The Atlanta Dream are in the WNBA semifinals for the first time since 2018, and they got there the way good teams usually do in October: one star carrying the load all night, and a second star deciding the fourth quarter belonged to her. Allisha Gray put up 22 points. Jordin Canada finished with 19, and 13 of them came in the fourth as Atlanta turned a playoff game into a 93-75 closeout of Washington in Game 2.
That's the detail worth sitting with. Thirteen in a quarter from a guard who spent the first three halves of this series setting other people up. Washington had hung around, the way a young team does when it still believes, and then Canada took the ball and the game went quiet. Series over in two.
Eight years is a long stretch for a franchise with this much history to be stuck in the first weekend. Checked the almanac: Atlanta has three Finals trips on the shelf, 2010, 2011 and 2013, and no banner to go with any of them. That's the institutional memory this group is playing against, not just the 2018 team that got this far and no further. For a city that has watched a lot of postseason basketball end early, a 18-point closeout game is a nice sound.
What I keep coming back to is the shape of it. Gray's 22 is the steady number, the one you can plan around. Canada's fourth quarter is the other kind, the unplannable kind, and in a short series the second kind is what separates teams who advance from teams who go home with a good story. Atlanta got both in the same night.
Next up is the hard part. The New York Liberty come to Atlanta on Sunday afternoon, 3:00 ET, and that is a different weight class of problem than the one Atlanta just solved. The thing I'm watching: whether Canada can manufacture another one of those quarters against a defense built specifically to make sure she can't.