ATLANTA — For the first decade of Brittney Griner’s WNBA career, she was a social butterfly in the locker room, regularly asking teammates about their plans for after games or practices.
“What we doing? What we doing?” she’d repeat.
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But now, as a 34-year-old veteran, Griner said, “I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m gonna go wash these bottles. I’m gonna go play with my son. We’re gonna watch some Gracie’s Corner,” she said, referring to an animated educational children’s YouTube channel. “It’s just a little bit different now.”
Griner and her wife, Cherelle, are parents to 10-month-old son, Bash, who is wide-eyed, curious and learning to walk. Parenting responsibilities are not the only difference in Griner’s life this spring.
For the first time since being selected No. 1 in the 2013 WNBA Draft by the Phoenix Mercury, Griner is playing on a new team. She signed with the Atlanta Dream this past offseason. It’s a move as significant to her as it is to her new franchise. Although Atlanta has made the playoffs the past two seasons, it has just one winning season since 2014. Griner, a 10-time All-Star and three-time Olympic gold medalist, could be the steady veteran who can anchor their future.
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It’s early, but she has already woven her infectious spirit into the fanbase. She attended Atlanta’s season-ticket holder kickoff event — a cookout held at Piedmont Park — in May. For more than an hour, Griner and her teammates chatted with fans, danced and posed for pictures. When 6-foot-9 Griner stepped over a park fence to grab donuts from a nearby food truck, Atlanta supporters were impressed. One small step for Griner. One huge leap for the Dream.
“(Griner) is very easy going, fun, playful,” Dream general manager Dan Padover said.
Griner will make her regular-season home debut Thursday night against the Indiana Fever, yet in many ways, she seems to have already found what she was looking for.
“Rejuvenated for sure,” Griner said. “I definitely have a new energy being here in Atlanta. I feel like I’m at home.”
As Griner determined what was next in her career, she wanted to find a place where she felt comfortable. She didn’t enter the offseason thinking she would leave the Mercury. She had only ever played in Phoenix, where she won a WNBA championship in 2014. She thought about a maxim from her father: “You don’t give up when the times are tough. You buckle down. You endure and find a way to get out of them.”
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After 11 WNBA seasons and reaching the back half of her career, Griner initially thought she would help Phoenix get back on top before eventually exiting the game.
“Where I got drafted, I definitely, in my mind, wanted to retire. But it wasn’t up to me,” she said.
Griner said that before playing for Unrivaled — a new professional three-on-three league that tipped off in January — she visited the Mercury facility for a matter unrelated to her unrestricted free agency. Only then, Griner said, did she hear from Mercury representatives that her future in Phoenix was uncertain.
Griner flourished there as a two-time WNBA scoring leader and became one of the WNBA’s most recognizable stars. When she was detained in Russia for more than nine months in 2022, she was grateful that the Mercury helped raise awareness about her imprisonment and led outcries for her release.
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So learning the franchise was prepared to possibly part with her came as a surprise.
“I was like, ‘I want to be somewhere where they know for a fact they want me,’” Griner said.
On the first full day of free agency in January, she met with Padover, owner Larry Gottesdiener, first-year Dream coach Karl Smesko, assistant general manager Brooklyn Cartwright and others from Atlanta’s coaching staff. For an hour, the franchise pitched how she would be a great fit with their existing foundation and the city. Growing up in the Houston suburbs and graduating from Baylor, Griner had always been fond of living in the South — the charm of its towns, the region’s culture, and, especially, its food.
“More than anything, she was really looking for a home,” Padover said.
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Griner also met with representatives from the Dallas Wings and the Las Vegas Aces in free agency. But a few days after meeting with the Dream, she spent an afternoon boating and fishing with three Atlanta players — two-time All-Stars Rhyne Howard and Allisha Gray, and two-time WNBA champion and All-Defensive first-team guard Jordin Canada. Like Griner, they were also participating in Unrivaled.
By then, she had decided to play for Atlanta, and she wanted to hang out with her new teammates. They enjoyed the waters off Miami Beach, and Griner, an avid fisher, caught a king mackerel. But there was other business to handle.
On the boat, Griner filmed a video — with cameos from her boatmates turned teammates — for social media where she announced herself as the newest player in Atlanta.
