The Washington Mystics got what they wanted with their Game 1 victory over the
Atlanta Dream on Sunday when they flipped the home-court advantage in their
favor in the best-of-five WNBA semifinal series.
Now the Mystics are in the hunt for another road win as the two hottest teams in
the league square off in Game 2 of the series on Tuesday in Atlanta.
Games 3 and 4 (if necessary) will be played Friday and Sunday in Washington,
respectively. If the series goes five games, the deciding game will be back in
Atlanta on Sept. 4.
Washington captured the opening game of the series 87-84 by riding the
considerable coattails of All-Star forward Elena Delle Donne, who racked up 32
points and 13 rebounds. But it was ultimately the defense that produced the
victory, especially in the final seconds when Atlanta had a chance to tie after
trailing by nine points with less than two minutes to play.
On the final possession, the Dream worked to get the ball to guard Alex Bentley
for a 3-pointer, but stingy defense by Mystics rookie guard Ariel Atkins forced
Bentley to pass to post player Jessica Breland, who hadn’t taken a 3-pointer
this season, and she missed.
“Our team did a really good job of looking each other in the eye like, ‘we need
to get stops right now,’ ” Atkins said of the final possession. “We buckled down
on defense, and it’s something that we’ve grown to be able to do this season.”
Atkins scored 15 points for Washington, Natasha Cloud added 13 and Tianna
Hawkins had 11 off the bench. The Mystics got 76 of their 87 points from
starters.
Bentley led the Dream with 19 points off the bench. Tiffany Hayes, Atlanta’s
erstwhile star forward, had a woeful shooting game in the first three quarters
but surged at the end, scoring 11 of her team’s final 13 points to finish with
17. Elizabeth Williams added 15 points and 14 rebounds for the Dream.
“My teammates stepped up real nice — they kept us in the game,” Hayes said. “In
the fourth quarter, everything started falling, finally, for me. Next time, I
have to start faster, and we can’t give them as many 3s, because that was the
biggest difference in the game.”
That and free-throw shooting. The Mystics were 11 of 26 from behind the arc and
20 of 20 from the foul line.
“What we’ve got to do is do a better job taking the arc away from them,” Dream
coach Nicki Collen said after the loss. “We know that 35 percent of their shots
are 3s, and we talked about making them go two-by-two-by-two.
“I’m not sure you won’t see in some ways see a more energized team on Tuesday
night as we battle back out of a hole.”
The Dream, who forced more turnovers than any other team in the WNBA this
season, lost the turnover battle with the Mystics in Game 1, forcing just four
and committing eight.
It’s hard to imagine Washington producing a better overall performance than it
did in Game 1. The Mystics have now won 11 of their past 12 games, including two
in the playoffs.
“You have the feeling that the series could look like this the whole way,”
Washington coach Mike Thibault said. “You have two highly intense defensive
teams; the scoring was big early, but then it turned into a defensive battle
down the stretch. We’re going to need to shoot the ball better going forward.”
