The Atlanta Dream went into Aug. 24 as 9.5-point road favorites over the Los Angeles Sparks, and the number said almost everything about where both teams stood. Atlanta had won seven of its last 10 games, while the Sparks had already been eliminated from playoff contention.
That is why Dream vs Sparks was drawing attention again in Los Angeles. The teams had just met on Aug. 20, when Atlanta scored 124 points in a 36-point win, the second time this season it reached triple digits against Los Angeles. The Dream were still within 1.5 games of the Golden State Valkyries for the No. 2 seed entering Monday's action, so the result mattered well beyond one night.
Rhyne Howard was a major reason the Dream had been priced this way. She had scored 19 or more points in eight of her last nine games, averaged 22.0 points per game over that stretch, and shot 46.2 percent from the field while hitting 44.3 percent from 3. Her season average was 18.2 points per game, and she put up 26 points with five made 3-pointers in the Aug. 20 rout.
The Sparks, by contrast, were carrying a 13-24 record and the numbers around them were bleak. They were 13th in the WNBA in defensive rating and were allowing the second-most points per game in the league, which helps explain why they had moved on from All-Star guard Kelsey Plum at the trade deadline and still had not found a way to stabilize the end of the floor. Atlanta, meanwhile, ranked as a top-five team in offensive rating and kept forcing opponents into track meets.
The one wrinkle was location. Atlanta had already blown past Los Angeles by 36 points, but this rematch came on the Sparks' floor, where a home crowd offered the only obvious buffer against another one-sided night. Even so, the setup pointed in one direction: if the Dream kept getting the same kind of production from Howard, Los Angeles would need a far better defensive answer than it had shown all season.
The Aug. 24 meeting was the next test, and it was a meaningful one for both ends of the standings. Atlanta was still chasing positioning near the top of the WNBA, while the Sparks were playing out a season that had already slipped away.
