{"id":933918,"date":"2026-10-15T12:10:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T12:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/933918\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T12:10:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T12:10:20","slug":"how-the-atlanta-dream-reflect-the-wnbas-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/933918\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Atlanta Dream Reflect the WNBA\u2019s Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Atlanta Dream will take the court this weekend for their first WNBA<\/a> Finals game in 13 years, a pinnacle achievement for the franchise with the lowest valuation in the league still undergoing a massive turnaround.<\/p>\n

\n\tFive years ago, the Dream made headlines for their political activism more than their on-court performance. In 2020 and 2021, players successfully campaigned to elect now-Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) over then-team owner and incumbent Kelly Loeffler, who had opposed players\u2019 support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Dream players\u2019 campaigning assisted Warnock\u2019s election and contributed to the sale<\/a> of the team to Larry Gottesdiener, Suzanne Abair and former Dream player Renee Montgomery.<\/p>\n

\n\tToday, the Dream arguably represent the shortest and most direct bridge between the WNBA\u2019s social justice roots and its present era of mainstream popularity and dynamic athleticism. They are led by Angel Reese<\/a>, acquired in a preseason trade, who is the 2026 Defensive Player of the Year and a mainstream celebrity who has appeared at the Met Gala and in the Victoria\u2019s Secret Fashion Show. The Dream\u2019s front office has expanded tenfold from 2021 to the present, and the organization recently agreed to a deal with the NBA\u2019s Atlanta Hawks to share State Farm Arena as the team\u2019s permanent home venue beginning next season.<\/p>\n

\n\tGetting there required a lot of investment and patience. In 2021, the Dream were \u201ca team that had to be rebuilt. We were starting five years ago with a deficit,\u201d Morgan Shaw Parker, Dream president and chief operating officer, said. \u201cWe had to, for four and a half years, build our franchise to be able to bring in someone like an Angel Reese.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tDespite the strides the team has made, there\u2019s still a significant financial disparity between Atlanta and the team it will face in the WNBA Finals, the Golden State Valkyries. The Dream are valued at $280 million, according to Sportico\u2019s WNBA valuations<\/a>, and posted 2025 revenues of $16 million. The Valkyries, only in their second year in the WNBA, are worth $850 million and posted 2025 revenues of $78 million. This year, Golden State became the first women\u2019s team to generate $100 million in revenue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe gulf between the two 2026 Finals opponents was most apparent this week when the Dream scrambled to finalize an agreement with the Hawks to host Games 3 and 4 at State Farm Arena (capacity: 16,888) in Atlanta, rather than the Dream\u2019s longtime home of the Gateway Center (capacity: 3,500) in suburban College Park, Ga. The Valkyries, meanwhile, have fostered one of the most intimidating home environments at San Francisco\u2019s Chase Center, which the team shares with its sibling NBA franchise, the Golden State Warriors.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2020, stadium upgrades and All-Star trades were not even on the radar of the Dream, whose players that season assembled the \u201cVote Warnock\u201d warmup campaign to protest against Loeffler. Meredith Geisler, assistant professor of sport management at George Washington University, said the Dream\u2019s campaign that year built upon a tradition of progressive social justice that has been a hallmark of the WNBA since its inception.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat the Dream players achieved in 2021, Geisler said, \u201ccompletely turned that election around. Without a doubt. I don\u2019t think [Senator] Warnock would say anything different.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCrucially, Geisler said, the team\u2019s activism created an opportunity for Renee Montgomery, a player at the time who sat out the 2020 season to devote herself to activism, and as a result became the first former WNBA player to join ownership of a franchise when the Dream were sold in 2021.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was a beautiful illustration of what can happen if you are organized and have an important point of view. They affected change in the most wonderful way for them, and for the league itself, and turned [the team] over to people that may not have had this opportunity, certainly Renee,\u201d Geisler said.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis season, political discourse around the league has mostly centered upon the issue<\/a> of transgender women\u2019s participation in sport. The debate ignited when Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham expressed she was opposed to trans women in women\u2019s sports (currently, there are none in the WNBA) and has since become a firestorm among off-court talking heads.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFor hundreds of years, sport has always been a catalyst for social change,\u201d Parker, the Dream\u2019s COO, said. \u201cWe have the infrastructure, the platform to be able to tackle some of these issues. Do we have the answers for all of it? No, but I do think that some of the things come to surface that people want to talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tUltimately, she said, \u201cThe Atlanta Dream has really proven out that a small organization can create outsized impact.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Atlanta Dream will take the court this weekend for their first WNBA Finals game in 13 years,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":933919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[724,49,48,82,630],"class_list":["post-933918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-angel-reese","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/933919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}