The WNBA expansion draft takes place on Friday, and one team now knows that none of its players will be selected. On Wednesday, the Chicago Sky made a series of trades with the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo that essentially boiled down to this: Chicago gave up draft assets in exchange for a guarantee its players wouldn’t be taken in the expansion draft. That involved swapping second-round picks with the Fire and then straight-up giving a second-round pick to the Tempo.
First, the idea that you can even make a trade like that is weird, right? But second, I really don’t know why the Sky did this, because …. these are bad trades. Chicago didn’t need to be scared of losing the sixth or seventh-best players on its roster. Here’s why.
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The Chicago Sky’s expansion draft trades make no sense
Chicago Sky center Kamilla Cardoso | Stephen R. Sylvanie-Imagn Images
How do I say this nicely? I don’t want to, like, say I understand how to run a professional sports team better than an actual professional sports team general manager, but from where I sit, the Sky appear to have just given away one draft pick and traded down with another for absolutely zero reason.
WNBA teams are able to protect five players from selection in the expansion draft, which essentially means that in the worst-case scenario, you lose the player you consider your sixth-most important. For many teams around the league, losing your sixth-most important player would really, really suck – players like Olivia Nelson-Ododa and Azur Stevens have appeared in some mock expansion drafts, for instance. But for the Sky? It’s not clear which five players the team would even protect, or who the expansion teams would want. Angel Reese, obviously. Kamilla Cardoso and Ariel Atkins? But beyond that, the team doesn’t have many building blocks.
More than likely, Chicago would have lost Hailey Van Lith or Maddy Westbeld. Maybe both. And while losing young players would have sucked, is it really worth trading away assets for?
I know that second-round picks in the WNBA don’t have a great track record, but an expanding league will make each draft pick more valuable. Giving up one of those picks to avoid losing a middling player is an objectively weird move. There’s no guarantee the expansion teams would even both take one of your players, considering Chicago has one of the league’s worst rosters, but you’re willing to give up a chance at a new rookie-scale player in hopes of saving someone’s roster spot who teams might not even want?
It’s just another example of Chicago’s front office doing something that goes against conventional wisdom, and it’s tough to give general manager Jeff Pagliocca the benefit of the doubt here when he has a history of making strange moves that don’t work out.
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For example, the Sky traded the pick that would have landed at No. 2 in this class for the No. 11 pick last year. It was clear at the time the trade was made that Chicago wasn’t a good team and was giving up a future lottery pick just for the chance to draft Van Lith. Maybe that’s part of why these trades happened – the team doesn’t want to admit defeat on last year’s bad trade, so it made a new bad trade this year?
Regardless of the reason, these moves feel short-sighted, and they’re another example of why the Sky front office is viewed so negatively by fans from around the WNBA.
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This article was originally published on www.fansided.com as WNBA Expansion Draft trades prove Sky front office doesn’t know what it’s doing.
