CHICAGO — Near another bad ending on Tuesday night, many people filtered out of Wintrust Arena. A smaller cohort decided to repeat themselves.
Sell The Team! Sell The Team!
It wasn’t the first time frustrated Chicago Sky fans have chanted this, but the timing was a touch confusing. Said team had played well. Said team nearly beat the Atlanta Dream, one of the best clubs in the WNBA. The Sky fell, but tolerably so.
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The explanation arrived a few minutes later. A fan hustled to the floor after the final buzzer and stood outside a temporary barrier of yellow ribbon, holding a large blue posterboard, hoping to grab the attention of one of the visiting players. A message in white lettering bordered a collage of images in the middle. DON’T WORRY CHICAGO, her sign read. ANGEL IS STILL WATCHING OVER US.
Angel Reese doesn’t play here anymore, of course. But this was never going to be beside the point Tuesday, even though she and the Dream swung through the arena in the preseason, even though everyone has had time to get out of their feelings and insist the most seismic trade of the offseason was for the common good. Her presence loomed. A reminder of what’s missing, even when what’s missing is not entirely a basketball problem.
It doesn’t matter that Reese, specifically, isn’t on Chicago’s roster anymore. It matters, a lot, that this is a Sky without a single star.
Call it an existential challenge in the modern WNBA, if not an outright dilemma. The visibility of the game, and the willingness of the players to avail themselves to fans and followers across all mediums, creates an increasingly measurable dynamic: Allegiance to the team is hardly the only thing. There’s fealty to individuals, regardless of the uniform they wear, which is plain to the eye and ear when Dallas Wings fans invade Atlanta, or Atlanta rolls through Chicago. And so on. Connection counts. Even by way of TikTok.
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So to be noticed, it won’t always be enough to win. You better have someone worth noticing, too.
Put another way: Do you want to be a franchise that simply is, or do you want to capture people’s imaginations?
Which brings us to the Sky, losers of eight of 12 games, and the mistake of nebulous intent.
Satisfying the conditions for WNBA attention in 2026 is hard enough. A market saturated with options for sports-related dollars and loyalty exacerbates the issue for the Sky, and always has since their inception in 2005. One incredibly obvious solution — often admittedly requiring a colossal amount of losing and luck — is onboarding someone everyone will talk about. Go get a star is a terrific plan, and laughably tough to execute.
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In April, Chicago let loose the one player on the team capable of captivating large-scale audiences. Under the circumstances, it’s defensible if it’s a win-win deal driven by clear purpose from both sides, which has been the refrain since the trade broke.
We’re in mid-June now, and it’s absolutely true for Atlanta, which has seen Reese make a team with championship aspirations edgier and better. In Chicago, as it stands, the club has followed the trade by testing a theory that it can grab hold of a city and find a place in the women’s hoops zeitgeist by being … what? The team that has the best chance to hover in the middle of the standings for years? A nice, solid group the market and larger WNBA universe can mostly ignore until the Indiana Fever roll in and push a regular-season game to the United Center?
The 2027 WNBA Draft is full of megawatt prospects. One of Chicago’s first-round picks is subject to a potential swap with the Washington Mystics. (The other is one acquired from the Dream, which presumably won’t fall high in the draft order, anyway.) So if USC’s JuJu Watkins fits the mold as the best overall prospect and the player with resonance reaching well beyond the court, the Sky have given themselves no chance of selecting her. The team also traded away its own first-rounder in 2028 for guard Jacy Sheldon and then recouped one with less of a chance to make a substantial difference via the Reese deal.
Even if egregious tanking is definitively off the board — general manager Jeff Pagliocca has effectively said as much — the Sky haven’t protected assets that could produce a star in the event they are accidentally bad.
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And, well, being actually bad tends to make things worse. Despite the inspired effort against the Dream in an 82-75 loss, the Sky nevertheless woke up Wednesday with the league’s third-worst net rating (minus-6.4).
But the agitation from the fans Tuesday wasn’t about the on-court product. Not really. It was about the disconnect between what they want — what almost any women’s basketball fan in the modern age wants, in fact — and what the Sky are delivering. Where there needs to be star-driven spectacle, there is none. Worse still: There’s little hope to create it.
In fairness, concluding no one cares is a specious take, at best, based on the evidence Tuesday. Reese jerseys popped up throughout the crowd but didn’t outnumber those for current players and other former Sky stars. Their biggest moments received pops substantially more robust than anything Reese inspired. Core, longer-range building blocks such as Sheldon, Kamilla Cardoso and Gabriella Jaquez heard some love. The Sky faithful seem to like them.
They do not obsess over them. That’s the difference. That’s the space between being something else in this version of the WNBA, and to this era of WNBA fans, and … just being there.
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After the buzzer Tuesday, Reese walked across the floor and moved along the fan cordon, signing things and snapping pictures. About halfway down, she found the woman with the “ANGEL IS STILL WATCHING” sign. She autographed it, then held the woman’s phone up and snapped a selfie. After a few more stops, Reese had to assure everyone that she’d be back, once her postgame duties were complete.
Sky players were long since out of sight. Not that anyone noticed.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Atlanta Dream, Chicago Sky, WNBA
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