Team Heat Check: Atlanta Dream Run Hot, Toronto Tempo Run Cold (WNBA)

Ten games is not a season, but it is a mood, and moods decide a lot of games. The current mood around WNBA: Atlanta Dream keep winning, Toronto Tempo keep losing, and everybody else lives somewhere in the weather between.

Who's hot

Nobody is playing better than Atlanta Dream right now. The record says 8-2 over their last 10; the points column says even more, a +110 margin that works out to 97.0 scored and 86.0 allowed a night.

Indiana Fever are the closest thing to company at 8-2, with a +83 points margin that says the record is no fluke.

Minnesota Lynx (8-2) round out the warm end of the ledger.

Some context helps: across every club in the sample, scoring sits at 86.7 points per game right now. Atlanta Dream are beating the league's own pace by 10.3 a game.

The cold end

Then there is Toronto Tempo. A 1-9 stretch is ugly on its own; pair it with a -138 points margin and it stops looking like bad luck. They are being outscored by about 13.8 points a game, and no scheduling quirk explains that away.

Connecticut Sun are not far behind on the misery index at 2-8.

The middle of the table is where the real congestion lives: Dallas Wings (5-5) and Las Vegas Aces (5-5) are separated by almost nothing, and one good weekend reshuffles the whole neighborhood.

By the numbers

For the fuller picture, the five best recent records in the league:

Worth remembering

As always, watch where record and points margin tell different stories about the same club. The margin tends to know first.