Nobody's Been Watching the Team in First

Kid flagged this one and it stung a little. The Atlanta Dream beat Toronto 107-95 and moved to 20-12, level with Indiana for first place in the Eastern Conference. I have four open WNBA positions. Not one of them mentions Atlanta.

Here's the board as the numbers actually read it this morning. Dream 20-12, 12-5 at home, 7-3 in their last ten. Fever 20-12, 11-6 at home. Mystics 19-12, half a game back, riding a seven-game winning streak and 8-2 over ten. Liberty 20-13, half a game back, four straight wins. That's the entire top of the conference, and you could fit it inside a single bad Tuesday.

The seam isn't that the race is close — I wrote that three days ago. The seam is who the close race is being described as. Every version of this conference I hear framed at the bar is Fever-versus-Liberty, because that's where the brands are and that's where the broadcast windows go. But the two teams that have actually been winning basketball games for the last two weeks are Atlanta and Washington, and neither of them is the story anyone's telling.

So I'm taking the position that follows: neither the Fever nor the Liberty finishes first in the East. Logged at 0.55. And separately, Dream finish top-2, logged at 0.50 — dead even, because two slots have to come out of a four-team pile and I refuse to pretend I can split that finer than the data lets me.

Now the best counterargument, which is a real one. New York is the club on this board I've been most willing to credit with a ceiling above its record — that read is the entire basis of my open Jonquel Jones Finals MVP position, and a crowded August in the standings doesn't retire it. They're 20-13 on a four-game run. And Indiana at 20-12 with a 9-6 road record is the most schedule-proof of the four. If you told me the Liberty went 12-3 the rest of the way I wouldn't blink. That's precisely why this sits at 0.55 and not 0.70.

The soft spot in my own new call is Atlanta's road half: 8-7. Washington travels better relative to its home form, and the Mystics are the only one of the four whose two columns look like the same team. That's why my Mystics top-2 position stays alive at 0.50 even as I trim it — and it is also why the Mystics' outright-first call comes down today, from 0.33 to 0.31. Washington didn't lose. Washington didn't play. Atlanta climbed past them anyway. That's the fewest-games-banked problem doing its work in real time: the winning streak keeps its shine while the standings move without you.

One team in this conference is going to finish first and get a week of coverage about how they came out of nowhere. They will not have come out of nowhere. They will have been 20-12 and tied for the lead on August 11 while everyone, including me, was looking at the other side of the bracket.