Hello, hoopheads! Seeing as the only interesting thing that happened anywhere in the world yesterday was The Last Dinner Party setting Hammerstein Ballroom ablaze, I can only assume everyone is waiting with bated breath for the next installment in my WNBA preview series. Truth be told, I’ve been looking forward to this one all week, because it seems to me that everyone is sleeping on the Atlanta Dream.
What happened last season?
Atlanta made a splash early last offseason, when it became the team to finally lure longtime coach Karl Smesko out of the college ranks and into the WNBA. Months of discourse as to whether Smesko’s style could work in the WNBA — his last seven FGCU teams all led Division I in 3-point rate, with at least 44% of their scoring attempts coming from beyond the arc — proved pretty silly in the end, as the 2025 Dream didn’t even approach a 40% 3-point rate or lead the league in the category. That said, they did embody Smesko’s general “3s and layups” philosophy, finishing second in 3-point attempts and fourth in field goal attempts in the restricted area according to Her Hoop Stats. More importantly, Smesko’s Dream won like his FGCU teams, doubling their 2024 win total while finishing tied with the eventual champion Las Vegas Aces for the second-best record in the league at 30-14 (.682). The postseason was a letdown, with a third straight first-round exit at the hands of the sixth-seeded Indiana Fever, but the Dream are poised for another step forward this season.
What’s the roster going to look like?
Atlanta brings back most of the key players from last year’s team, and I’m going to get to them in a moment, but I have to start with the acquisition of Angel Reese via trade with the Chicago Sky. If you’re familiar with my work in the Her Hoop Stats newsletter last year or came here as a Bluesky follower, you may well remember that I spent several weeks last summer saying “Angel Reese is playing like an MVP candidate” so often that I referred to it as my catchphrase. Everything seemed to visibly slow down for Reese on the offensive end last June, with attempts that once had been rushed or frantic turning into seemingly automatic buckets, and her numbers from that point on were genuinely without precedent. Reese averaged 16.8 points, 12.9 rebounds, 3.8 assists and 1.4 steals per game while making exactly 50% from the field over her final 20 games last season, the only player in WNBA history to post 16/12/3 over any 20-game span according to Sports Reference. I wrote last September that the Sky letting its relationship with Reese deteriorate over her fair assessment of the team’s direction would haunt it for a decade, but forgive the pun when I say Chicago’s nightmare has become Atlanta’s dream.
Reese joins a roster that most notably returns Allisha Gray after a breakout 2025 season in which she was named to the All-WNBA first team, as well as former No. 1 overall pick Rhyne Howard, both of them three-time All-Stars and among the WNBA’s most dangerous outside shooters. They were two of just six WNBA players who made at least 98 triples last season and the only teammates among the 10 players who made more than 80. Alongside them in the backcourt are returning veteran point guard Jordin Canada and second-year understudy Te-Hina Paopao, while Reese joins a frontcourt featuring four-time All-Star Brionna Jones and 2025 Sixth Player of the Year Naz Hillmon. I’ve still got some cognitive dissonance about Hillmon winning that award even though she started every game from August 1 on, but I can only get so mad about Naz Hillmon’s awesomeness being celebrated. It isn’t very mad. I should also note that Jones looks like she’ll be sidelined to start the season, but it doesn’t seem her season is in jeopardy.
There was one particularly notable departure, as Brittney Griner moved on following one season with the Dream, but the future Hall of Famer was the player whose starting spot for the first two-thirds of the season eventually became Hillmon’s. In addition to Reese coming into the fold, first-round draft pick Madina Okot, a promising center from South Carolina, should help soften the blow of Griner’s departure.
What’s the Marvel Snap deck?
There’s a high-level Marvel Snap player and content creator who goes by KMBest whose YouTube videos I watch on a daily basis, even when I’m going through a spell where I have either no time for or interest in Snap. He talks frequently about the deck I’ve paired with the Dream, built around the card Doctor Doom 2099, as one which, instead of attempting to answer questions posed by opponent decks, stares them down and says, “I am the one who asks the questions.” That, to me, is what the Smesko-era Dream represent. They might not always have answers for what you’re doing, but they have the ability to force you to answer them.
Like the Dream, this deck asks more questions than it worries about answering
(If there are any Snap players reading: the deck KMBest talks about in the video I linked above is my current favorite, and to be honest, I wish he hadn’t told everyone how good it is.)
What’s the expectation?
If I haven’t made it clear enough yet, Reese’s presence pushed my already high expectations for the Dream Sky high. Let the capital ‘S’ be all the evidence you need that the pun was intended. Joining a roster with a pair of ascendant superstars in Gray and Howard and a perpetually underrated All-Star in Jones, I’m not even sure that Reese needs to sustain the level that she played at over her last 20 games in Chicago to make Atlanta a legitimate threat to win its first WNBA title, but I don’t think that level was a fluke. If she keeps evolving, I genuinely think the Dream have the potential to be the league’s best team. As I said above, they might not always have answers, but I think the rotation at Smesko’s disposal will generally be the one asking the questions. That’s a great place to be.