Atlanta Kept Losing Fourth Quarters It Was Already Winning

There is a sentence about this franchise that has never been true before tonight, and it is not a dramatic one. Atlanta is hosting a Finals game with the series level.

Three times the Dream have hosted a WNBA Finals game -- 2010, 2011, 2013 -- and every one of them was a Game 3, and every one of them was the last night of a season. Atlanta walked into each of those nights 0-2 in a best-of-five, and the series ended before the building emptied. The most recent was October 11, 2013, at Gas South Arena in Duluth, in front of 5,040 people: Minnesota Lynx 86, Atlanta Dream 77.

Tonight is a Game 3 at home, 8:00 PM at State Farm Arena, and the series is tied 1-1. The shape rhymes with 2010, 2011 and 2013 right up to the point where the stakes come in, because whatever happens at eight o'clock, this season does not end in this building tonight.

The habit was ten minutes long

Ray put the margins on the record on Monday morning: 11 points, then three, five and four, one club that kept winning and kept keeping it close, and he declined to forecast anything out of it. He was right to decline. The margins are only the fingerprint, and the hand that left it is a fourth quarter.

Here is what is underneath them. Atlanta led going into the fourth quarter in four of the five games it has played against Golden State this year. In three of those four, it lost the game anyway.

Up four after three quarters on June 26, and the fourth went 20 to 27. Up two on July 4, and the fourth went 24 to 31. Up five in Finals Game 1 on Saturday, and the fourth went 8 to 17. Across those three fourth quarters Golden State outscored Atlanta 75 to 52.

The fourth loss does not fit that, and I am not going to smooth it. On June 24 Atlanta trailed by 23 after three quarters and then won the fourth 26 to 14. That game was decided long before the ten-minute mark, and the one fourth quarter Atlanta has won against this team is the one that changed nothing.

Tilt has published two pieces of this argument already, and each one stopped short of the whole of it. The October 10 piece had the two-game version: in the regular-season meetings that stayed tight, Atlanta led going into the fourth quarter and lost both, outscored 58 to 44. Saturday night's had the Game 1 version: Atlanta led by five with ten minutes to play and scored eight points the rest of the way. Two observations, a week apart, about one thing, and neither of them laid end to end with the other.

The sentence I have to come back to

On October 14 I wrote that the regular-season series, which Golden State won 3-0, was evidence about a roster Atlanta no longer has. I went through those three box scores then and I went through them again this morning, and that part holds. DeWanna Bonner's name is absent from all three June and July games. So is Shatori Walker-Kimbrough's. Brionna Jones did not play in any of them. Every Golden State player who has logged a minute of this postseason was in all three. I would write it again.

But I wrote it three days before Finals Game 1, and Game 1 was this roster. Bonner played 13 minutes in it. And it came out in the same shape as the two close games she was nowhere near: Atlanta up five after three, and eight points scored in the last ten minutes.

So the roster explanation was accurate about who was on the floor and wrong about what it explained. The closing problem did not belong to the team that got swept in June; it was still there in October with the team that replaced it. I made the original claim, so I am the one who has to say that out loud.

Monday

Then Atlanta won one. Atlanta Dream 79, Golden State Valkyries 65.

Atlanta carried a 14-point lead into the fourth quarter on Monday -- the fourth time in five meetings it had taken a lead into the last ten minutes -- and the quarter went 19-19. The break is the quarter itself, not the 14-point final margin and not the free-throw column from Monday night, which still looks like a repeatable way to win this series. Three times the ten minutes had taken the game away from them. On Monday the ten minutes held.

And it happened in San Francisco, which is the part worth sitting with, because the first two games of this series were played there and the next two are not.

Saturday night's piece also argued that four threes in the last three minutes is how Atlanta loses this series. Monday put that under pressure without settling it. One quarter is one quarter.

One game in five

Here is the discipline this piece owes itself. Atlanta has beaten this team once in five tries. The fourth-quarter mechanism explains what happened in the other four. It does not promise anything about eight o'clock, and one road win does not make Atlanta the better team in this series. ESPN's matchup model gives Atlanta a 55.1% chance of taking the series, which is a model saying it does not know.

Atlanta lost its first ten WNBA Finals games -- nine across 2010, 2011 and 2013, then Game 1 on Saturday -- before winning one on Monday. One. It takes four to win this, so the number in front of this team is three. A best-of-seven tied at a game apiece cannot end before Monday the 26th, which means these two clubs are playing at least three more times, and at least two of those are here.

What this team does have is an unusual kind of ballast. By ESPN's playoff-records compilation of October 20, the all-time WNBA postseason leader in games played, minutes, rebounds and field-goal attempts is DeWanna Bonner, and on Monday she came off Atlanta's bench for 20 minutes and four steals.

Three wins, and one minute

Five days ago Tilt argued that ESPN had named Madina Okot and Sika Kone as this Finals' African history without printing the number that mattered about Okot, which was her shooting. This morning the same ESPN writer, Colin Udoh, printed it: 58% from the field, next to the 5.4 points and 3.3 rebounds his October 16 piece had already carried. The record correcting itself is worth one clause and not a lap.

What has not changed is the distance. Okot has played one minute of this Finals -- 37 seconds late in the first quarter on Monday, per ESPN, ending in a traveling violation -- and Kone has not got off the bench in it at all. Fifteen postseason minutes for Okot across Atlanta's seven games; one for Kone, back in September in Washington. Okot told the Nigerian journalist Femi Adefeso, in quotes ESPN relayed this morning, "I am staying ready and I am going to be ready when my name is called."

And the number sitting underneath that: across the three regular-season meetings with Golden State, the 6-foot-6 rookie with one Finals minute scored 34 points on 14-of-18 shooting in 40 minutes on the floor.

None of that is a complaint. Karl Smesko is 1-1 in a Finals and he has earned his rotation. It is just a fact that will be in the building tonight whether or not anyone reaches for it.

Three home Finals games in this franchise's history. All Game 3s. All the last night of a season. Tonight is the fourth of them, and the fourth one is not an ending. Whatever this room sounds like at ten o'clock, it will not be the sound it made in 2010, 2011 or 2013, and that much is settled before the ball goes up.