tweeted that the Griner signing — one of the league’s all-time greats joining a team on the outskirts of relevance — was “one of the most stunning free agency moves in league history.”

So the Dream have stunned the league and jostled the Atlanta market. Now, Smesko and Griner have to make this work.

There is talent on the roster, including Griner’s fishing buddies — Howard and Gray (both two-time All-Stars) and Carter (two-time all-defensive team).

And the team already has sold out all of its season-ticket packages for the second year in a row. (Last year, about a third of Gateway Center was allotted to season tickets.)

But, with perhaps its best chance in years to gain traction in the market, the franchise has to do more than sell out a 3,500-seat building.

If the only games they shift to State Farm Arena are the home games against the Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark, as was the case last season, it would be reasonable to wonder how much demand there is in this market. And if Griner and Smesko can’t make a measurable impact on the team’s place in the standings — the Dream finished eighth last season with a 15-25 record — then that would constitute a missed opportunity.

But the best-case scenario also is worth envisioning. Freed to showcase more of her game, Griner catches a second wind with the Dream, which finishes in the top half of the eight-team playoff and makes a memorable run. The team plays numerous games at State Farm Arena and becomes a must-see sensation.

After 17 seasons, women’s basketball fans in Atlanta deserve as much.