The Atlanta Dream’s first WNBA Finals appearance since 2013 will be played in a 3,500 seat arena after the team couldn’t move its home games to State Farm Arena, which is booked on those nights for a concert and two Atlanta Hawks games.
USA Today reported Sunday, citing people with knowledge of the situation, that the Dream’s talks to move Finals games to the 17,000 seat arena in downtown Atlanta fell through. State Farm is booked during Games 3, 4 and 6, including October 24, when the Hawks open their home schedule. The Dream also looked for other large venues around Atlanta, and those efforts didn’t pan out either.
Barring a change, Game 3 on October 22, Game 4 on October 24 and Game 6 on October 29 will be played at Gateway Center Arena in College Park, the Dream’s home since 2021. It holds 3,500 fans for basketball.
The Golden State Valkyries, who host Games 1, 2, 5 and 7, won’t have that problem. They’ll play every home game at Chase Center in San Francisco, where they’ve played all season. Valkyries president Jess Smith said her team won’t play a single postseason game outside of Chase Center, and she shrugged off the Dream’s situation. Smith said arenas book events around contingency dates all the time, called it standard operating procedure, and said, “It’s not a headline.”
For Atlanta, the timing stings. Just five days before the report, the Dream announced a multi-year deal to make State Farm Arena their full time home starting in 2027, when the WNBA moves to a 50 game season and the Dream will host all 25 home games downtown. The team already played several regular season games and its home playoff games there this year, including the semifinal opener against the New York Liberty, when Angel Reese was honored as the league’s Defensive Player of the Year.
Demand has never been the issue. The Dream have sold out every game at Gateway Center over the last three seasons and sold out State Farm Arena eight times in that span.
Dream guard Rhyne Howard said the big arena games during the season helped prepare the team for this moment. “We had a couple of games there, and they felt like playoff games,” Howard said.
Atlanta earned its Finals spot the hard way, entering the playoffs as the No. 4 seed and then sweeping both the Washington Mystics and the Liberty. Now the Dream will try to win their first ever Finals game. The franchise is 0 and 9 all time in the WNBA Finals, with losses to Seattle in 2010 and Minnesota in 2011 and 2013.
