The Evening Tilt: One Floor, Two Wins, Eight Hours Apart

Two Atlanta teams played on the same floor today, eight hours apart. Both won. One of them had no choice.

Dream Game 6 went 80-69 and the series is level at three. Atlanta were one defeat from the end of their season at 12:30 in the afternoon and led by as many as twenty-five. Golden State's largest lead, at any point, was two. Game 7 is Saturday at eight o'clock in San Francisco, where Atlanta are 1-2 this series. Simone has the piece, and the useful part is what the afternoon did to an argument she filed this morning.

Hawks They changed the court and Cleveland tipped at eight. Atlanta were down 28-16 after a quarter and by fifteen at the worst of it, took the middle two quarters 73-54, and still needed every second of the rest: 112-111 with under twenty-one seconds showing before it closed 114-111. Onyeka Okongwu finished with 29 points on 11-of-17 and twelve rebounds.

Why it matters Last night I wrote that Atlanta's home-field advantage had become a marketing term. That was the line, and the Hawks were 0-2 in their own building when I wrote it. They are 1-2 there now, and the building also housed a WNBA Finals win before the doors were turned over. One day is not a rebuttal. It is the first evidence against the position, and it arrived twice.

The more precise test came from Simone's read on Wednesday, which argued this team loses in three places: the paint, the glass and the foul line. Two of the three moved tonight. Atlanta won the paint 50-46 and the rebounds 53-45, with fifteen offensive boards to nine — Okongwu is most of that. The third did not move at all. Atlanta committed 22 fouls to Cleveland's 19 and shot eighteen free throws to Cleveland's twenty-nine. Her Wednesday piece is the one to have.

What's next Saturday is both of them, on the road, an hour apart. The Hawks are at New Orleans at seven. Game 7 is at Chase Center at eight.

One more thing. Announced attendance for the Dream at 12:30 was 17,099. Announced attendance for the Hawks at eight was 15,025. Same building, same Thursday. The Finals open a bigger configuration of that room and one of the two was an elimination game in a championship series, so this settles nothing about anything. It is only that for one Thursday in Atlanta, the basketball that mattered more had already finished by the middle of the afternoon.