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WNBA Playoffs: Coach of the Year Nicki Collen one win away from her first-ever WNBA Finals

ATLANTA, GA - AUGUST 26: Head Coach Nicki Collen of the Atlanta Dream looks on during the game against the Washington Mystics during Game One of the 2018 WNBA Semifinals on August 26, 2018 at McCamish Pavilion in Atlanta, Georgia. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this Photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2018 NBAE (Photo by Scott Cunningham/NBAE via Getty Images)
ATLANTA, GA - AUGUST 26: Head Coach Nicki Collen of the Atlanta Dream looks on during the game against the Washington Mystics during Game One of the 2018 WNBA Semifinals on August 26, 2018 at McCamish Pavilion in Atlanta, Georgia. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this Photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2018 NBAE (Photo by Scott Cunningham/NBAE via Getty Images)
ATLANTA, GA AUGUST 09: Atlanta head coach Nicki Collen (center) gathers the whole team around her during the closing seconds of the WNBA game between Atlanta and Los Angeles on August 9th, 2018 at Hank McCamish Pavilion in Atlanta, GA. The Atlanta Dream defeated the Los Angeles Sparks by a score of 79 73. (Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
ATLANTA, GA AUGUST 09: Atlanta head coach Nicki Collen (center) gathers the whole team around her during the closing seconds of the WNBA game between Atlanta and Los Angeles on August 9th, 2018 at Hank McCamish Pavilion in Atlanta, GA. The Atlanta Dream defeated the Los Angeles Sparks by a score of 79 73. (Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Nicki Collen is one win away from her first WNBA Finals appearance

Each conversation with Atlanta Dream head coach Nicki Collen is a master class on basketball. Listening to Collen go in-depth about multiple scenarios after just a handful of questions is like stumbling across gold.  Her analysis is critical and detailed. Even as she speaks of current challenges or issues, she hints at the solutions.

It’s a sign of a basketball mind always at work. Always looking to improve. It’s amazing to witness. Sunday, the 2018 WNBA Coach of the Year will experience her first-ever Game 4 of her (37-game) head coaching career.

With one more win, Collen earns a date to the WNBA Finals against one of two former Coach of the Year winners in Sandy Brondello (2014) and Dan Hughes (2001, 2007).

She laughed when asked on Friday whether she expected this much progress, this soon, though she characteristically can explain how it happened.

“No,” Collen told High Post Hoops, sitting on the Atlanta bench after shootaround in Washington. “I mean, when I took the job, I knew there were good pieces. I knew Chris . Fortunately they brought him on really quickly after I was hired. So then as I was still assembling the rest of my staff, he and I are already had a direction plan for free agency.”

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Collen and the Dream will have to go through former Coach of the Year Mike Thibault (2006, 2013) and the Washington Mystics. After dropping Game 1, Collen currently leads Thibault 2-1 in the semifinals.

On Friday, as her team prepared to defend a two-point lead at the beginning of the fourth quarter, Collen, who was wired for the game, reminded her team of their greatness. “I just want you guys to know something right now! Make up your mind. We’re 17-0 when we lead going into the fourth. We’re up two. That’s all the lead that we need,” said the head coach heading into the fourth quarter of Friday’s win over Washington.

She closed out the huddle by fiercely tapping her temple and saying, “We have to stay with it here. We gotta stay with it here.”

The psychological approach, the emotional one, has led many around the league to marvel at how all the Dream players seem to move as one unit, an easy answer for how they managed to post the best defensive efficiency in the league.

“I was telling my team I’ve only coached in three playoff games but that felt like a grind-it-out playoff-type game,” said Collen in the postgame conference Friday evening. All season, the Dream has persevered. Finishing strong is something Collen focused on tweaking when she inherited the team.

Changing habits

It wasn’t immediate. After a lackluster preseason performance against the Connecticut Sun on May 9, Collen kept it real with her players. “As hard as it was to get beat, and at some times to get exposed, you need that film,” Collen to High Post Hoops after a 74-58 preseason loss in Connecticut.

“I told our players after the game that if there’s an M.O. on Atlanta, it’s that they don’t bounce back. They don’t play through adversity.”

