The Atlanta Dream will not play their home games in this year’s WNBA Finals at State Farm Arena. Instead, the team’s two or three home games will be held at Gateway Center Arena, a venue with a maximum basketball capacity of about 3,500 people.
The switch happened because State Farm Arena had already booked other events over the potential Finals dates. Those bookings include two Atlanta Hawks games and a concert by the artist known as Sombr. Arena management chose to keep those commitments rather than hold the dates open for a possible Dream championship run.
OutKick host Craig Carton laid out the situation on Monday’s broadcast of “The Craig Carton Show,” saying the Dream’s absence from their own home floor wasn’t due to poor ticket sales.
“The WNBA Finals, when it goes to Atlanta for the two or three games that’ll be played in Atlanta, will not be playing in the State Farm Arena,” Carton said. “And not just because they can’t sell it out, which they proved last week they can, but because the folks that own and run the arena had to make a decision: Do we save the date months and months and months ago for the possibility that the Dream are going to be playing there, or do we actually use those open dates and sell for events that bring in more people? They chose the latter.”
Carton singled out the Sombr concert as the most embarrassing detail of the scheduling mess.
“The first event that’ll be the State Farm Arena instead of the Atlanta basketball game is a performer I’ve never heard of, his name or the band’s name is SOMBR, S-O-M-B-R,” Carton said. “Raise your hand if you’ve heard of SOMBR. I haven’t. SOMBR averages about 10 to 12,000 people per concert, which is awesome. So congratulations to SOMBR. That still means the arena is gonna be empty, but it’ll have a few more people than it would have had if the Atlanta Dream were playing.”
With State Farm Arena off the table, the Finals games move to Gateway Center Arena, which Carton described bluntly.
“Not only are they not playing in the State Farm Arena, they are playing in Gateway Center Arena,” Carton said. “The Gateway Center Arena is a glorified high school gymnasium. Max capacity for a basketball game is 3,500 people. Now I did the research. There are two other arenas within 30 miles of State Farm Arena that fit 10 to 12,000 people.”
Carton predicted the smaller venue would still sell out, one way or another.
“My gut is they will sell those games out, whether they give the tickets out for free or actually sell them. It’ll look great. Small high school gymnasium, rabid fans watching the WNBA Finals. But that’s what you get when you ask for that,” Carton said.
Carton tied the scheduling blunder to what he called the league office’s priorities, arguing the WNBA has leaned into certain narratives at the expense of its biggest draws, Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham.
“They want someone other than Caitlin [Clark] or Sophie [Cunningham] to be the face of the league,” Carton said. “Last week, only about a half a million people watched the Atlanta Dream play in their series against, I think it was the New York Liberty, right? Half a million watched; nobody cares. Why is it that nobody cares? Because the most popular players aren’t in it.”
Game 1 of the WNBA Finals tips off Saturday, Oct. 17.
