Weekend Preview: Sky Start 4 Game Homestead as Wings & Fever Visit
Chicago looks to get back on track after 8 losses in their last 10 when fellow strugglers Dallas and Indiana visit Wintrust Arena.
While Teresa Weatherspoon will likely move forward with her new starting five in this weekend’s action, there’s little that the Sky can throw at either opponent that will come as a huge surprise given they’re preparing for their third match-up of the season with both Dallas and Indiana. And while familiarity may be breeding some contempt (especially with the Fever), it’s also opening the door for the Sky to spin back two different sets of game tape on each opponent when preparing and building out a game plan. Every match-up remains a learning opportunity given this is such a new Sky team, but the familiarity also lends itself to execution ruling above all else. On Sunday, the Fever got the best of the late-game execution (as they did a few weeks earlier), but the Sky split their opening weekend meetings with the Wings after a dominant fourth quarter in the second game of the doubleheader. Let’s dive into where else (besides late-game execution) the Sky can gain advantages in their first re-rematches of 2024.
Sky vs. Wings
Thursday, June 20th at 11:00 AM CT
Matchup to Watch: Who Guards Arike Ogunbowale?
If you flash back to the last time the Sky met the Wings, I asked the exact same question. But even after a pair of meetings with Dallas, we don’t have a great idea of how Weatherspoon wants to handle this match-up because of the rotational changes we’ve seen over the opening month of the season. In the doubleheader at the start of the season, the Sky used a number of defenders on Ogunbowale but Michaela Onyenwere and, especially, Diamond DeShields played a key role in trying to limit Dallas’ superstar. And while Ogunbowale still found plenty of success—totaling 60 points and 8 threes made, DeShields’ length definitely had an impact on her efficiency as she shot just 37% from the floor in the two games.
However, DeShields, based on last weekend’s games in DC and Indianapolis, is less likely to be a factor this time around. After playing just under 20 minutes per game in her first 9 appearances of the season, DeShields played only 16 minutes total in the weekend’s games while Onyenwere featured for just 50 seconds on Sunday after a solid performance Friday against the Mystics. Of course, a match-up with one of the game’s premier scorers could elevate one (or both) of these options into a more prominent role, but there’s no indication based on Sunday’s meeting with Caitlin Clark—a less pro-proven but equally explosive scorer—that that’ll be the case against Ogunbowale. Instead, expect to see Chennedy Carter and Marina Mabrey (who, with DeShields, did the heavy lifting in May) handling the match-up the majority of the time with Chicago likely to switch freely with no primary defender for Arike on the floor. Of course, the trade off for the Sky going with these three-guard line-ups (which Weatherspoon seemed to fall in love with in the May 18 win over Dallas) is that Carter, Lindsay Allen and Dana Evans can all attack the Wings’ perimeter players—who have been average at best defensively—off the dribble and generate a lot of paint looks in the process.
Numbers Game: Second Chance Efficiency
Dallas (33%) and Chicago (31%) enter Thursday’s game as the two best offensive rebounding teams in the league. In principle, that’s unsurprising. Both rosters have been carefully constructed to excel on the glass, and their work in that area has been key to their overall ability to produce offense—with Dallas scoring 23% of all its points from second-chance looks and Chicago generating nearly 15% of its 79.1 PPG from those scenarios. While both are impressive in that respect, the size of the gap between the teams could be key to the outcome of this game—as it was in the previous two meetings. On May 15, the Wings outscored the Sky by a substantial margin of 14 points in a game they won by only 8. A few nights later, Dallas was still on top, but the margin was just +2 as the Sky won the game by 9. Whether this is correlation or causation, Chicago making up 12 points in this area alone certainly contributed to the 17-point flip between the two scorelines.
The difference between the two games? Well, the absence of Natasha Howard certainly stands out as the most obvious factor. After grabbing four offensive boards in the opener, Howard missed the May 18th meeting due to a foot injury and remains out of the Dallas line-up for the foreseeable future. That said, the Wings—more than a month after losing Howard—are still the league leaders in offensive rebounding for a reason. Teaira McCowan and Kalani Brown remain uniquely dominant (and tall) while Stephanie Soares and Monique Billings have also done an admirable job of replacing Howard’s production. The Sky, of course, have also added since the last meeting with the equally vertical Kamilla Cardoso sliding into the team’s line-up and quickly becoming the league’s second-ranked regular in ORB% behind teammate Angel Reese. At the same time, both teams have struggled to protect their defensive glass (ranked 11 and 12 in DRB%) which leaves the offensive glass even more vulnerable. For the Sky, however, grabbing offensive boards isn’t enough. In each of the previous two meetings with Dallas, the Sky collected more offensive rebounds, but Dallas’ much higher conversion rate in the May 15th meeting was enough for the Wings to win. If the Sky want to win Thursday, they need to be productive and efficient with the opportunities their offensive rebounding prowess creates.
