What the Sky Can Learn from 2022's WNBA Coaching Hires
Despite what I felt was a compelling case to run it back next season, the Chicago Sky (unsurprisingly) announced Wednesday that Emre…
Despite what I felt was a compelling case to run it back next season, the Chicago Sky (unsurprisingly) announced Wednesday that Emre Vatansever would not return as head coach in 2024. This, coupled with Kahleah Copper’s (also unsurprising) comments about the franchise splitting the head coach and GM titles, means that the Sky are now in the market to fill their two most important front office positions before free agency begins in January.
Various head coaching candidates’ names are already swirling, but before the Sky start to make a move (too late!) on any — it might help to take a quick journey back to last offseason. Five franchises made coaching changes last season and, at least for a couple of those, the Sky may be able to take some learnings.
10/21/22 — Los Angeles Hires Curt Miller
The Sky can learn very little here as Miller’s presence on the market was an exception not a rule. If a coach with six straight trips to the playoffs comes available on the market, the Sky will make a push for that person but short of James Wade u-turning from the Raptors I don’t see who that person would be.
11/4/22 — Indiana Hires Christie Sides
Sides is unique in that, prior to taking the Fever job, she had never been a head coach at any notable level. Then again, that’s not entirely surpising when you consider the position that the Fever were in. After pretty consistently being a contender, Indiana had really bottomed out with Pokey Chatman and Marianne Stanley — meaning hiring another retread head coach was never going to be a preferred option.
Instead, the Fever wanted to start fresh with their generational top draft choice and a coach with fresh ideas. If nothing else, Sides is an interesting case study for the Sky of how a coach with no head coaching experience can perform a culture change as she did quite well with Indiana this season. That said, Chicago are (presumably) looking to continue to build on their success (with limited culture change) in a different fashion to Indiana given Kah’s new deal. I’m sure we’re all aware at this point, but the Sky do not own their 2025 draft pick; so, there’s no sense in a complete reset with that knowledge and a Finals MVP under contract.
11/7/22 — Dallas Hires Latricia Trammell
While Dallas’ franchise fortunes (no playoff series wins since moving from Tulsa in 2016) at the time of hiring Trammell are quite a bit different, I think there is some takeaways from this hire. First and foremost, Trammell is a player’s coach. She obviously knows her stuff — as evidenced by her rise from coaching in high school to the W — but the first thing you hear about her from players and media is the strength of relationship she’s built with her core players. The Sky obviously want someone who knows the game, but I get the feeling the franchise would take someone who sees eye-to-eye with Copper long before they’d worry about the specifics of the X’s and O’s.
Again though, Trammell is a very tactically astute coach — particularly when it comes to her work with the defensive side of the ball. In her previous stop with Los Angeles, Trammell coached a top three defense in each of her first three seasons, and it’s no coincidence that a team like Dallas — destined to have offensive firepower with Arike at the helm — would go for a coach whose expertise could help improve what they presumably perceived as their team’s weakness. Granted, the statistical improvement on the defensive side of the ball this season wasn’t that noticeable, but the change in outcomes certainly is. I don’t think Chicago is in a position where they need to target one side of the ball too heavily with this hire. Players are under contract with strength at both ends, and their star player is the game’s premier two-way perimeter player.
Last word on Trammell, she is another example of a coach whose head coaching experience at high level was virtually non-existent (no disrespect to the NAIA). In the NBA world where 10–15 re-treads might be available every season, a good amount of teams are bound to convince themselves they can ‘fix’ someone who failed elsewhere. In the world of the W where there’s only 12 jobs in total, front offices need to be able to identify assistant coaches like Trammell with the right tools to take the head job as viable retreads are more few and far between. I’ll talk more about her in a future blog exploring the candidates but Tonya Edwards certainly fits the Trammell mold internally.
11/15/22 — Washington Promotes Eric Thibault
Similar to Miller, this situation offers very little for the Sky. With Thibault replacing his father at the helm, the Sky’s most similar option would’ve been keeping a lead assistant like Emre — which they’ve opted against. Edwards is the only other assistant who would seem a viable candidate and, again, more to come on her in the future.
