ATLANTA — The day will certainly come when the Atlanta Dream lose at home.
It just might not happen this season.
Thanks to balanced scoring (six players in double figures) and red-hot shooting from the field (56 percent), the Dream sprinted past the San Antonio Silver Stars for a 93-67 victory — the club's sixth straight win ... and seventh in seven tries at Philips Arena.
As the first WNBA team to 10 wins, the Dream led wire to wire on Sunday, rushing out to an 8-1 lead in the opening minutes before cruising to a 10-point advantage after one quarter.
And when San Antonio started hitting shots from long range in the second quarter, even outscoring Atlanta in the stanza (26-25), the damage had already been done.
By then, the Dream had established a frenetic pace the Silver Stars had no choice but to match; and when they were proficient in open-court situations, there was still no adequate response for Atlanta's 1-2 inside punch of Angel McCoughtry (15 points, nine assists, five rebounds) and center Erika de Souza (10 points, seven boards, three blocks).
"Every day, we keep making progress, and I think we're getting better. So yeah, this might have been our most complete game," said Dream head coach Fred Williams.
In the postgame scrum, the cool and calm Williams wasn't fazed by the specter of his Dream being the hottest and most-talked about team in the league. (Hence, the bigger media scrum compared to a few Sundays ago.) Nor did he seem daunted by the media-friendly, but ultimately loaded question of, Can the Dream win every home game this year?
"Oh boy, I don't know about that. I don't know if (the Dream players) are even aware of (being 7-0) at home. Maybe they do," Williams said. "I just worry about how we prepare for each game, and how hard we play."
On Sunday, the Dream fell short of tying their season-high point total (98 vs. Tulsa on opening night), but they eclipsed every other scoring effort — home or away.
With only one seasonal loss, it's perhaps trite to establish a few indicators that guarantee victory every time. But the Dream are 10-0 when hitting the 68-point mark overall — a figure the club reached with two-plus minutes leftin the third quarter on Sunday.
As a result, all 10 Dream players posted a positive plus-minus ratio for the day, with Tiffany Hayes (19 points), Jasmine Thomas (15 points), Aneika Henry (12 points, six boards) and Armintie Herrington (10 points) rounding out the crop of Atlanta's double-digit scorers.
In a weird way, the Silver Stars (3-7) can feel no shame from the 26-point setback. The club had four double-digit scorers and connected on more three-pointers than the Dream. They just weren't a good match for Atlanta's size, losing the battles with rebounding (38-24), blocks (7-5) and points in the paint.
The Dream put things away in the third quarter, perhaps still riding high off McCoughtry's buzzer-beating layup just before halftime (boosting Atlanta's lead to 49-40). After a made basket, McCoughtry needed only 3.1 seconds to dribble full court and dish to de Souza for an easy layup.
Two possessions later, McCoughtry had an easy putback off a missed shot. After that, de Souza nailed a tricky turnaround jumper in the post. And with the score at 57-47, McCoughtry pulled off the game's coup de grace moment, leaping over the competition to grab a potential alley-oop pass near the basket (side angle) ... before instinctively finding de Souza for a wide-open jumper — as if San Antonio's five had assumed McCoughtry would attempt an acrobatic shot.
"I saw Erika (in her peripheral sight)," recalled McCoughtry, one of the league's most complete forwards. "She had a better look."
That sequence essentially defines the Dream's season to date. Yes, they're running on opponents at will; and yes, they've been devilishly hard to score on in the paint. But at the core of everything, offensive execution and selflessness still trump all comers.
The Dream (3-1 on the road) are set to embark on their longest road swing of the season, a four-game, 12-day western voyage to Minnesota, Seattle, Los Angeles and Tulsa. After that, they can look forward to a post-All-Star-Game stretch that includes nine games in 21 days.
