Dream staying focused and confident ahead of WNBA Finals Game 6 despite scheduling madness

ATLANTA -- While the Atlanta Dream and WNBA play the blame game and the outside world expresses outrage and condemnation over the midday Game 6 of the WNBA Finals, Dream players and head coach Karl Smesko are staying laser-focused on the task at hand: evening the series against the Golden State Valkyries and keeping their hopes of a WNBA championship alive.

"Funny thing about Atlanta, I knew they were going to show up and show out," Angel Reese told reporters on Wednesday afternoon after practice at Gateway Center, referring to the fact that the game sold out just hours after tickets became available on Monday. "It being sold out is not a surprise to me because I know how much they support us and they've supported us all season. So it is really cool, and I'm really grateful to be able to play in front of the fans one more time."

Despite the scheduling debacle turning into a bigger conversation than the basketball itself, Smesko said the team hadn't really even talked about it that much among themselves. 

"I haven't really heard them mention much about it, so I think we're handling it great," the second-year coach said. "I think we're trying to focus on the basketball and let other people take care of that, and we're just glad that it came to a solution." 

Thursday will be a historic day no matter what. It will be the first Game 6 in WNBA Finals history -- the championship series just switched to best-of-seven in 2025, and the Las Vegas Aces swept the Phoenix Mercury in the first edition. Game 6 was originally scheduled at a more traditional time of 8 p.m. ET. The Dream, though, had only reserved their regular-season home, the Gateway Center Arena, for the playoffs. The problem? The Gateway Center Arena is the smallest in the league, seating only 3,500 fans. Five Dream regular-season games and all previous playoff games were played at State Farm Arena, the 17,000-seat home of the Atlanta Hawks. But last-minute scheduling changes made it possible to host Games 3 and 4 at State Farm, but the Hawks tip off at 8 p.m. at home on Thursday and weren't giving up their arena. That left this Thursday matinee -- 12:30 p.m., to be exact -- as the best option all parties could agree to.

But while Dream ownership was calling out WNBA leadership, and others were throwing stones back at the Dream organization, the players had a much more immediate issue to deal with: the Valkyries' defense.

The Valkyries and Dream had the top defenses in the league this season, so it's not a surprise that scoring has been tough to come by in this series. But since the Dream won Game 3 97-91 to take a 2-1 lead in the championship round, the Valkyries have absolutely stifled Reese and her team, winning Game 4 in Atlanta 67-62 and Game 5 back in San Francisco 64-55. Reese, who was on fire earlier in the series, was held to just 15 points combined in the last two games. 

Reese, the third-year forward who was traded to the Dream from the Chicago Sky in the offseason and was just named to the first All-WNBA second team of her career earlier this month, said the team had a particularly good film session on Wednesday morning and was ready to come out strong on Thursday and force a Game 7 at the Chase Center on Halloween.

"We are able to see in film that a lot of these things are just us, like missing shots or turning the ball over, or just not being on our defensive principles," Reese said. "Just kind of figuring that thing out is really just keeping us together. Honestly, [Dream rookie guard Isabele Borlase] said it today; she was like, 'I felt really, really good after that film session,' and that's good coming from a rookie because there could be a lot of pressure, especially going off a two-game losing streak. So everybody's in a great mind space right now."

When asked what advice she had for her team heading into such a uniquely timed game, veteran DeWanna Bonner said that time and place were pretty irrelevant.

"I don't think that they need any advice. It's just win or die," she said. "No matter what the timing says, you can't even worry about that because that's the least of our worries. We just need a court, ball, hoop. Once we start feeding into all that, I think that's something the media can do. That's something the fans can worry about. We've got our own things that we got to figure out."

Bonner said that despite her team's offensive inefficiency in the series, they planned to keep shooting, no matter what.

"We haven't lost confidence," she said. "That'd be crazy to lose confidence."

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