Can you hear that? Can you... hear that? Way down south tucked into a corner of the country that most people have never even visited, a WNBA team has been slowly, steadily plotting their way through a season with a fortitude that just might mean they pull off something incredible: a rematch 12 years in the making, and a championship title.
The Atlanta Dream came into the 2025 season a little under the radar. Despite managing to bring in two elite bigs – Brittney Griner and Brionna Jones — and despite having drafted one of the most hyped and frankly delightful rookies of the class (Te-Hina PaoPao), it felt like everyone was so used to writing off the Dream that they didn't even look twice. This, it appears, was a mistake.
The Dream has also been playing under first-year coach Karl Smesko, one of the nicest guys in the league and also one of the least showy (and who came to the WNBA after spending several years coaching the women's basketball team at Florida Gulf Coast). When you hear from Smesko in the pre or postgame conferences, he's thoughtful, supportive, and measured: it's not really the kind of delivery that breaks the internet, but it certainly appears to be the kind that makes his athletes feel secure and empowered.
Naysayers also considered the fact that the Dream didn't come into 2025 with the best record. The team ended last season ranked 8th in the league with 15 wins and 25 losses; they were No. 5 overall the years before (19-21 in 2023 and 14-22 in 2022). So, sure: it made sense to count them out.
The Lynx and the Liberty have been the 2025 favorite all season
The Lynx and Liberty, on the other hand, came into this season with teams so stacked it felt unfair and very nearly borderline obscene. And they both started strong; neither team lost a game for weeks as the rest of the league appeared to crumble around them, and a rematch of the 2024 championship game has seemed almost inevitable.
But then... there was a shift.
The Dream, the Mercury, and (to the surprise of anyone who watched them play the first two months of this season, including probably Beck Hammon herself) the Aces woke up. Alyssa Thomas has put in a performance this season that is legitimately worthy of tears, A'ja Wilson is playing like she was just giving everyone else a head start for fun, and Atlanta? Atlanta is moving mountains when everyone else expected them to spend the season shoveling snow and wishing everyone else good luck.
The last time Atlanta found itself in a Finals match was 2013; the last time the team even made it past the first round of playoffs was 2018. In a lot of ways, anything they do for the rest of the season will be tremendous; but in every way that counts, "anything" isn't good enough for a team that currently sits at No. 2 in the overall rankings.
A lot can happen between now and the end of the season, and it would be foolish to count Thomas, Wilson, and, once she returns for the Liberty, Breanna Stewart out — but if there's one thing to takeaway from August 2025, it's that doubting the Dream this season was a woeful mistake.