Atlanta Stopped Having a Bench. Then It Won Twice.

Count the people who stand up.

That is the whole trick to watching a team that has run out of options, and it works from the upper deck or from a couch in Kirkwood. When a coach still has somebody to go to, the end of the bench moves — a warmup comes off, a trainer leans in, somebody drifts toward the scorer's table and starts rolling her shoulders. When a coach has nobody, the end of the bench watches the game like the rest of us.

On the ninth of October, in Brooklyn, in a two-point closeout game that sent the Atlanta Dream to the Finals, two Atlanta players came off that bench. Te-Hina Paopao played three minutes. Isobel Borlase played twenty and scored ten. Nobody else moved. Seven women, on the road, with a series in hand.

ESPN put its Finals preview up Thursday morning with four bylines on it — Michael Voepel, Alexa Philippou, Kendra Andrews and Kareem Copeland — and the thing all four of them circle is depth. The preview makes it the deciding edge of the series: Golden State's second unit is scoring 32.3 points a game this postseason, the best in the league, against Atlanta's 16.2. Three of the four pick the Valkyries. ESPN's own model puts Golden State at 62.4 percent.

I went and added it up myself, because a number that tidy deserves a check. Golden State's bench has 194 points in six playoff games. Atlanta's has 81 in five. The preview is right to the decimal. And 16.2 is not a talking point, it is the number.

What the preview does not say is when Atlanta's number got small, or why. That part is not a weakness. It is a decision with a date on it.

Through the first three games of this playoff run, DeWanna Bonner came off the bench, and she was Atlanta's second unit nearly by herself: thirteen points against Washington, then seven, then twenty-three against New York on the fourth of October. That twenty-three is the best game anyone in this uniform has had coming off an Atlanta bench all month. It is also the last one, because eleven minutes into that same game Allisha Gray hurt her left hand and did not come back.

So Karl Smesko moved Bonner into the starting five. And Atlanta's bench, which had largely been Bonner, became two people.

Fifteen bench points in the next game. Ten in the one after. Atlanta won both.

Those were not games you would choose to spend a short roster on. The first went to overtime at State Farm Arena — Naz Hillmon and Rhyne Howard played forty-four minutes apiece, Jordin Canada and Angel Reese thirty-nine each, Bonner thirty-four. The second was the closeout in Brooklyn, decided by two. Combined margin across the pair: five points. That is the exact stretch ESPN is describing when it calls this team starter-dependent, and the description is fair. It is also the stretch where the dependency held up under more weight than anyone has put on it yet.

The depth across the floor is less of a crowd than the number suggests, too. Of Golden State's 32.3, Tiffany Hayes accounts for 13.3 — something like two-fifths of a league-best bench, out of one player. Janelle Salaun is the league's Sixth Player of the Year, by ESPN's reckoning, and she is averaging four points a game in these playoffs. Golden State's second unit is genuinely the best there is, and Natalie Nakase has earned the right to lean on it. It is still one reliable scorer and a group that has not yet been asked a question it could fail.

Which brings all of it back to a hand.

Gray played forty-four games this season, started all forty-four, and averaged nineteen a night, a career high. She had a procedure she will not describe. She is listed day-to-day. On Thursday she told reporters that the medical staff makes the call, and that as long as she can shoot, she feels good. She took shots at practice. Nobody here is going to tell you whether she plays Saturday afternoon, because nobody knows yet, and she said so herself.

But the interesting part of a Gray return is not the obvious part. Everybody is reading it as a starter rejoining a starting lineup. ESPN's own projected five for Game 1 — Canada, Howard, Reese, Hillmon, Bonner — has no Gray in it. That is the group that won the last two. There is no reason to think Smesko is itching to touch it.

Put Gray in the second unit instead and Atlanta does not get a better starting five. It gets a bench, for the first time since the fourth of October. A nineteen-point scorer arriving as the sixth option is the only thing on this roster capable of closing a sixteen-point gap, and it would close it without disturbing the five that is actually winning. I have no quote from Smesko saying he is thinking about it that way, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I just think it is the version of this team that beats Golden State.

The rest of it is two defenses that have already met. Reese won Defensive Player of the Year two weeks ago — 46 votes out of 74, the first Dream player ever to take it, off a league-record 521 rebounds. The woman who finished second on that ballot plays for the other team. Gabby Williams is averaging 22.7 in this postseason. The two highest finishers in the only defensive vote there is will spend Saturday afternoon trying to take each other's season apart.

Game 1 is Saturday at 3:30 Eastern at Chase Center. Atlanta does not get home until the twenty-first. Golden State has the better record, the home court and the deeper bench, and all three of those are true, and Atlanta is still the team that has not lost since Gray got hurt.

So watch the end of the bench on Saturday. If somebody stands up who is not Borlase, this team is deeper than it has been all month — and the number everybody spent Thursday citing goes out of date in the middle of a Finals.