Then the team, just like now, was without Angel McCoughtry. Atlanta let little things bother them, they argued calls. At one point, all five players were pleading their case, leading to an easy midcourt inbounds and layup for the Sun. 

After that game, Collen said, “I spoke to them about how I think this team is really talented but how we need to play through mistakes and how we need to play through adversity and when teams score that we can come right back out. Not hanging our head goes a long way to winning close games in this league.” 

Atlanta went 2-3 in their first five games of the Collen era but found their groove quickly. The Dream did not lose more than two games in a row all season and started the month of August with a six-game winning streak. The defense was a constant—but as Collen pointed out this week, the Dream finished fourth in the league in offensive efficiency after the break, part of a late-season run that earned Atlanta a double-bye straight into the semifinals.

Finishing Strong

Like all the teams in the WNBA this season, the Dream have battled through normal injuries, fatigue, and travel in a condensed season. By August 12, with only three games left in the regular season, Collen was pleased her team showed resilience—in part because she didn’t overtax her deep roster. Not one Dream player averaged as many as 30 minutes this season, both a Collen goal and a testament to her substitution patterns.

If Collen had questions about the grit of her team in May, by August the doubts were gone. Even on Friday, she remembered the way the Dream came out of the locker room at halftime that afternoon in August, and showed her what was possible with this group.

"“This team knows how to grind. There’s no doubt even early. Even when we were .500 early and [would] win one, lose one, lose two … we kept coming to play. We were competitive in every game and we didn’t back down. We were playing hard and then you know when we found our groove offensively and found our balance and our post players started scoring. Now all of a sudden you know like you can’t really key on anyone [defensively] … we’ve learned to move the ball share the ball.”"

Yet, Collen knows there are still challenges to overcome, and challenges to present to her young team. “If we have an M.0,” Collen said again in August, “it’s sometimes we’re slow out of the gate we’ll get down 9-2. And they just know, ‘OK. It’s it’s just the first two minutes, we’ve got this.'” 

Indeed the Dream has rallied from a halftime deficit nine times this WNBA season. However, they have never surrendered when leading at the start of the fourth quarter, and are now 18-0 when leading at the half.

Collen’s report card

In 2017, Atlanta finished 12-22 and missed the playoffs. This season, Collen led the Dream to a 23-11 regular season record and a  franchise playoff appearance.  One more win and she becomes the third Atlanta head coach (Marynell Meadors – 2010-11, Fred Williams – 2013) to lead the Dream to the WNBA Finals. And she did so through defense.

On average, opponents scored only 79.5 points per game against Atlanta, while the Dream tallied 7.6 steals, 5.3 blocks, and 81.8 points per game. Collen worked under Curt Miller as the defensive coordinator for the Connecticut Sun before landing in Atlanta. In June, she admitted to Ben Dull of High Post Hoops that she sometimes still focuses too much on the off-ball action.

“Amazingly, as many years as I’ve been a defensive coordinator, I’ve always found myself in that role watching things off the ball. So there are actually times I’ll be watching off the ball and have to turn around and say, ‘What just happened?’ because I’ll actually have missed what happened with the basketball.”

However, things have settled and despite her defensive bias–or because of it–she was named the WNBA 2018 Coach of the Year. “ a little better than I anticipated, not gonna lie,” Collen said on August 12 in New York.

“I knew we had a good roster, but it takes time to build your culture and your system and get players to believe and share and trust and all those things.  I think that happened a little faster.” 

She credits her team and her coaching staff for perpetuating a culture of transparency, “If anything‘s worked for this team it’s been how we’ve communicated as a whole from player-coach to player-player to really involving my assistant coaches who’ve been incredible all season. Yeah, I mean it’s gone pretty well.”

Regardless of how this season turns out, Collen sounds like she is at peace with the way her first head coaching season has gone, and with good reason. Collen and the Dream will take on the Washington Mystics in Game 4 of the WNBA Semifinals September 2 at 3:00 pm eastern time.

“I knew we could be good,” Collen said Friday. “But you still sometimes have to have that aha moment. That wow. Okay. We can play this way and it’s fun.”

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