The Chicago Sky were supposed to be getting a franchise building block when they drafted Angel Reese with the seventh overall pick of the 2024 draft. Instead they ended up with a player who didn't even make it through her rookie deal. The Sky announced Monday morning that Reese had been traded to the Atlanta Dream, in exchange for two first-round picks and a second-round pick swap.
Devoid of certain context, this is a trade which the Sky could defend on its merits. While Reese was the best player on the team and an All-Star in each of her first two seasons, the Sky have won a total of 23 games since drafting her and are in desperate need of a rebuild. Then there's the way the 2025 season ended for Reese: with her being suspended for the first half of a game after she offered a sharp and accurate assessment of the franchise to the Chicago Tribune. It would be safe to assume that Reese wouldn't have been keen to continue her tenure in Chicago once she became a free agent, and so it stands to reason that the Sky would use her as a trade asset to try and kickstart their latest roster overhaul. They received 2027 and 2028 first-round picks from the Dream in today's trade.
That said, the Chicago Sky and merit are concepts as distant from each other as Earth and the Moon. This is possibly the worst organization in American pro sports. The Reese trade is a culmination of numerous managerial fuck-ups that have turned the Sky into the clowns of the WNBA. One reason the Sky might have been so desperate to get their hands on a 2027 first-round pick is because they already traded swap rights on their own first-round pick in that draft to the Washington Mystics. That swap was made as part of a trade in which the Sky received Ariel Atkins for the 2025 No. 3 draft pick, which the Mystics turned into All-Rookie guard Sonia Citron. Oh, and Chicago would've had the second overall pick in this year's draft, if not for a last-minute swap with the Minnesota Lynx right before last year's draft.
That's just one of several thick-headed roster moves made by Sky general manager Jeff Pagliocca over the last few years, leaving the team with limited draft capital and a decreasing ability to attract free agents due to losses piling up around the franchise's lagging team facilities. Reese pointed out this obvious reality when she spoke to the Tribune at the end of last season; the team responded by suspending her and getting negative stories about her into the press.
If you're wondering how Reese is feeling about the trade, she posted photos of herself in a Dream jersey just minutes after the news started to leak. We now get to find out what kind of team a more competent franchise might be able to build around Reese's skillset. Meanwhile, the Sky have nothing left to do but set off on yet another rebuild. The good news for them is that the 2027 draft should be stacked with talent. The bad news is that their original 2027 first-round pick, which they stupidly gave away, is likely to be much more valuable than whatever pick they end up getting from the Dream. I guess everything's riding on the recruiting power of that new practice facility.
