Game Preview: Sky Look to Recapture Energy with Return to Las Vegas
After beating the Aces in July, Chicago has managed just one win--could a return to the West Coast change their fortunes?
After Atlanta’s win over the Sparks on Sunday evening, the Sky enter play on Tuesday night tied on record for the eighth and final playoff spot—with only their 2-1 record over Tanisha Wright’s team in 2024 keeping them ahead of the Dream in the standings. With Atlanta also in action on Tuesday night against the Phoenix Mercury, it’s possible for one team to pull a game in front before Wednesday morning comes, but the Sky’s recent performances suggest that their focus, first and foremost, needs to be on their own play before they can start worrying about how Rhyne Howard and company are getting on. With just 2 wins in the team’s last 11 games, tiebreakers and scoreboard watching are unlikely to do much good without a change that starts from inside the Sky’s locker room. Let’s dive into the keys to Chicago making that 3 from 12 (and 2 from 3 against the champs) on Tuesday night at T-Mobile Arena.
1. Chennedy Carter’s status.
So far this season, the Sky are 6-9 when Carter has started and 5-12 in games where she came off the bench or didn’t play at all. Neither is an ideal record, and they’re both below .500, but the difference between a 40% win percentage (with her) and a 29% mark (without) is the difference between sitting comfortably in the eighth seed (within range of the Mercury [48%] in 7th) and mixing it up with the Wings and Mystics (28%) for lottery position. If you’re reading this, it’s almost certain you watch the Sky and know her status for this game is critical. And yet, some of the best basketball the Sky played in the last meeting with the Aces back on August 25th was when Carter was off the floor. In a four minute stretch of play, a group of Allen, Banham, Onyenwere, Reese and Cardoso (the same five that has started in Carter’s absence) was able to hold the Aces at bay and put together enough offense to go on a 9-2 run and close the deficit. In the game just before that against Connecticut (8/23), that five had been equally impressive in the time that they got—playing to a +13 in 11.5 minutes. In the time since, the group has been less dominant, but it’s still the Sky’s most effective five player lineup in 2024 (min. 20 mins played) with a net-rating of +13 in 83 total minutes together.
The ‘normal’ starting five with Carter in for Banham has been considerably worse in that metric (-9.4 in 57 mins)—leading to a natural (though obviously flawed) question: are the Sky better without Carter? If you want the simplest path to the answer being no, look at how the 8/25 loss to Las Vegas ended. The Carter-less line-up deserves credit for closing the gap and has a nice blend of complementary skills (namely Banham’s extra three-point efficiency) that allow it to produce long stretches of good play, but there’s no one in that five who’s shown the ability to take and make the back-to-back threes Carter hit to close a 6-point-game into a tie. And there—in its simplest form—is the difference between this team with and without Chennedy Carter. Just as when she almost single-handedly closed the win over Vegas on 7/16, Carter is a player with that extra bit of (sometimes indescribable) quality. In the same way the Aces have many, many great players but there’s no one quite like A’ja Wilson, the Sky have shown flashes of being an effective group without Carter, but they’re still some way off having the ceiling they have with her when she’s not around. The quick turnaround from game to game means the Sky presumably will be without Carter again on Tuesday with the success the interim starters had in the last meeting showing the Sky can make a game of it, but the odds of closing out a win over Wilson and company if Carter is missing feel low after Sunday’s loss.
2. “Limit” A’ja again.
In the last meeting, the Sky, especially Reese, did quite well against A’ja—holding her to her fourth fewest points (20) and second lowest field goal percentage (28.6%) of the season to date. Cardoso, Reese and Onyenwere combined for 7 blocks on the two-time MVP, and you’d be hard pressed to do much better defensive work against a player in the midst of possibly the greatest individual season in the history of the WNBA. Yet, Wilson—in one of her worst games—still scored 20 points. The Sky, as a team, have 20 twenty-point games (and just 2 thirty-point efforts) this season. Wilson has 29 with 20 or more and 10 with 30+ all on her own—including a pair of 40-point outbursts in the week and change since her game winner over the Sky (for comparison, Chicago has only two forty-point performances in franchise history). In three games since her rough efficiency game at Wintrust (which, mind you, still ended with a game-winner), Wilson has averaged 36.3 PPG on 66.1% FG with 13 boards and 3 blocks a night. To put it a different way, Wilson is now playing the best basketball of her 2024 season which also happens to be her best overall season yet. The bar—as high as it’s been for a number of years—continues to rise for the world’s best player.
