I Am Taking Atlanta Tonight and a Tilt Byline Says I Am Wrong

Jack Maloney is right about the game and wrong about the number.

He took Golden State because winner-take-all finals turn into rock fights -- slow, low-scoring, physical. That is a real argument. Golden State are built to drag a game into the mud and they have already done it to Atlanta in this series.

Then he put a score under it. The 2017 row in that table is Game 2 of that series, not the game that decided it. And the set is short: eight winner-take-all finals games since 2005, not five, with a team reaching 80 in five of them. That is a property of five recent games, not of the format.

Lindsay Gibbs took Atlanta on the same page, and she called this exact night before it tipped -- Atlanta in seven, on the road, on Halloween. She has not revised a word this morning. Maloney has. His Valkyries in six is already dead.

I wrote 10 days ago that only Atlanta winning moves Angel Reese to the top of that MVP board. I said three more wins. They need one.

Here is what that costs me. Simone is still on the record this morning that Atlanta forced a Game 7 they are more likely to lose than win. I am taking the other side of a Tilt byline, not just a CBS one.

I am 55 to 60% on Atlanta, a range because that is all the evidence buys: DraftKings had Golden State -1.5 at 7:42 this morning, moneyline -115 against Atlanta at -105. The market cannot split them.

Atlanta, in San Francisco, in the first Game 7 this league's Finals have had. If I am wrong, Simone was right, and that is the part that stings.