Kyle Goon: Angel Reese’s offensive growth has the Atlanta Dream on the cusp of a championship

If you want to know early whether the Atlanta Dream will win the decisive Game 7 of the WNBA Finals, watch the 3-point line — and watch Angel Reese.

In one of the more uncanny stats of the season, the Dream are 16-0 when Reese hits at least one 3-pointer, including all three wins in their series with the Golden State Valkyries. That might seem like a dicey proposition for a career 18.9% 3-point shooter, except for one thing that has defined Atlanta’s playoff run: Reese has gotten better.

Through 11 postseason games, the Randallstown native and three-time All-Star has shown the work she’s put in to develop an offensive skill set that seemed unpolished when she entered the league. She’s made 10 of 26 (38.5%) attempts from 3-point range, and in the three Dream wins in the Finals, she’s shot 47.8% from the field, up from her career mark of 43.4%.

When Reese is having an efficient shooting night, it’s a bellwether that Atlanta is going to win — and it may be the factor that swings Game 7, as Reese has struggled when matched up with Valkyries shot-blocker Kiah Stokes. But Reese and the Dream don’t get one win away from a title without her leap on offense, which the 24-year-old has long felt was coming.

“Nobody around me is surprised,” she said. “But they didn’t know how fast it was gonna come.”

For a long time, Reese’s offensive game took a backseat to her much more developed defense and rebounding. Her left-handed shot, with an exaggerated snap of the elbow, has a clunky look. For most of her career, her shooting percentages reflected these mechanics. In two seasons with the Chicago Sky, she took just 38 shots from long range, making seven, and her overall field-goal percentage was 42.1%.

Reese’s celebrity has made her a target in many ways — viral lowlight clips of her missed shots are one example. Even as Reese has set league records for rebounding, her critics have claimed her numbers are inflated because she gathers her own misses (known derisively as “me-bounds”).

But the Atlanta coaching staff sought to insulate Reese from outside noise. From the moment Reese came to the Dream in April, she told them she wanted to work on her offense — and that’s what they’ve done.

“She’s handled it with grace — it’s not something that ever comes up between us,” assistant coach LaToya Sanders said of outside noise. “We just truly try to focus on her, you know, how can we make her game grow.”

When Reese was working out a trade from Chicago this spring, she told her agent she wanted to go to Atlanta because of the Dream’s coaching staff. Reese admired the development of forward Naz Hillmon, the 2025 Sixth Player of the Year, and had heard head coach Karl Smesko played a big role in Hillmon’s development. She wanted that for herself.

“With [Hillmon’s] shot in her individual development, I thought that was important,” Reese said.

Smesko and Sanders met with Reese soon after she landed with the Dream. Only 10 minutes after that first sit-down, they were on the court: Why wait?

Reese, Smesko and Sanders developed a shooting routine that Reese does faithfully after every practice. She makes a certain number of 3-pointers, then works on finishing from different areas of the court and in different situations: face-ups, back-to-the-basket, in traffic.

On average, Reese’s routine takes 30 minutes. The first few times, it dragged on as Reese struggled to make shots. But as the months went on, she found a groove.

“Now, because she’s hitting shots, that actually goes by pretty fast,” Sanders said. “She’s kind of got the muscle memory down a little bit.”

Reese’s in-game numbers improved, too. In the first two months of the regular season, she shot 41.3% from the field. In the last two months, she hit 48.6% of her looks (including six 3-pointers).

Some of the improvement, Sanders said, came from learning to trust her teammates, like All-Stars Rhyne Howard and Allisha Gray. Reese has a lot more help on the Dream than she had on the Sky, and she’s learned the best move is often to pass to one of them.

But Reese has become better at reading the court and her matchups. Her worst habit as a rookie was rushing shots, even when she was matched up against a talented blocker. The Dream staff has worked with her on targeting matchups that are more favorable and thinking her way out of problems instead of charging headfirst.

Sanders pointed to a Game 3 sequence in which Reese got a steal and swept down the floor in transition. In previous years, she might have forced her way into traffic for a tough finish. Instead, she feigned a drive to attract a defender, then passed to Howard, who nailed a 3-pointer.

Reese has long been a brash, outspoken player dating back to her days at Baltimore’s Saint Frances Academy, but the talk means little without the game to back it up. Even as she’s exuded an unassailable sense of self-confidence, she’s taken lots of time behind closed doors to improve her weaknesses, which has won over her Dream teammates and coaches.

“Even if she’s shooting well, she has not skipped her routine — not one time,” Sanders said. “She’s gonna get to work, she’s gonna be sharp, she’s gonna be crisp, and then she can go about the rest of her day.”

Reese’s offense will be one of the most closely watched aspects of Game 7, in part because her last three games have been rough offensively. Even as the Dream rolled in Game 6, Reese was just 5-for-18 — Gray and Howard took on the lion’s share of the scoring.

But the key, Reese said, is just keeping at it — even when it’s not going well at first. The work she’s put in will appear eventually, but she has to shoot for everyone to see it.

“They keep telling me to shoot, and I don’t like when I’m not making the shots,” she said. “But my teammates still trust and pass it to me. I’m really, really grateful to them for always putting confidence into me.”