Nicki Collen knows she’s starting to sound like a broken record in postgame press conferences.
The Dream coach has seen her team lose seven of its nine games, and most of those losses have had a similar storyline. The Dream plays hard and keeps things close for a while, or battles back from a large deficit, but at some point, a large run by the opposing team puts the game out of reach.
In Sunday afternoon’s loss to the Washington Mystics, the storyline appeared once again. The Dream had a three-point lead at halftime but were outscored 28-7 in the third quarter. Atlanta won the fourth quarter, 21-19, but it didn’t matter in the end. The Mystics pulled away enough in the third quarter that there was little the Dream could do about it, resulting in an 89-73 loss.
“We won three of the four quarters today,” Collen said. “If you eliminate one bad quarter, I thought we played really good basketball. … Disappointed with the result. We can’t forget there’s four quarters in a game, and three isn’t good enough to win in this league. It’s a matter of us continuing to get better and turning three good quarters into four.”
The storyline was familiar in other ways, too. Tiffany Hayes extended her streak of games with double-digit points to five with an 18-point performance, including four made 3-pointers to tie her career high.
But 16 of Hayes’ 18 points came in the first half, which is emblematic of how the Mystics pulled away in the second half. Hayes is still recovering from an ankle injury before the season opener, and her stamina began to wane in the second half.
When it became clear that the Dream likely weren’t going to make a run and come out on top, Collen put Hayes on the bench for the rest of the game.
“I kinda played her as long as I thought the game was in reach or we were going to make a run,” Collen said. “She made big shots from the arc in the first half. They really iced her in the second half. … They did a better job of making her give it up (in the second half) and making somebody else — play to somebody else, play to our posts. Make them make the reads rather than her.”
On the other end of the floor, the Mystics’ Elena Delle Donne turned in a predictably strong performance, leading all scorers with 21 points and adding 10 rebounds. The five-time All-Star scored just six points in the first half, but she got going in the second half and keyed the Mystics’ 28-point third quarter.
“I thought we were really engaged, game-plan wise, in the first half,” Collen said. “I thought early in the third quarter, when we turned it over a few times, (Delle Donne) got away from us in transition. She hit some tough shots, there’s no doubt.
“But we got a little too far in help side on her, and you can’t recover on a player that can shoot it that quickly and has the ability to shot fake and beat you off the bounce. When you’re in recovery mode all the time, you get yourself in trouble against her.”
In the third quarter, the Dream scored just seven points — and four of them came from free throws. Rookie guard Maite Cazorla made the Dream’s only shot, a corner 3-pointer, for her fourth career completion from beyond the arc.
And while the Dream struggled to make shots, the Mystics rolled. Four of their 10 3-pointers came in the third quarter, and any momentum the Dream could’ve gotten from making stops was eliminated. And while the Dream outscored the Mystics in the fourth quarter, the 21-point difference in the third proved too much to overcome.
“It came down to, when we weren’t making shots, it was about getting stops,” Collen said. “We didn’t do either in the third. We didn’t keep the momentum going by making shots, and then we didn’t get stops. It would be different if we only scored seven but gave up 12 or gave up 15. We would’ve still had a fighting chance going into the fourth.”