The Sky are where they always have wanted to be, where owner Michael Alter long pleaded for them to be. That is, talked about, in the news, a big deal, on the move, riding the wave.
And guess what comes with that success? Yep, scrutiny, gossip, rumors, criticism.
The Sky went 13-27 last season and at times looked highly dysfunctional, like a bicycle wheel missing spokes. There were problems with team chemistry, with three-point shooting, with court leadership. One wondered about their philosophy, about discipline, about basic maturity.
News conferences were tense. Players didn’t seem to understand that every question wouldn’t be a softball, that this wasn’t college anymore. Hovering over it like a defiant gym teacher was coach Teresa Weatherspoon.
She would get fired at the end of the season, but the damage was done by then. The Sky missed the playoffs for the first time since 2018. And only four of the WNBA’s 12 teams didn’t make the postseason. If the 2024 dysfunction could be tied to a symbolic point, it likely was the game on June 1, when the Sky visited the Fever in Indianapolis.
The Sky were 3-3 and playing before a wild and raucous enemy crowd. The event was hailed as a heavyweight clash between two star rookies, Sky forward Angel Reese and Fever guard Caitlin Clark. There was tense collegiate history between the two, ending with Reese’s ring-finger taunting of Clark after Reese and LSU beat Clark and Iowa in the NCAA championship game in 2023.
But the part of that game that still resonates came at the end of the third quarter, when Sky guard Chennedy Carter blindsided Clark to the floor with a shoulder block that was upgraded the next day to a flagrant-1 foul. It was a strange, nasty moment, occurring as it did when the ball wasn’t in play, and it was made stranger when Reese high-fived Carter on the bench with a big smile.
The moment clearly came from some deeper resentment of Clark than mere in-game competitiveness. Jealousy about the endless publicity Clark was getting seemed to be involved, particularly after Reese testily said about Clark being responsible for the growing interest in the WNBA, ‘‘It’s because of me, too.’’
Carter’s postgame comments were the most destructive. All she had to do was apologize, say the shove came in the heat of battle, that she lost her head for a moment and bore no ill will toward Clark. Instead, what she said was, ‘‘I ain’t answerin’ no Caitlin Clark questions.’’ Questioners then were stopped dead by Weatherspoon, who declared, ‘‘That’s enough. We’re good.’’
But they weren’t. The Sky had lost by a point, 71-70, and the difference could be said to have been Clark’s made free throw after Carter’s flagrant-1 foul. That began a stretch in which the Sky lost six of seven games and, with that, the season.
The ripple effect continues.
Carter, the feisty leading scorer for the Sky, was dumped unceremoniously in January, and nobody has picked her up yet. Reese, the rebounding wonder, is no longer Carter’s best pal. Something was way wrong in the locker room. The ever-troubled Carter might have been the problem, but it also might have been bigger than her.
The Sky just signed Courtney Vandersloot, the mix-master during their glory days, and Rebecca Allen. But they need a lot more. They have 6-7 Kamilla Cardoso and Reese underneath but no lights-out three-point threat or the bouncy penetrator Carter was.
Tied in with all this is Reese’s seemingly unending devotion to fashion, to her pink, pink podcast, to the goal of becoming rich and famous, to herself. As a fan, you wish she were more devoted to workouts and basic layups, at which she was the worst in the WNBA last season, making an embarrassing 42%.
What the Sky really need — and what new coach Tyler Marsh must instill — is a climate of fierce dedication to the game and, most of all, teamwork. Carter and Weatherspoon are gone. Reese, the former ‘‘Bayou Barbie,’’ remains. She is an off-court star with endorsements and sponsorships galore, now even with her own McDonald’s meal.
Thus, the question is, can she lead the way? Not with fame, not with money, not with her gowns, a la her New Year’s Eve affair that caused such controversy that she shut down her Instagram account.
Not with any of that. But with good, old-fashioned winning.