The Chicago Sky’s season died a multitude of deaths on its way to one of the worst records in the WNBA for the second straight year. The Sky’s season was effectively over when the front office botched the 2025 draft in spectacular fashion, when it made 36-year-old point guard Courtney VanderSloot their big free agent addition, again when Vandersloot suffered a season-ending torn ACL in early June, and once more when Angel Reese got hurt just before the All-Star break, leading to a 1-9 stretch in her absence that saw the team lose by an average of 21.7 points per game.
The Sky’s season has been over for a long time, but leave it to Reese to find some intrigue in playing out the string. With five games on the schedule, Reese spoke with Chicago Tribune ace reporter Julia Poe about the Sky’s terrible, horrible, no good season, and a future that looks even bleaker. Reese provided the honesty fans supposedly crave from athletes, and she told no lies in dissecting the micro and macro problems facing the franchise.
“I’m not settling for the same s−−− we did this year,” Reese said to the Tribune on the team’s lousy offseason. “We have to get good players. We have to get great players. That’s a non-negotiable for me.
“I’m willing and wanting to play with the best. And however I can help to get the best here, that’s what I’m going to do this offseason. So it’s going to be very, very important this offseason to make sure we attract the best of the best because we can’t settle for what we have this year.”
Reese kept going. She said “We can’t rely on Courtney to come back at the age that she’s at,” when talking about how to fix the team’s point guard problems for next year. She implored head coach Tyler Marsh to coach the team harder, and pointed to the Golden State Valkyries’ defensive intensity and team-wide competence in their first year as an expansion club to show that a more competitive present is possible. She yearned for a major free agent addition but said “I don’t know what will attract that,” nodding to the Sky’s status as a small market stand-in despite being located in the country’s third biggest market.
Reese’s words have predictably caused an uproar. Annie Costabile of Front Office Sports (who was on the Sky beat last season) followed by reporting teammates were unhappy with Reese’s direct remarks. Honesty has a way of hurting some feelings, and Reese already apologized for her remarks following Wednesday night’s blowout win over the Connecticut Sun for the Sky’s most lopsided victory of the season.
Reasonable minds can argue about whether this is a “bad look” for Reese from a publicity standpoint. What can’t be debated is that Reese was spot-on about the Sky’s dire outlook thanks to epic mismanagement from the front office and a broke boy ownership group.
The Sky already had to dig out of a hole when the team hired Jeff Pagliocca as GM in Oct. 2023. Chicago was previously led by James Wade, who was the head coach and GM during the team’s legendary run to the 2021 WNBA championship run. As that team suffered an incredible collapse in the semifinals the next season, the core broke up, and Wade made a short-sighted trade for Marina Mabrey, sending out two first-round picks and swap rights on another first-rounder, plus young forward Leonie Fiebich for a player who has still never been a WNBA All-Star.
The prudent move for the Sky at that point would have been committing to a full-scale rebuild. Pagliocca went the other direction and immediately started mortgaging the team’s future with some rash trades that were always doomed to fail.
Pagliocca didn’t get enough of a haul when he traded Kahleah Copper to Phoenix. He traded control of another future first-round pick to move up one spot in the draft order to take Reese in 2024, who the Minnesota Lynx may not have taken anyway. His 2025 draft decisions were a disaster-class that will serve as a case study for how not to run a WNBA franchise for future generations of women’s basketball fans.
The Sky came into the draft with the No. 3 pick. Pagliocca traded it to Washington for Ariel Atkins, and he included 2027 first-round swap rights for good measure. The Mystics drafted Notre Dame wing Sonia Citron, the exact type of Swiss army knife on the perimeter the Sky roster needs so badly. Citron has been better as a rookie than Atkins has been at any point in her career. It was a move that never made any sense for a rebuilding team, and the Sky will continue to pay for it well into the future.
