Film Study: Kysre Gondrezick Signs With the Sky
Diving into the considerable potential the former Fever lottery pick (and 2022 Sky training camp attendee) will bring to the Windy City.
The Sky signed Kysre Gondrezick to a training camp contract on Thursday—adding to their offseason additions and bringing back a player who was briefly part of Chicago’s 2022 training camp under James Wade. With Spoon at the helm, Gondrezick will have a somewhat familiar face in charge as her mother played with Spoon on Louisiana Tech’s 1988 NCAA Championship team. In case you forgot, Gondrezick was selected fourth overall by Indiana in the 2021 draft. And, after being cut by the Fever before the 2022 season, she did not play in the W during either of the last two seasons. Yet, Gondrezick is still just 26 and showed loads of potential during her brief run in the W. Let’s take a look at some of the brightest aspects of her game that should be of value as she reunites with Spoon and the Sky when training camp kicks off:
1. High-Pressure Defense
The first thing that jumps off Gondrezick’s film is just how high her defensive ceiling is. For a player with a relatively slight frame who was most well known at West Virginia for being an offensive force, I was surprised to see how polished she looked on defense in her 19 games as a rookie. Of course, she was still a first year player prone to the occasional missed coverage (even vets miss things now and again), but the overall sample—especially in games where she got a solid run of minutes—was really impressive. The element that stands out most: her ability to stay tight on someone’s hip throughout a possession. On the ball, you can see her doing this effectively in the first three reps against three very unique types of player: Dana, Sabrina Ionescu and Sami Whitcomb. Even if the play ends with a foul, you see her ability to change directions multiple times and stay with a ball carrier who appears to have an obvious advantage driving. In the rep against Whitcomb, you also see how shifty she is around screens—an ability that popped up fairly often throughout her half-season with Indiana as well.
The next two plays, against Kah, offer great examples of what Gondrezick can bring defensively—even against a superstar. In the first rep, she stays with Copper well despite an obvious size and strength disadvantage, and it takes a veteran move from Kah—recognizing the outstretched arm that’s a guaranteed whistle—to draw a foul. With more experience, Gondrezick could learn those moves which the game’s craftiest offensive players all have in their arsenal and have better odds to avoid committing a foul. In the second rep—later in the same game (maybe her best in the W), you see Gondrezick’s most impressive defensive skill (at least for me)—her ability to deny the ball. Against Kah, her initial denial forces the Sky to reroute their set while a similar effort in the final play below against Seattle frustrates Epiphanny Prince enough to make the veteran guard commit an offensive foul. These are the examples that are most glaring and make for a nice highlight, but there’s many other—less visually apparent—examples of this unique skill throughout Gondrezick’s tape.
2. Shooting
One thing is for certain, Gondrezick can shoot the basketball. While she finished as a 28.6% shooter from three in her rookie season, the numbers are misleading as her role diminished across her final 8 games with the team and she shot 0-9 during that stretch to dent her numbers. Prior to that, Gondrezick was shooting a more than respectable 42.1% on 1.7 attempts per game while, in college, she was a career 37% shooter on nearly 6 threes a game. In other words, her hot and cold streak in the W are each too short to make a definite conclusion, but all of the underlying data supports Gondrezick’s potential being closer to the hot streak.
Her film from Indiana also suggests Gondrezick can make threes from a lot of different scenarios. A majority of the looks she got were spot up threes, and she is definitely dangerous with that chance to set her feet and fire. However, she also has the ability to get shots off on the move using screens: both via catch and shoot opportunities and dribbling past a screen into a pull-up. The last rep below—where she beats the shot clock against the Mystics—also shows how naturally she shoots under pressure (from both the clock and the defender). Given how much coverage she faced as an all-conference, number one option in college, it’s no surprise that Gondrezick is able to process these highly difficul situations and still find a way to make shots.
3. An Incomplete and Imperfect Sample Size
If a rookie can completely adapt to the professional game within half a season, they’re probably on track towards a decade plus career as a professional. If they can’t adapt that quickly, they’re in the same place as 99% of professionals that have come before them. With just 19 games played for Indiana before stepping away from the team for personal reasons in 2021, Gondrezick never even got the chance to finish that half-season of development. Her rookie season was also in a COVID-oriented world where training camps and other preseason preparation were considerably impacted by the needed health restrictions. In other words, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what Gondrezick is as a professional because of the unique circumstances that have impacted her career.
Another thing worth noting: how differently she was used in Indiana compared to in college at West Virginia. While she was probably seen as a shooter first and foremost in college, she was also known as a player who could get to the basket and score inside with regularity. In the professional game, that dynamic aspect of her game disappeared almost entirely with Gondrezick taking just 6 shots from inside the paint all season.
To illustrate metrically, 39.8% of Gondrezick’s attempts during her senior year were three-pointers. At the WNBA level, that jumped up to 60.8%. Such a drastic change to a player’s style doesn’t just impact their volume of opportunities to score at the basket, it also has considerable impacts on free throw opportunities and playmaking. Gondrezick’s free throw rate at West Virginia was a solid 32% while that dipped to just 9% in the WNBA. Her assist figures—even adjusted for minutes played—also fell by 20% in the W. It’s not as simple as drawing a direct line between those statistical drops and Gondrezick’s change in three-point shooting volume, but the tape shows how difficult her role made it to have the same impact. Too often, she was stationed in the corner—on the periphery of everything Indiana was doing offensively. For a player who had the ball in hand all the time in college, the transition to being something akin to a glorified 3&D player was always going to be challenging.
And that’s where I have to suggest that the context in Indiana didn’t put Kysre in the best position to be successful. Far be it from me to tell a legend like Tamika Catchings—who was the team’s GM at the time—how to operate, but the roster construction was a bit of a mess. Watching this team often felt like watching a rotation of 6 point guards and 6 centers, and that was definitely detrimental to Gondrezick’s chances of getting the on-ball opportunities that would’ve helped her be more successful and, presumably, aggressive.
Marianne Stanley—another whom I’m certainly not qualified to criticize too much—also failed to offer a clear role to Gondrezick at any point in the season. As a perfect example, many of the most impressive performances Gondrezick had with the team were followed shortly after by a drop-off in minutes. Other times, Indiana—trailing by as many as 40 points—would go to the end of the game using a group of veteran players while Gondrezick finished with less than 10 minutes. Fewer chances on court meant fewer opportunities to develop as a pro. Fewer times on the ball and drives to the basket meant fewer opportunities to score easy points, get to the line and create for others. All of those “fewers” could only have a negative impact on Gondrezick’s confidence—making it that much more challenging to transition to the pro game. In the small (nearly comprehensive) sample of drives below, you see all the things beyond defense and shooting that she offers when she’s attacking off the dribble.
That’s not to say that we should expect Gondrezick to get the chance for the Sky’s offense to regularly flow through her in training camp, nor if she makes the team. The presence of Dana, Marina, Diamond DeShields and Lindsay Allen (a former teammate who paired nicely with Gondrezick at times in 2021) means the Sky have plenty of ball handlers who are also deserving of those chances. Instead, it’s to say that I don’t see Spoon, who—again—has a personal connection to the Gondrezick family, making the choice to bring Kysre into camp with no intent of allowing her some chances to do the things that made her so successful in college. Even if Gondrezick makes the team, she likely won’t get big minutes in the early part of the season, but I trust Spoon, a player development expert, to make sure the minutes she does get are ones where she can spread her wings—not have them clipped once again.