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<\/p>\nCHICAGO \u2014 Near another bad ending on Tuesday night, many people filtered out of Wintrust Arena. A smaller cohort decided to repeat themselves.<\/p>\n
Sell The Team! Sell The Team!<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019T WORRY CHICAGO, her sign read. ANGEL IS STILL WATCHING OVER US.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Chicago fans still long for Angel Reese, who moved in the offseason to the Atlanta Dream. (Michael Reaves \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Angel Reese doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s missing, even when what\u2019s missing is not entirely a basketball problem.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t matter that Reese, specifically, isn\u2019t on Chicago\u2019s roster anymore. It matters, a lot, that this is a Sky without a single star.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
So to be noticed, it won\u2019t always be enough to win. You better have someone worth noticing, too.<\/p>\n
Put another way: Do you want to be a franchise that simply is, or do you want to capture people\u2019s imaginations?<\/p>\n
Which brings us to the Sky, losers of eight of 12 games, and the mistake of nebulous intent.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 often admittedly requiring a colossal amount of losing and luck \u2014 is onboarding someone everyone will talk about. Go get a star is a terrific plan, and laughably tough to execute.<\/p>\n
In April, Chicago let loose the one player on the team capable of captivating large-scale audiences. Under the circumstances, it\u2019s defensible if it\u2019s a win-win deal driven by clear purpose from both sides, which has been the refrain since the trade broke.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re in mid-June now, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s hoops zeitgeist by being \u2026 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?<\/p>\n
The 2027 WNBA Draft is full of megawatt prospects. One of Chicago\u2019s first-round picks is subject to a potential swap with the Washington Mystics. (The other is one acquired from the Dream, which presumably won\u2019t fall high in the draft order, anyway.) So if USC\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Even if egregious tanking is definitively off the board \u2014 general manager Jeff Pagliocca has effectively said as much \u2014 the Sky haven\u2019t protected assets that could produce a star in the event they are accidentally bad.<\/p>\n