Dream drop eighth straight

A powder-blue feathery creature named Star went 0-for-2 Tuesday night at Philips Arena.

The crowd laughed. After all, it was just a mascot basketball game, mere halftime entertainment, and who could expect a 5-foot-9 eagle with stars protruding from her head to put the ball in the bucket?

Unfortunately for Atlanta’s WNBA team, it isn’t very good at that, either.

And there was no laughing in the home locker room after Tuesday night’s 83-69 loss to Seattle, who are 19-10 and tied for the best record in the league.

Dream coach Marynell Meadors got back to the locker room about 20 minutes after the game and told reporters she would be back in a minute. Instead, she was gone almost one minute for all 27 of her team’s losses.

“That’s a team thing,” she said when asked the details of her postgame talk.

Her players said it was about accountability, about what they have to do to win games. They’ve won only three of 30, and they’ve lost their past eight.

“Everybody’s disappointed,” Betty Lennox said. “Everybody’s disappointed in themselves and how we played as a team. … Anytime you have an atmosphere like that, it’s just really kind of quiet, you’re stepping back and realizing, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ That’s what’s next. Accountability. Every last one of us. All of us. What are we going to do about it?”

There’s not much time. Only four games remain, one of them at home. Meadors said she needs her team to get through an entire game without losing its focus. The stats suggest it needs to focus on the basket.

Ivory Latta, the team’s No. 2 scorer, missed 11 of 13 shots. Iziane Castro Marque missed 9 of 13. Even Lennox, who led the team with 25 points, was just 7-of-19 from the field.

The team made fewer than a third of its shots, and let the record show that the Dream is the poorest shooting team, at 39.5 percent.

“I have to keep my head up, keep shooting,” Latta said. “We’ve got to be more consistent. At times we look like 100 million bucks. At times we look like a dollar.”

Her opposite number, the Storm’s Sue Bird, looked like a seven-figure player all night. She scored 21 points, handed out nine assists and made five steals. Bird made a 3-pointer and a 15-footer to start an 11-0 Seattle run that turned a one-point Dream lead into a double-digit Atlanta deficit in the third quarter.

“She’s just calm. She keeps her team calm. Sometimes we’re really hectic out there,” Meadors said.

Latta has never been known for being calm, even in her days as a college All-American. And she’s really struggling now, with 7 points Tuesday, her third consecutive game under 10.

“She’s got to grow,” Meadors said, “with maturity and playing time.”