Forty-five minutes before the doors open for fans to enter Gateway Center Arena, the first group of Atlanta Dream players are on the floor for their pregame warmups.
One of those players is Naz Hillmon.
After Hillmon goes through her warmups with a mix of catch-and-shoot 3-pointers, work inside the perimeter and on-the-go 3-pointers, she rounds out her sessions with free-throw shots before heading to the bench to hydrate.
But the work doesn’t end there.
She’ll go along the baseline front-row seats with her shooting coach and Dream assistant coach Chelsea Lyles to watch film. A lot of the film is usually looking at the offensive and defensive tendencies that the team they are about to play runs to go over any last-minute details before tip-off.
However, those sessions lately — and the work on the floor during practice — are also focused on something else: Hillmon’s shot. At a practice a week ago at the Dream’s practice facility at Core 4 outside of Atlanta, Hillmon, Bri Jones, and Angel Reese put in some post-practice shooting with their coaches. During the shooting practice, Hillmon’s shot mechanics and release looked slightly different.
“I think that has to do with just some aches and pains that she’s been battling with,” Lyles said to The IX Sports. “But we’ve brought stuff to her attention, and she’s seen it. It’s just every day being consistent with her shot and working on the way that she knows how to release it.”
The aches and pains that Lyles mentioned are a shoulder injury that Hillmon has been dealing with all year, as well as a hamstring injury that she was battling through at the beginning of the season.
“I’m feeling great. Feeling great,” Hillmon told The IX Sports before the Dream’s recent game against the Portland Fire. “Another day, another opportunity to play with my teammates, so I’m excited about that.”
It’s what any athlete would say, of course. They play through pain. They downplay the pain. They don’t make excuses.
But after seeing the numbers that Hillmon put up last year en route to winning the WNBA’s Sixth Player of the Year Award, it was obvious pretty early that something was off with her.
After dropping 15 points in the season opener against the Lynx, Hillmon went on to score 21 combined points over her next four games, going 0-for-9 from 3-point range.
If you said that in 2024, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Up until the end of that season, Hillmon wasn’t a 3-point shooter, going 1-for-6 for her career from 2022 through 2024.
Last year, under Karl Smesko, that famously changed, as Hillmon shot 32.1% from beyond the arc.
So you can see why that’s a surprise, right?
“It’s been different. It’s not something that I’ve dealt with throughout my entire career,” Hillmon told The IX Sports about battling through injuries this year. “So it’s been a challenge of figuring out my routine because it’s a little bit different than it has been, but I’m managing. I can definitely say it’s been a little bit of a different year.”
Hillmon is asked about her 3-point shooting all the time. When you change your game like that at the top level with the types of results that she had last year, it’s going to be a constant point of conversation.
Multiple times this season, Hillmon has mentioned the changes to her mindset going into 2025 to 2026. Last year, she said that she was anxious to shoot the three or thought about it before shooting it; this year, she lets it fly with confidence.
The 3-point percentage, though, is sitting at 26.7%, though, with her eFG% (shooting percentage after accounting for the value of 3-point attempts) and 3p Rate (percentage of all scoring attempts from beyond the arc) percentages down from last year at 50.9% and 46%, respectively.
Could there be any doubt creeping back in?
“No, I don’t think there’s any doubt in it. I know that if I continue to do what I’ve been doing, it’ll fall,” Hillmon told The IX Sports. “I think it is a little bit different when you’re expecting them to go in compared to last year when I wasn’t expecting them to go in, and it was just nice that they did. I’m able to sleep well at night if I know that I put in the preparation, I put in the work, and then I just live with the results.”
Lyles, who is the coach that turned Hillmon into a 3-point shooter last year with the Dream, echoed Hillmon’s sentiments.
“She’s very strong mentally, so she gets it, and she hasn’t been consistently playing. As you can see, she’s been on a little bit of minutes restrictions, but she knows how to shoot,” Lyles said. “She’s very comfortable in that, and surprisingly, we’ve had people who weren’t shooters go to shooters and like would not shoot for the longest. And Naz last year, she bought into it so quickly that she understands that, ‘OK, maybe I’m not doing this right. I need to fix this,’ but she understands what she needs to fix to be better, and it doesn’t really affect her too much.”
In response to Lyles’ feedback, Hillmon didn’t wallow. Didn’t shoot back. Didn’t seem surprised.
She just took accountability.
“I think the reps are going to be the biggest thing,” she said. “Being confident in whatever that form looks like and adjusting is really easy when I’m practicing and really thinking about my mechanics to fix it. It’s about getting those reps at game speed and putting it all together.”
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Hillmon wears a wrap on her arm while on the bench, and throughout the season, she’s worn one on her leg, as well, as she recovered from the hamstring injury.
Changing a shot because it isn’t falling is one thing. Tweaking the release because there’s a hitch in the shot is another. Changing it because of an injury is a whole other aspect.
Lyles is a shooter. She knows shooters. She shot 34.6% from 3-point range in her senior season under Smesko at Florida Gulf Coast University. So if anyone knows how the mechanics can be affected, it’s her.
“If it’s something that maybe has been wrapped or taped, she just has to get used to that,” Lyles said. “When you’re shooting before you have that injury, you have a lot more range of movement. And then once you have like different types of tape or a brace on it, and then it can disrupt obviously your range of movement, which then can affect your shot. So it’s just trying to get her fully healthy, and then that’ll help her with her shot.”
Hillmon’s production has been up and down this season from where it was a year ago. Her Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) — an advanced NBA basketball metric that isolates an individual player’s on-court impact on scoring margin by using ridge regression to filter out the strength of teammates and opponents — is down from 2.86 last year to 1.67 this year (which is the same as Azzi Fudd for comparison). Despite that decline, Hillmon is still finding a way to make her team better.
After each game, the team meets in front of the bench in a huddle. Allisha Gray was asked by the media after a game what words of advice she had for her team.
“Naz is the one that does that,” Gray said.
And it’s true. Hillmon hands the role of being a vocal leader, and it’s one that she wears on her sleeve proudly.
“Since I got to Atlanta, that’s been asked of me,” she said. “Whether I’m playing 40 minutes or four minutes, I always want to be someone who the team relies on and knows is going to have an input and opinion. I want to be someone who also, at the same time, is encouraging, uplifting my teammates, and I just think that I’m someone who likes to talk on and off the floor, so I just try to use that to pour into those around me.”
Prior to the Dream’s recent game against the Los Angeles Sparks, he mentioned that he wanted his team to communicate more. That’s what Hillmon has always done. The press box is on the upper bowl of the small Gateway Center Arena, but despite how loud the fans get, you can always hear two people on the court at all times: Hillmon and Angel Reese.
Smesko said that he wants Hillmon to continue to be that vocal leader, and with some down time coming up, he expects her to return to the player that we saw last year, too.
“It’s tough anytime you have one thing, then another thing comes up, and while you can play through it, you know you’re not 100 percent,” Smesko told The IX Sports about Hillmon. “She’s a competitor, and she will give us whatever she has. But we know that the day she is 100 percent is going to be a great day for us because she’s just had to be really tough and fight through some things for the whole first half of the season.
“I think the All-Star break might be great for her. But she’s going to be out there for us and competing, and she knows what to do out there. She makes very few mental errors, so we appreciate the toughness that she’s shown for the first half of the season.”
2026 WNBA Injury Tracker
It’s been a different year for Hillmon. A different shot. Different expectations. Different injuries. Different results.
She’s working to keep one thing the same, though, and that’s the high-energy, high-effort way that she plays the game.
Because in that way she is different, but in a good way.
