Thirteen Years Ended at the Free-Throw Line

Allisha Gray went through the whole warmup in Brooklyn on Friday night. The full routine. About an hour before tip, Atlanta ruled her out.

So the Dream went to close out a series without the player who led them in scoring all season. They closed it anyway, 85-83, and they are going to the WNBA Finals for the first time since 2013.

The score is going to tell people this was a thriller decided on the last possession. It wasn't, quite. Atlanta led 85-81 with three seconds on the clock. Breanna Stewart's basket at 0.2 was a real thing that happened and also a decoration. The game got decided at 6.2 seconds, at the free-throw line, by DeWanna Bonner, who is 39 and in her seventeenth WNBA season, and who spent the evening putting up 13 points and 13 rebounds without missing a free throw.

It got hard first. New York scored 29 points in the third quarter and took the lead, and for twelve minutes it looked like the series had finally found a direction to turn in. Atlanta won the fourth quarter 19-15. That is the whole margin of the night — one quarter better after one quarter worse — and what it bought was a Finals appearance.

I wrote Friday morning that Jordin Canada, not Angel Reese, had been the best player of Atlanta's postseason, and I hung that on Canada leading the team in scoring. By Friday night the sentence had stopped being true. Howard's 21 pulled her level: through five playoff games, Canada and Howard have each scored exactly 96 points. The same number, twice.

The claim survived. It just moved somewhere less convenient. It isn't in the scoring column now, it's underneath it. Canada got her 96 on 33-of-64 from the floor. Howard got hers on 28-of-87. Twenty-three extra shots for the identical output. Canada has 44 assists in this run to Howard's 17, and she has not missed a free throw since the postseason started, 18-of-18, which is the kind of detail that sounds like trivia until you watch someone shoot two of them with a season on the line.

Reese led Atlanta on the night with 22 and pulled nine rebounds, and the three highest-scoring games of her postseason are its three most recent. She is playing her best basketball in the biggest games available to her, which is the part of all that noise around her that was never really the question.

And then there is Naz Hillmon, who played 32 minutes, missed all seven of her shots, scored nothing, picked up five fouls, and finished plus-6 — the best figure on the team. Two nights earlier she made the basket that won Game 2 in overtime. Friday she could not throw it in the ocean, and Atlanta was six points better with her out there. Nobody is putting that on a graphic.

This is the part where I am supposed to say what it means for the city, and the honest answer is that Atlanta hasn't entirely decided yet. Three numbers. Game 1 of this series, at State Farm Arena: 9,745. Game 2, same building, an overtime win: 9,574. Game 3, Barclays Center, a team playing to stay alive: 17,991.

Brooklyn turned out to watch its season possibly end. Atlanta did not quite turn out to watch a team win its way into October's last week.

The Dream have been here nineteen seasons. They went to three Finals early — 2010, 2011 and 2013 — and lost all three, and they hadn't been back to a semifinal since 2018. There is no banner. The city's memory of this franchise is mostly a memory of almost, and almost is a hard thing to sell tickets against.

Four more wins rewrites every bit of that. Game 1 is Saturday the 17th, and Atlanta does not yet know who it is playing — the other semifinal was still being decided as I wrote this. They will not have home court against whoever emerges. The first Finals game in Atlanta is Game 3, on the 22nd, and the building that drew 9,574 for an overtime win gets another invitation.

Allisha Gray will presumably be back for some of it. Atlanta is 3-0 in the games she hasn't finished, which is either a nice piece of trivia or the entire point, and the Dream have eight days to work out which.

Soundtrack: "No Matter What" by T.I.