{"id":181124,"date":"2025-08-28T00:57:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T00:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/181124\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T00:57:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T00:57:09","slug":"karl-smesko-drops-take-on-coach-of-the-year-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/181124\/","title":{"rendered":"Karl Smesko drops take on Coach of the Year award"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Atlanta Dream are currently in second place<\/a> in the WNBA and recently broke the franchise record for wins in a season. None of this would be possible without head coach Karl Smesko, who came in during his first year with the team and made a big difference. At this point in the year, many players are getting endorsed for end-of-the-season awards<\/a>, and Smesko’s name has come up<\/a> in the Coach of the Year discussion.<\/p>\n

After their franchise win against the New York Liberty, Smesko was asked about being a candidate.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs for coach of the year, to me, the most important coach of the year is whoever wins the championship,\u201d Smesko said. \u201cThe other thing is nice; it\u2019s a title, it\u2019s probably a contract bonus for most people. To me, the coach of the year is whoever gets their team through those playoffs and gets to hold that championship trophy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though the award is for the regular season success, Smesko wants to make sure if he wins it, he wants to make a deep playoff run and win the championship. It shouldn’t be out of the question for the Dream, especially with the way they’ve been playing this season.<\/p>\n

Karl Smesko receiving endorsements for Coach of the Year<\/strong><\/p>\n

The players on the Dream have also been adamant about Smesko being in those conversations, and Naz Hillmon thought that her coach wasn’t getting enough recognition.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he definitely is deserving of being in those conversations,\u201d Hillmon said. \u201cIf not, the top in my opinion. Maybe I\u2019m biased, but before this season, we were ranked by some people as number seven, and we\u2019re number two right now. The season is not over. We got a bunch of games left, but I think that speaks to what he\u2019s done to make this team.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see a lot of players having career highs and adding more things to their game. Our coach is probably gonna say \u2018Oh, I don\u2019t care about it,’ but I definitely think that I don\u2019t hear enough about it, and I think that he should definitely be in that conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Smesko was asked about what Hillmon said, he indeed tried to downplay the endorsement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m glad she said that. I want them to think nobody has an advantage over us in terms of being prepared for a game,\u201d Smesko said. \u201cThere are great coaches in this league, and the goal is to have our team the best prepared to play every day. That\u2019s a goal of mine, of having the best prepared team every time we go out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Atlanta Dream are currently in second place in the WNBA and recently broke the franchise record for…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":181125,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[1503,8808,62,67,132,68,232],"class_list":{"0":"post-181124","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-atlanta-dream","9":"tag-reporting","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-wnba"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115103678273935453","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}