October 26, 2026
October 26, 2026
Atlanta Dream’s 2025 Season: Thirty Wins and a New Standard
Atlanta Dream’s 2025 Season rewrote what the franchise believed it could be. A team that went 15-25 a year earlier and scraped into the playoffs as the eighth seed clawed its way to 30 wins, the most in club history. A new coach, a rebuilt frontcourt and a fearless shooting identity turned a forgotten roster into one of the WNBA’s elite. The finish stung, but the standard had changed for good.
The Dream entered the winter needing more than tweaks. Atlanta had not won a playoff series since 2016, and the front office decided the old formula had run its course.
The Dream parted ways with Tanisha Wright in October 2024 and hired Karl Smesko a month later. Smesko arrived with no WNBA coaching experience. He had spent more than two decades building Florida Gulf Coast into a mid-major powerhouse. His teams lived beyond the arc, moved the ball relentlessly and defended with discipline.
The hire raised eyebrows across the league. Smesko answered by installing his system immediately, demanding volume three-point shooting from nearly every position on the floor.
General manager Dan Padover went shopping on the first day of free agency. On February 1, 2025, Atlanta signed 10-time All-Star Brittney Griner, former Connecticut forward Brionna Jones and veteran wing Shatori Walker-Kimbrough. Tina Charles, Cheyenne Parker-Tyus and Aerial Powers departed, and Iliana Rupert was lost in the expansion draft.
The Dream also used the No. 18 pick on Te-Hina Paopao, a sharpshooting guard from South Carolina. She earned an opening-day roster spot and became a reliable piece of the rotation. Even with the overhaul, preseason projections pegged Atlanta for roughly seventh place.
Atlanta Dream’s 2025 Season exposed those projections almost immediately. Atlanta went 5-2 in May, closing the month with four straight wins.
The new identity took hold fast. The Dream jumped from 19.4 three-point attempts per game in 2024 to 28.4 in 2025. Their accuracy climbed too, from 30.8 percent to 33.7 percent. Smesko’s offense finished second in the league in offensive rating at 108.2.
June delivered statement after statement. Rhyne Howard torched Chicago for 36 points and nine three-pointers in an 88-70 win on June 13. Two nights later, Atlanta flattened Washington 89-56, a 33-point demolition that announced the Dream as a genuine threat.
The defense mattered just as much. Atlanta posted the league’s second-best defensive rating at 98.9, trailing only Minnesota. The Dream also led the WNBA in defensive rebounding percentage and surrendered the fewest transition points. That two-way balance separated this group from every Atlanta team before it.
July brought the first real test. The Dream went 5-5 that month, and doubts about their staying power crept in. Smesko adjusted. Griner moved to the bench, and her minutes were staggered with Jones to keep a strong interior presence on the floor at all times.
The response defined the season. Atlanta seized August with a 9-3 record, including five straight wins early in the month. On August 23, the Dream throttled the defending champion New York Liberty 78-62 for their 24th victory. That win broke the franchise record of 23 set in 2018.
September brought no letdown. Howard poured in 37 points and nine more threes in a 104-85 rout of Los Angeles on September 5. Four nights later, an 87-62 win over Connecticut gave Smesko his 29th victory, the most ever by a first-year WNBA head coach. Atlanta closed with five straight wins and finished 30-14. A tiebreaker left the Dream as the No. 3 seed, their highest since 2018. The full statistical picture of the run is preserved at Basketball Reference.
Allisha Gray played the finest basketball of her career. She averaged a career-high 18.4 points per game and shot 38.4 percent from three on more than six attempts a night. Gray started the All-Star Game and won Eastern Conference Player of the Month three times. She earned All-WNBA First Team honors and finished among the top five in MVP voting.
Howard formed the other half of a dangerous backcourt. She averaged 17.5 points, and her two nine-three games became signature moments of the season. Her defense earned equal respect. Howard guarded perimeter scorers and bigs alike, landing on the All-Defensive Second Team.
Naz Hillmon became the season’s most surprising story. She had attempted just six three-pointers across her first three seasons. Under Smesko, she launched 165 of them. That transformation, paired with her energy off the bench, earned her the WNBA Sixth Player of the Year award.
Jones led the team in rebounding at 7.3 per game and shot 52.7 percent from the field. She joined Gray and Howard on the All-Star roster as a replacement selection. Jordin Canada ran the offense with 5.7 assists per game, while Maya Caldwell posted career highs in a full-time role. Padover’s rebuild earned him the WNBA Basketball Executive of the Year award, the third of his career.
The first-round draw looked favorable. Atlanta faced a sixth-seeded Indiana Fever team missing Caitlin Clark and several key rotation players to injury. The best-of-three series promised the Dream a real chance to end a nine-year drought without a series win.
Indiana struck first on September 14, opening with a 9-0 run and building a 15-6 lead. Atlanta refused to panic. The Dream seized control in the third quarter, when a Jones layup, a Gray pull-up and a Howard three pushed the lead to 47-40.
Kelsey Mitchell scored 27 points and kept the Fever within reach. Hillmon slammed the door with a three-point play in the final minutes. Gray and Howard scored 20 apiece, Hillmon added 16 points and nine rebounds, and Atlanta held on, 80-68, according to the official WNBA recap.
The momentum vanished in Indianapolis. On September 16, the Fever dominated Game 2, winning 77-60, forcing a decisive third game in College Park.
Game 3 delivered the cruelest night of the season. Atlanta led by seven at halftime, surrendered an 8-1 run to open the third quarter, then answered behind Howard to take a 69-61 lead. The Dream carried a 73-69 cushion into the fourth. A Jones bucket and a Howard three later pushed the margin back to five in the closing minutes.
Then the season unraveled. Indiana scored the next seven points. Aliyah Boston’s jumper gave the Fever the lead with seven seconds left, and Odyssey Sims added a free throw. Jones rose for one final jumper, and it fell short. Indiana escaped 87-85, a finish the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called a nightmare conclusion. Gray finished with 19 points and 12 rebounds, and Canada added 18 points and 10 rebounds in a losing effort.
The ending hurt precisely because the season had been so good. Atlanta doubled its win total, posted the best winning percentage in franchise history at .682 and finished second in the league in net rating. Atlanta Dream’s 2025 Season proved that Smesko’s system could thrive at the professional level, silencing the skeptics who questioned the hire.
The campaign also reshaped how the city viewed its WNBA team. Gateway Center Arena became one of the league’s toughest buildings, where Atlanta went 16-6. Gray established herself as a legitimate MVP candidate, and Howard grew into a two-way force. The season’s complete record documents the full haul of individual honors that followed.
One brutal final minute could not erase what came before it. Atlanta Dream’s 2025 Season gave the franchise a new identity, a new benchmark and a new expectation. Thirty wins became the floor, not the ceiling, for everything that followed.
7th February, 2017
17th June, 2026
5th March, 2016
29th March, 2016
17th April, 2016
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