The Same Mistake in Two Different Sports

Two Atlanta teams played on Saturday. Both lost holding the ball.

The Dream. Golden State 68, Atlanta 64, Game 1 of the Finals at Chase Center. Atlanta led by five with ten minutes left and scored eight points in the fourth quarter. The last four shots it took were three-pointers, on a sixteen percent night from out there. Neither team made a field goal in the final 3:12; Golden State won it with seven free throws. Down 1-0 in a best-of-seven is not an emergency. The last three minutes are a separate conversation.

Atlanta United. Inter Miami 3, Atlanta United 1 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Berterame in the 45th, Messi in the 56th and the 60th, Picault from the spot in the 89th. Atlanta took twenty shots and put three on target. Miami took seven and put five on target. Atlanta attempted twenty-six crosses and completed four.

What the two have in common. Neither side was outclassed for a full game. Neither was overrun — Atlanta United completed 383 passes and intercepted eleven, and the Dream held Golden State to nine points in the third quarter, the lowest quarter total either team managed. And both, at the moment things stopped going their way, responded by doing the same thing more often rather than doing it differently. Four three-pointers in three minutes from a team shooting four-for-twenty-five. Twenty-six crosses from a team that found a teammate with four of them.

Volume is the easiest adjustment available. It is almost never an adjustment.

The difference is what each one gets to do about it. The Dream get Monday at 8:00 in the same building, with a series barely started and five wins from six postseason games behind them. Atlanta United get Chicago at the Benz on the 24th and three matches after that, sitting on thirty points from thirty played, with no particular evidence that the crossing stops. One of those is a question. The other is a habit with three weeks left to run.

One more thing. On Friday I wrote that the only call in Atlanta sports nobody had made yet was Allisha Gray's, and that it was not hers to make. The room answered. Karl Smesko started her, thirteen days after she last played, and she took nineteen shots — more than any other Atlanta player. Five went in, and eight of eight from the line said the hand was fine. Whatever Monday settles, availability is no longer the question.