State Farm Arena is booked for a Sombr concert and Hawks games on Atlanta's scheduled home dates, leaving the Dream's 3,500-seat Gateway Center as the fallback.
The Atlanta Dream are set to host the Golden State Valkyries in the WNBA Finals, but as of four days before the series was scheduled to begin, the team did not have a clear home venue sorted out. State Farm Arena, the 17,044-capacity home of the Hawks where Atlanta played its earlier playoff games, is unavailable on the Dream's scheduled home dates because of a Sombr concert on Oct. 22 and Hawks regular-season games on Oct. 24 and 29.
That left the Dream's actual home arena, the 3,500-seat Gateway Center, as the fallback option, since efforts to find a bigger venue reportedly came up empty. Gateway Center has been Atlanta's home since 2021, but it is a fraction of the size of State Farm Arena and far short of what a Finals series would typically draw.
The WNBA is now considering moving its Finals schedule around to let the Dream play at a bigger venue instead. It is not yet clear which specific games, out of Atlanta's scheduled Games 3, 4 and 6, would be affected by any schedule change. The Dream later announced changes to the date and time of the finals games to work around the arena's existing bookings.