For Chicago, the danger is then clear. Even with Reese’s defense, some Carter heroics, the strong play of the five including Banham and Wilson having an off game, they still lost on their home court just last week. Now, Chicago must travel across the country, play without Carter (presumably) and face Wilson at, likely, a higher level. Even if she’s only at her season averages, that’s still an extra 7.5 points the Sky will have to counter compared to the last meeting. If she’s anywhere near her averages of the last week, it’s difficult to see how Chicago can even keep this game close. And while their defense can look to be strong and make life difficult inside just as they did last weekend, there’s a couple of key factors that could make the tactics that worked on 8/25 less effective this time around.
First, the Aces gameplan figures to be quite a bit different. Becky Hammon was running everything through Wilson early on in the previous game and, while that sounds good in theory, it probably asked the MVP elect to do a little bit too much—hence the 28 FG attempts her most of the season so far. More diversity in the offense will make it harder to hone in on Wilson (even though everyone knows she’s still the center of the offense) and produce the same number of disruptions and blocks. And speaking of those blocks, some of the contact with Wilson definitely could have been called fouls. The referees largely swallowed the whistle (at both ends) in the last game between these two, but a more active officiating crew could’ve sent Wilson to the line a lot more—with her 86% mark at the stripe meaning those are virtually as good as makes. Of course, if Wilson is at the line regularly, that also likely means foul trouble for the Sky’s starters—further reducing their defensive effectiveness as they’ll have to sit.
3. Diamond DeShields’ impact.
After a long stretch in the rotational wilderness (7.7 MPG between July 10th and August 27th), DeShields has started to claw her way back into regular playing time in Carter’s absence—with her ability to attack off the dribble making her one of the few players besides Onyenwere that can replicate Carter’s influence. It’s still not perfect (she had 4 turnovers in 5:42 in the first half Sunday), but the overall scoring and efficiency has ticked upwards in the last three games—with DeShields’ mentality clearly far more in line with the one that helps her play her best basketball. And defensively, there’s hardly ever been much doubt about what a player of her profile (quick, long, intelligent) can offer for a team that is always saying how much they take pride in their defensive performances. The issue is that, even with Carter out, we’re still only taking about a 10-15 minute a game role, but the Aces feel like a perfect opponent against whom that role can expand. Because as much as Teresa Weatherspoon loves line-ups with multiple small guards, a group with DeShields, Onyenwere, Reese and Cardoso all on the court is a logistical nightmare for any team—even the Aces with their relatively big perimeter trio (Plum, the shortest of the three at 5’8”, seems to play bigger—and stronger—than her listed height).
At the defensive end, DeShields has the blend of height and agility needed to keep up with Vegas’ stars on the perimeter, Onyenwere has the strength and speed to jump between the different levels, and Reese—though not asked to do it as much recently—has shown plenty of times that she’s comfortable picking someone up on the perimeter (A’ja works plenty off the dribble from the elbow and perimeter so those skills come in handy here). Overall, that flexibility and versatility enables a lot more defensive schemes that someone like Rachel Banham—for all she does bring—simply cannot offer. What Banham (or Allen and Carter before her) does offer that has kept DeShields off the court at times is flexibility at the offensive end. So long as DeShields can keep performing at the offensive end by taking the right types of shots and trusting her skills attacking the basket (61.3% at the rim in ‘24), she could claw her way into a bigger role—as she did briefly on Sunday with a strong second half. Of course, whenever Carter returns (which could be Tuesday), the musical chairs will begin again, and it’s anyone’s guess who gets the minutes at that point. In the meantime, DeShields may not be the player to win you a game all on her own, but she can do what’s needed to complement Reese, Cardoso, Onyenwere and Allen’s consistently strong play.