They Were Winning It at Halftime

Twenty-four minutes into the last basketball game of their season, the Atlanta Dream were winning it.

Thirty to twenty-four. Not the way Game 3 was winning — that was a 97-point night at home where the margin got rude early and stayed rude. This was the other kind. A six-point lead assembled out of an 18-point second quarter against a team that does not allow 18-point quarters, on the wrong coast, in the first Game 7 the WNBA Finals have ever staged.

They had it. Hold onto that, because it is the part that is going to sit with this city through the winter.

The easy story tonight was already written, and I wrote a version of it twelve hours before tip: Atlanta could not score in San Francisco. Tonight complicated that more than it confirmed it. They scored enough to lead a championship game at the break. What they could not do was keep scoring for another twenty-four minutes, and the second half went to the Golden State Valkyries 44-33, and so did the title, 68-63.

The third quarter is where it went. Twenty-one to fourteen, the one stretch of the night where Golden State looked like the team that finished two games ahead of Atlanta in the standings and had the home floor because of it. I wrote at one in the morning that nothing dramatic happened in it. That was wrong, and it is the one thing in here worth correcting. Gabby Williams scored fifteen of Golden State's twenty-one in the quarter, and every one of their last thirteen was hers. Atlanta scoring fourteen was half of it; the other half was one player, and a game with no margin in it anywhere — their largest lead all night was nine, Golden State's was eight — tilted by seven points and never tilted back.

Here is the mechanism, and it is specific enough to be uncomfortable.

Rhyne Howard played 38 minutes, more than anyone in an Atlanta uniform, and scored six points. She shot 3-for-14. She went 0-for-7 from three and never got to the free-throw line. Allisha Gray scored 16, the second-most on the team, and needed 16 shots to get there — nobody in Atlanta took more. Together, the player who logged the most minutes and the player who took the most shots went 8-for-30 from the floor and 2-for-13 from distance.

Gray's version of that has a cause on the record. ESPN reported Thursday that her left hand required what it called a minor procedure and that it has affected her shot. I wrote a correction about that on Friday, because I had cleared the hand two weeks earlier on the evidence of eight made free throws, and a free throw was never going to show me anything. She went 4-for-4 from the line tonight and 5-for-16 from the field, which is exactly the shape of a shooting hand that works fine standing still.

Howard's version does not have a cause on the record, and I am not going to invent one for her at one in the morning.

As a team Atlanta shot 6-for-30 from three and 23-for-69 overall. Thirty-three percent. In a game they led at halftime.

And the player who kept them in it was the one who has been keeping them in it all month. Jordin Canada scored 18, led the team, had five assists, and finished the night at even — the only Atlanta player in double figures who did not come out of it underwater. Thirty-six minutes, six baskets, nothing wasted. There is a version of this series where Canada is the story and the national conversation never quite gets there, because she does not come with the rest of it.

Angel Reese finished with 12 rebounds and eight points on seven shots, with four turnovers. Nine of those rebounds were defensive. It was the most rebounds any Atlanta player had and not the most anyone had — Kiah Stokes had 13 for Golden State, which is its own small summary of the evening.

And then there is the reason none of it was enough.

Gabby Williams scored 30 of Golden State's 68. Forty-four percent of a championship team's points in the game that decided the championship, on 10-for-23, 4-for-8 from three, 6-for-6 from the line, with four blocks in 38 minutes. She had two points at halftime and twenty-eight after it, which CBS Sports and Yahoo Sports both report as the most points anyone has scored in a half in WNBA postseason history. Nobody else in gold reached 12. Veronica Burton had 10 and 10 boards, Stokes had eight and 13, Tiffany Hayes had 11, and the rest of it was defense — eight blocked shots, 15-for-16 from the line, the kind of margins that decide 68-63 games.

One player scored 30 in a game decided 68-63. Atlanta's best number all night was 18. That is not a tactical observation. That is just what happened.

I published Thursday night that Atlanta had forced a Game 7 they were still more likely to lose than win, and Saturday morning that they needed something close to 70 points in a building where they were averaging 66. They scored 63. The line held for a seventh straight game: three wins every time Atlanta cleared 70 in this series, four losses every time they did not. I would rather have spent tonight explaining why that was wrong.

Dex took the other side of that in print on Saturday morning, named my byline while doing it, and said in advance what it would cost him if he missed. He is writing that column tonight and it is his to write, not mine.

So here is what Atlanta actually did, stated plainly, because it deserves to be stated plainly before anybody starts litigating it.

This franchise went to the Finals in 2010 and lost three straight. It went in 2011 and lost three straight. It went in 2013 and lost three straight. Nine Finals games, nine losses, the only club still operating that had never won one. That sentence was true for sixteen years and it stopped being true on October 19, in that same building, when Atlanta put 79 on Golden State and took Game 2.

Then they won Game 3 by 26. Then they were down 3-2 and facing elimination at 12:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and they won that too.

Three Finals wins in franchise history, all of them in the last two weeks. A 30-14 team that swept two rounds, lost home court by two games in the standings, and took a championship series to a seventh game on somebody else's floor and lost it by five. The record books will show 3-13 and will not show any of the rest of it.

There is no consolation in here that anybody in Atlanta wants tonight. A team that gets this close does not get credit for the distance traveled; it gets asked what happened in the third quarter. That question is fair and the answer is above.

But the thing I keep coming back to is the halftime score. Thirty to twenty-four. For twenty-four minutes on the last night of the season, the Atlanta Dream were the better team in a championship game, in a building where everyone had already decided they could not be, and nobody can take that back out of the record. They just could not make it the whole way.

Next year they will have a seven-woman rotation that played forty minutes of championship basketball and a city that now knows what this is supposed to feel like. That is not nothing. It is not a trophy, and it is not nothing.