Brittney Griner Gets Honest on Atlanta Dream’s Championship Chances

The playoffs are just around the corner for the Atlanta Dream and they’re posed to make a deep run.

2025 has been a resurgent year for Atlanta. After an underwhelming 15-25 finish in 2024, the Dream have risen to the top of the WNBA with the second-best record in the league.

The Dream will be fighting for their first championship in franchise history, but they have a long road to get there. As well as the regular season has gone, anything can happen in the playoffs. With such relatively few games to decide a team’s fate, every piece of a team needs to be at their best to guarantee success.

The Dream have a handful of exceptional players on their roster that have led them to success, but the offseason addition of one superstar in Brittney Griner lends the Dream a WNBA veteran who knows what it takes to take a deep run at the championship.

“Everybody’s ready. When you get into the Finals, you get in the playoffs, it’s always that extra player that you’re not thinking of, that someone’s not thinking about, or somebody from the bench that needs to come in and step up,” Griner said. “It’s always that sixth or seventh player, and I think we have that, honestly.”

Griner touches on a crucial component to postseason success. In the playoffs, it can’t just be the stars that show up. In crunch time, it’s often the unlikeliest of players that can show up and decide a game. The teams with the deepest rosters can have the most success and find themselves outlasting their opponents when it matters most.

The head coach leading the team is just as important as the players on the court, especially when it comes to the razor’s edge of playoff success.

Fortunately for the Dream, they have head coach Karl Smesko at the helm. Smesko has had a triumphant first season as Atlanta’s head coach, evidenced by the record set after the Dream’s most recent win over the Connecticut Sun, which set the record for Smesko as the most wins by a first-year head coach in WNBA history with 29.

Griner has the utmost faith in the depth of her team to make it through the battle of the postseason. With Smesko coaching, the 2014 WNBA champion has even more confidence in her head coach’s ability to bring out the full potential of the squad.

“From the starting five to everybody on the bench, we’re ready to come in and do what we need to do, and coach has done an amazing job on challenging each and every one of us,” Griner said. “Like Naz [Hillmon] said, he really focuses on getting better himself, and you can see it.”

The playoffs are anybody’s game. The Dream will likely face off against the Indiana Fever in the first round, beginning September 14. With the championship experience of Griner and the full roster of talent for Smesko to work with, it may be Atlanta’s game most of all. If you ask Griner, she would say the same thing.