Pagliocca’s first draft pick in 2025, Slovenian forward Ajša Sivka, could still be very good, and is expected to join the team next season. His next first-round draft pick, Hailey Van Lith, was a massive whiff. Van Lith had marketing appeal after a buzzworthy college career, but she was always too small and too shaky with her handle and jumper to have a real pro future. The Sky have badly needed point guard play this season after Vandersloot’s injury, and Van Lith hasn’t really been able to play at all as she’s battled an ankle injury. Maybe Van Lith becomes a starting-caliber point guard in the years to come, but her game is so flawed that it doesn’t seem like a likely outcome.
Pagliocca has put the Sky in position where they might give up the first-pick in the 2026 WNBA to best team in the league, Minnesota. If the team can’t land a marquee free agent this upcoming offseason, he risks giving up the No. 1 pick again in 2027 thanks to the swap with Washington. The WNBA currently uses two-year records to determine lottery odds, and that’s going to be very good for the Mystics as owners of the Sky’s pick.
Of course, a terrible front office isn’t the Sky’s biggest problem: ownership is. During a time when so many franchises are run by billionaires with ties to other professional leagues, the Sky’s ownership group just can’t measure up. The team currently practices at a north suburban park district. Their long-rumored private practice facility is finally coming next year, but the team didn’t get a convenient location for it, settling for a spot out by Midway Airport. There’s a world where the Sky are a big market bully with a nice arena in a basketball-crazed world-class city, but instead they’re decidedly the league’s biggest have-not now that the Sun are about to change hands.
Reese has a way of starting a firestorm with anything she says or does, and her comments are another example of it. What’s been underplayed in the fallout is just how right she is: the Sky are horribly mismanaged and there’s nothing a player of Reese’s considerable talent can do about it.
Anyone paying attention knew the Sky had a terrible offseason. Trading the rights to Citron and the 2027 pick for Atkins was a truly awful decision by Pagliocca that didn’t need the benefit of hindsight to be panned. Vandersloot looked washed in New York and was never going to be the savior in Chicago even if she stayed healthy. Sloot’s injury is a convenient excuse for the front office to cover their lost season, but relying on her in the first place to this extent was total organizational malpractice.
Pagliocca is objectively terrible at his job. He’s led the Sky by taking shortcuts to nowhere that sacrifice any long-term upside from multiple years of tanking-level play. If the Sky have any standards, he needs to be fired the day the season ends.
Blame Reese if you want for not lifting the team to greater heights. In reality, she has no help, and she’s still turned in a pretty good second season. Reese has improved her scoring efficiency from 46.4 percent true shooting as a rookie to 53.7 percent true shooting this year. She’s raised her assist rate from 9.6 percent as a rookie to 21.5 percent this year. She’s the best rebounder in the league, and she plays hard as hell on every possession. She still has some issue in her game — she turns the ball over way too much, has no shooting range, and spotty finishing touch — but she has at least solidified herself as a good WNBA player in her first two seasons, if perhaps not a mega-star on par with her level of fame.
When Reese was hurt, the Sky were liable to lose to any decent opponet by 40 points. With her, the games have been more competitive, and the team is +5.8 points per 100 possessions better with her on the floor. It’s easy to day dream about how well Citron’s shooting (44 percent from three as a rookie) and burgeoning on-ball game would have fit with Reese. Instead, Pagliocca tried to take a shortcut to mediocrity that never had any upside, and ended up with a basement-dweller team anyway.
Reese’s biggest crime was timing. These comments should have been made after the season was over, when she didn’t have to look her teammates in the face anymore. The main target of Reese’s comments was never intended to be her teammates anyway: this was calling out Pagliocca and ownership for driving this franchise into the ground. Reese is setting a standard for her franchise that they need to be better if they want to keep her around.
Angel Reese will never fly under the radar, but the downfall of the Chicago Sky has to some extent. It’s not Reese’s fault. Looking at Pagliocca’s transaction log for five minutes should be totally disqualifying for his future as a WNBA GM. Reese just said what anyone paying attention already knew.
