Everybody Moved Except the Concert

Golden State had Atlanta's exact problem, and the Bay Area solved it the other way around.

A Doja Cat show held Chase Center on October 19, which is the night of Finals Game 2. The concert moved. It is on the 25th now.

In Atlanta the show stayed. Sombr plays State Farm Arena on Thursday the 22nd, so Finals Game 3 is now Wednesday the 21st at eight o'clock.

The WNBA and the Dream announced Tuesday that Games 3 and 4 of the Finals will be played at State Farm Arena — the room this city spent a long weekend being told it could not have. ESPN's Kareem Copeland has the particulars, and the particulars are the part worth reading twice, because they are an itemized bill.

Game 3 moved a full day. Game 4 kept its date and lost two and a half hours — a 3:30 tip became one o'clock. And the Hawks, in their own building, on the night of their own home opener, pushed their tipoff against Houston back thirty minutes, eight to eight-thirty, so a Finals game could be played in that room the same afternoon.

That last one is the concession that actually cost something. Three days ago this desk wrote that two of Atlanta's three possible home dates already belonged to the building's other tenant. One of those two just got handed over by the tenant. Steve Koonin, who runs the Hawks, told ESPN that Tony Ressler wanted the organization to do everything in its power to make it happen, and that the calls went out to State Farm executives, to the league, to the television networks. "Everyone had major conviction," he said.

You can hear that as corporate warmth. You can also hear a very large favor being performed in public. Both are available, and Atlanta is used to holding two things at once.

Then there is the part I keep turning over.

Joe Lacob owns the Valkyries. He told the Associated Press he put "quite a bit of pressure" on the NBA and WNBA commissioners to get these games moved downtown, and he explained why in a sentence that is going to sit in my chest for a while: "The look would not be too good to have Ballhalla and 18,000 fans here and 3,500 over there."

He is right. He is also the opponent. The man whose team is trying to take a first championship off this city is the man who argued, out loud, that this city deserved a room worth playing a championship in. Generous and faintly humiliating, in the same breath, from the same mouth.

And the thing is, nobody downtown needed convincing that the Dream could fill it. They already did it. Six regular-season games in that building this year, and every single one of their playoff home games — the first-round opener, both semifinal dates. The three nights in question were never about whether Atlanta could get into State Farm Arena. They were about a touring act and an NBA team with its own calendar in the same building.

Which brings us to the thing that has not been settled, and to the player who has not been cleared.

Allisha Gray had a minor procedure on her left hand. She would not say whether it was surgery. The club would not say when it happened. She was taking shots at practice Tuesday, the day before the team flies west, and when WSB-TV asked her whether she is playing Saturday she said: "Progress is great. As of right now just day-to-day, and you'll see."

That is the whole available truth and I am not going to inflate it. She started every game of the regular season, she averaged nineteen a night doing it, and she has not played since the first half of October 4. Atlanta won the two games after that without her and swept New York anyway. Whether the best version of this team shows up on the 21st is a different question from whether the right room was booked for it.

Because only two of the three got booked.

Finals Game 6, if it is necessary, is Thursday the 29th at eight. The schedule carries no building for it. The Hawks host Cleveland at seven that night, at State Farm Arena, and nothing announced Tuesday touched that date.

So: a game moved a day. A tip moved two and a half hours. An NBA home opener moved thirty minutes. A pop show moved nothing at all, and neither did October 29.