The Chicago Sky are a bad team with dim prospects and a lot of work to do to contend for WNBA championships again. Their biggest star, Angel Reese, implied as much in a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune where she reflected on the team’s second straight season outside the playoffs and discussed the team’s plans in free agency. “I’m not settling for the same shit we did this year,” Reese told the Tribune’s Julia Poe, in an article published last Wednesday. “We have to get good players. We have to get great players. That’s a non-negotiable for me.”
Getting great players has been a tall order for the Sky lately. Turned off by the team’s lagging facilities and barebones staff, the league’s superstars have looked to other teams when making trade requests and in free agency. Nor has the front office done well to make the value signings and draft picks that non-destination teams must hit on to survive. This offseason, the Sky traded this year's third overall pick to the rebuilding Mystics for veteran guard Ariel Atkins, who will be a free agent when the season ends. The Mystics used the pick to draft Sonia Citron, who was named an All-Star in her rookie season; will likely be a unanimous selection to the All-Rookie team; and, crucially, will be under team control for another three seasons. In the Atkins deal, the Sky also gave the Mystics swap rights to their first-round pick in the 2027 draft, which projects to be one of the most talented classes in recent memory.
Ostensibly a win-now move, the trade didn’t have the intended effect. The Sky did not win now. They will not make the playoffs this year. They currently have the league’s second-worst record. If the team’s franchise star wanted to make the case that the Sky are not positioned to succeed anytime soon, all available evidence would support her.
Her teammates might not. The Sky announced last Friday that Reese would be suspended for the first half of Sunday's Sky-Aces game “because of statements detrimental to the team.” Reese’s quotes didn’t scan as obviously offensive—and the Tribune story isn’t packaged like some bombshell report—but a less generous followup report from Front Office Sports’ Annie Costabile, who covered the Sky for the Chicago Sun-Times before this season, showed how the comments might be viewed in a slightly different light. “Angel Reese Faces Uncertain Future In Chicago After Publicly Torching Teammates,” the FOS headline read. Costabile reported that “the entire team has seen Reese’s comments, and are unhappy with the direct attacks,” and that the players planned to address Reese in a team meeting. Sky coach Tyler Marsh said the suspension was “from the top down as an organizational decision.” Alissa Hirsh of the Sun-Times reported that Atkins said “ownership handled it how they see fit” when she was asked about the suspension, which might suggest that the decision came from above Marsh.
Poe’s article did mention some players by name, but the offending statements aren’t all in direct quotes, so it’s hard to tell exactly how much torching Reese did:
While praising [Courtney] Vandersloot’s abilities and leadership, Reese balked at the prospect of building the roster around a point guard attempting to return from an ACL tear at age 36. And she doesn’t believe backup options such as Banham or Van Lith are better prepared to carry the mantle on a playoff team.
Poe also wrote that Reese “believes there are only two guarantees on the 2026 Sky roster: herself and [Kamilla] Cardoso.” Not obviously offensive, again—the two of them are among the four players under contract with the Sky next season. (The other two are rookies Hailey Van Lith and Maddy Westbeld, neither of whom has yet proven to be a WNBA starter.) But Poe noted that the team hopes to re-sign some veterans from this year’s team, and it could read like Reese didn’t see any future with them.
The article did include a quote from Reese on Courtney Vandersloot, whose ACL tear in June left the team without a true point guard for most of the season. As a result, Reese has spent time in a slightly different point forward role this year. She told Poe that shoring up the point guard position was her biggest concern going into the offseason. “We can’t rely on Courtney to come back at the age that she’s at. I know she’ll be a great asset for us, but we can’t rely on that,” Reese said. “We need someone probably a little younger with some experience, somebody who’s been playing the game and is willing to compete for a championship and has done it before.”
Vandersloot won the 2021 WNBA championship in her first stint with the Sky, but will be 37 at the start of the next WNBA season and had slowed down in recent seasons, coming off the bench for the New York Liberty during the playoffs last year. Reese’s evaluation was probably not wrong.
After the Tribune article came out, Reese said she felt her comments had been taken out of context. “I didn’t intentionally mean to put down my teammates because they’ve been through this with me throughout the whole season,” she told reporters after the Sky beat the Connecticut Sun in Chicago last Wednesday. “They’ve busted their ass just like I busted my ass. They showed up through thick and thin with me when nobody could see anything. I would apologize to my teammates, which I already have, about the article and how it was misconstrued.”
Reese took shots in warmups before Sunday night’s game in Vegas, but ended up not playing at all in the 80-66 loss. At halftime, Sky PR sent out an update saying that Reese had been ruled out of the second half with a back injury. After the All-Star break, she missed 10 games with a similar injury before returning to play on Aug. 19. The Sky were 1-9 in those 10 games. Only two more to go.