Sky vs. Fever
Sunday, June 23rd at 3:00 PM CT on ESPN
Matchup to Watch: Fever 4s vs. Sky Front Court
Though Reese has most of the tools you’d want in a player guarding NaLyssa Smith, the success that Smith has had in two meetings with the Sky (16 PPG on 59% FG and 50% 3PT) underlines why the Fever’s young power forward profiles as one of the league’s most difficult covers. Despite struggling to limit Smith in her minutes, the Sky did find plenty of success against her back-up Katie Lou Samuelson in last Sunday’s meeting. Samuelson, though 6’3”, profiles as much more of a small forward than a power forward, and the Sky were able to create a series of mismatches in the half-court and in transition during the 12 minutes she was on the floor.
Of course, the last play above also shows how Samuelson can flip the script to create frustrating disadvantages for the Sky at the defensive end. It’s not as if Chicago can’t step out to the perimeter to guard her; in fact, I’d hazard a guess that Reese would prefer to guard Samuelson to Smith on the perimeter because of the latter’s ability to put the ball on the floor. Instead, it’s the repercussions of one of the Sky’s interior players spending time away from the paint which is more troubling for Weatherspoon and her staff. This last clip illustrates how, in an effort to protect the paint, Reese leaves behind a good shooter. In the same way, the Sky are less able to double Aliyah Boston (if they wish to do so) or get to the defensive glass when Samuelson is moving a big so far from the basket.
In the end, the size and speed advantage that Chicago’s front court trio created against Samuelson was substantial enough to limit her time on court to just a single minute after half-time last Sunday. Regardless, the sharpshooter figures to play a role in giving Boston and Smith rest for as long as Temi Fagbenle is out due to injury. Whenever she’s on the court, the Sky need to make the most of their offensive mismatches and hope to limit Samuelson’s impact as a shooter. When it’s Smith on court (as it was for all 20 minutes of Sunday’s second half), the Sky need to think about how best to contain her explosiveness. Smith’s long-range shooting in the first meeting clearly kept the Sky wise to her threat (43% on the year), but the way she went by (and even backed down) the Chicago front court players with little resistance was equally damaging in the rematch. In the long run, stopping Smith at both levels while keeping track of Clark and Boston is a problem that should perplex W defenses annually; so, the Sky will not be the last team to rack their brain for defensive solutions against this trio.
Numbers Game: Chennedy Carter & Isabelle Harrison Plus-Minus
Given it was just a one-point game, it’s not super surprising that four Sky players finished with a positive plus-minus in the June 1st meeting between these two teams, but Carter and Harrison were the only Chicago players who managed to avoid a negative rating again in the rematch on June 15th (Onyenwere also had a 0 +/- but played less than a minute). If both can replicate the feat a third time on Sunday, it should help the Sky towards a victory. The advantages of a strong outing from Harrison are obvious given the role she plays in the mismatches discussed above, but Carter’s minutes look even more impactful for the Chicago offense. After finishing with 19 points in the first meeting between the teams, Carter registered 18 in the second meeting, and the only thing that’s slowed her so far against the Fever is foul trouble.
If she can stay out of foul trouble this time around, Carter figures to be at or near the thirty-minute mark, and the only ask from Weatherspoon should be that she takes even more shots. After going 8/12 in the first meeting, Carter managed 14 attempts in the second meeting but made only 1/3 attempts after picking up her fourth foul. If Carter’s momentum wasn’t broken by resting for an unplanned period in the third, she likely shoots more, scores more and eclipses her season high from the 6/1 meeting. As long as Carter continues to get downhill so easily against the Indiana guards on Sunday, there’s no reason to limit her touches or shot attempts—especially when she’s scored at a rate of nearly 20 PPG on greater than 60% shooting from the floor against this particular opponent.