11/21/22 — Connecticut Hires Stephanie White
Proven coach jumps ship for a new challenge leaving a roster with playoff experience in his wake…sound familiar anyone? The turnover with the Sky roster before the 2023 season makes this a fair bit different, but there’s still analogies to be drawn between Connecticut finding a coach that could piggy-back off the franchise’s success and what the Sky will be trying to do. In the case of the Sun, they did very well to find a candidate in a very specific niche given the success they had in 2022 with Miller.
In Indiana, White had inherited a similar situation by taking over for Lin Dunn after five conference finals trips in the previous six seasons. In 2015, she managed to continue Dunn’s successful run by guiding the Fever to the Finals in her first season. The jury is still out on Connecticut making it to the Finals this time around, but White has once again helped continue the successful tradition created by her predecessor in guiding the Sun to a semifinal appearance for the fifth consecutive season. It’s a classic line but the Sun’s president Jennifer Rizzotti said that the Sun had found ‘the right coach at the right time’ when they hired White and the similarities to her Fever tenure certainly seem to back that up.
Interestingly, the Sun, like the Sky, were also in the market for a new general manager after Miller relinquished the pair of titles upon moving west. In a slightly unconventional way, the Sun hired their new GM (Darius Taylor, at that time an assistant exec with the Dream) a week after the White news went public. Of course, the closeness of the two hires means that interviews may have happened in either order, but conventional logic would dictate having the GM in house first to weigh in on the coaching hire. In any case, the Sky’s aforementioned pursuit of coaches — presumably a search being guided by the same small core of execs that negotiated Kah’s renewal — suggests that they, like the Sun, are happy to secure their coach first. Whether or not that creates tensions down the line remains to be seen, but it’s working so far for Taylor and White — who made considerable changes to the Connecticut roster on the trade market and have reaped the rewards.
If the Sky wanted to go even further back, they could take a look at the hires preceding the 2022 season — with four further coaches having been hired that offseason. (Interestingly, this now means that only traditional powers Minnesota and Seattle will carry a head coach with 3+ years experience with a franchise into the 2024 season.) However, the learnings from that offseason are a bit limited. Phoenix’s hire of Vanessa Nygaard has already gone south (though the other finalists for the Phoenix job at that time will all likely be candidates for the Sky — Connecticut’s White excluded), Becky Hammon is one of a kind (Teresa Weatherspoon, for all her brilliance, has not coached under Pop) and Sandy Brondello fits the Curt Miller (if they’re available, take them) mold.
Only Atlanta’s hire of Tanisha Wright offers much of a replicable scenario to learn from with the 2019 retiree, similar to Noelle Quinn, making the case for recently retired players as viable coaching candidates. Quinn and Wright also offer contrasting styles in that one has aimed to continue the culture she played in while the other has attempted (and thus far, succeeded) to transfer her learnings to a different environment in Atlanta. While there’s always recently retired players who are capable of coaching, I’m not sure I see many obvious names who jump off the page as the Wright or Quinn candidate for Chicago this offseason. Rebekkah Brunson (Minnesota’s second assistant) and LaToya Sanders (Thibault’s lead assistant in Washington) are the two recently-retired names that stand out to me but neither has generated much buzz when it comes to head coaching jobs thus far.
If there’s a global take away that the Sky can have, it’s that interviews, in the WNBA more than the MNBA, tell so much of the story when it comes to finding a coach. Of course, you can ask around and get info from others in the league, but there’s just no way to look at an assistant’s work and really know how they’ll lead a team. The Suns may have looked back at various Lakers and Pacers tape to convince themselves that Frank Vogel’s style could work for their team, but the same type of empirical evidence doesn't exist for the talented (but largely unproven) assistants that fill up a lot of the coaching shortlists.
If the right high profile name comes available (and I just really don’t see who that is), the Sky should, and likely would, make a push, but they’re more likely to be doing their homework on a lot of names that have done the majority of their work away from the bright lights of a head coaching gig. If nothing else, the front office can take solace in the fact that Trammell, Wright and even Hammon (who, despite her high profile, had never been a head coach beyond the summer league before taking the Vegas job) are already re-paying their employers’ faith in their ability to move to the head of the bench.