“It was very special because not only was it just her announcing, but her already wanting to be a part of us,” Howard said.
Griner is helping further energize one of the league’s budding franchises, too.
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In February 2021, Gottesdiener, the founder and chairman of a leading real estate private equity company, led a trio of investors to purchase the team. Along with business partner Suzanne Abair and former Dream star Renee Montgomery, Gottesdiener said they walked into what was “tantamount to an expansion franchise.” Atlanta had only seven employees in its corporate office. Within months of their new ownership, the franchise parted ways with its team president and cycled through head coaches.
Since then, the Dream have rebuilt their infrastructure. They now have more than 50 full-time corporate employees, with aspirations to keep growing. Gottesdiener said Atlanta is “actively negotiating” a new practice facility as well as working on plans for what would be the WNBA’s first purpose-built stadium.
The Dream have also reestablished themselves with sharp maneuvers rather than relying on winning the WNBA Draft lottery. Atlanta has made 10 trades since 2022, acquiring key draft picks (including the No. 1 pick in the 2022 draft, which was used to select Howard) and players (including Gray and Canada).
That trio was a draw for Griner as she thought about where she wanted to spend the next stage of her career. She’d observed their humor and warmth at a recent Team USA Olympic camp and enjoyed hanging out with them.
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“You don’t hear mess about the Atlanta Dream,” Griner said.
Jitters washed over Griner as she entered the Dream’s Core 4 facility on the first day of training camp. But almost immediately, Griner settled into her new environment, and her teammates felt her presence.
Griner said her father instilled in her the importance of connection. He taught her to always walk into a room and speak to everybody. So Griner began to talk, and lead.
“Every day is a gift,” she said. “Tomorrow is not guaranteed. You never know. I just want to take advantage of all the time I can while I’m here.”
Nobody knows that better than Griner, whose detention in Russia provided her with newfound perspective.
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During Atlanta’s first preseason workout, Griner gathered a few younger players and delivered some hard truths.
“As much as we want y’all to make the team, not every single one of y’all are going to make it,” she said she told them. “That’s not the end of the world. The goal in life is to be able to provide for your family and have a job. Going overseas is not a bad thing. And that doesn’t mean you’ll never be back in the W.”
Smesko, a first-time WNBA coach who spent more than two decades coaching Florida Gulf Coast, has watched Griner pull players aside to teach about patience and effectively using the post. (Griner and fellow high-profile free agent acquisition Brionna Jones are two of the WNBA’s best bigs around the basket.)
In between the first and second quarter of Atlanta’s preseason opener against the Washington Mystics, Griner provided clear feedback on the Dream’s defense, despite leading by 20 points.
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And as the Fever made a late run in Tuesday’s game against Atlanta, Griner helped calm her teammates on the bench and on defense.
”She just has natural leadership qualities about her,” Smesko said. “She’s shown great leadership. She’s somebody that makes sure that we keep things going.”
“Having her on the court with me, I get to take a deep breath,” Howard said after Tuesday’s one-point win at Indiana.
Howard has shouldered the responsibilities of being a franchise centerpiece. A two-time All-Star, she remains integral to Atlanta’s present and future, but Padover has noticed a newfound freedom in the 25-year-old wing.
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“The people we brought in here really help her feel some comfort that she doesn’t have to do it herself,” he said.
“BG’s making it hard for everybody else to be quiet,” Howard said. “It’s like, we have to match her energy.”
Griner is playing a different role, too. The Dream hired Smesko in part because of FGCU’s 3-point success and offensive creativity. Atlanta, which had a league-worst offensive rating in 2024, has already been much improved. It scored at least 90 points in its first two games.
Despite her size advantage, Griner hasn’t just camped out around the block this season. She opened both of Atlanta’s preseason games with 3s. Expect her and Jones to play off of each other in high-low actions as the season progresses, though their post play remains important as well.
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Gottesdiener said he expects this Dream season will be one to “savor” and Griner said she is doing just that, finding bliss with the franchise and the city.
After training camp practices, she routinely returned home and folded into a new favorite chair on the back porch of her home in Atlanta’s suburbs, and relaxed alongside Cherelle and Bash. She watched squirrels running across her backyard and heard birds singing.
“It seems so small, but those things mean a lot to me,” Griner said. “That’s my peace, and I have it right here. It’s given me new life.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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