Chicago Sky

A franchise from the league's second wave

Chicago was awarded a WNBA franchise in 2005 and began playing in 2006, making the Sky one of the league's mid-period additions rather than a 1997 original. The early rosters were built around Sylvia Fowles, who anchored the team from 2008 to 2014, and then Elena Delle Donne, drafted second overall in 2013, who won a league Most Valuable Player award during her four seasons in Chicago. Courtney Vandersloot arrived as the playmaker and has since spent the bulk of her career there in two spells.

The first deep run came in 2014, when the Sky reached the WNBA Finals and were swept by Phoenix. The title came seven years later: in 2021 Chicago beat Phoenix 3-1 in the Finals as the lowest-seeded team in the bracket, and the first champion in league history without a winning regular-season record. Candace Parker, who had come home to sign for the 2021 and 2022 seasons, is one of two players whose numbers hang retired at Wintrust Arena — her 3 and Allie Quigley's 14.

The ownership group is led by Michael J. Alter and Nadia Rawlinson, with Adam Fox as chief executive and Jeff Pagliocca as general manager. Tyler Marsh was hired as head coach in November 2024, arriving from the Las Vegas staff with no previous head-coaching job at this level.

The 2025 floor

Marsh's first season was the worst the franchise has had since it started. Chicago finished 2025 at 10-34, a win total not seen since the inaugural 2006 campaign, and the injury list explains a good part of it: Vandersloot tore an anterior cruciate ligament after seven games, Angel Reese missed 14 games, and Ariel Atkins missed ten. The team never settled on a way of playing.

It also came apart in public. Reese was suspended after criticising the front office and questioning Marsh's coaching intensity, and the coach spent the winter fielding questions about whether he belonged in the job. His answer, when he sat down with Andscape before the new season, was blunt: he said he knew he belonged in the position, and that the online scrutiny only became a problem when it crossed into players' and staff's personal lives. Averages of 14.7 points, 12.6 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 1.5 steals a game made Reese the most productive player on a 10-win team, which made what happened next the loudest decision of the Chicago off-season.

April 2026: the roster taken apart

On 6 April 2026 the Sky traded Reese to the Atlanta Dream for first-round picks in the 2027 and 2028 drafts. Five days later they sent a 2028 first-rounder to Washington for guard Jacy Sheldon. At the draft on 13 April they took UCLA guard Gabriela Jaquez fifth overall on a four-year rookie contract. Atkins was moved for forward Rickea Jackson. By the time camp broke, only five players remained from the previous roster.

What replaced them was experience: seven-time All-Star Skylar Diggins, forward Azurá Stevens, guard DiJonai Carrington, and Natasha Cloud, signed days before training camp. Marsh described the group as players who had felt written off, which is a fair description of how the market valued most of them. He also rebuilt his bench, losing Tanisha Wright and Courtney Paris and adding Latricia Trammell — hired on 24 November 2025 — along with Kelly Faris and Jhared Simpson.

Where the 2026 season left them

The reset did not produce a playoff team. Chicago opened on the road at the expansion Portland Fire on 9 May and finished the regular season at Washington on 24 September, and came out of the longest schedule the league has run at 16-27, well outside the postseason. The road was the sinkhole; the veteran signings spent large parts of the year unavailable.

Diggins was the biggest loss. A knee problem that never settled ended her season at 19 games, with the club ruling her out for the remainder on 1 September, and guard injuries around Cloud and Carrington kept the rotation improvised into the closing weeks. The last fortnight read badly on paper: a 110-80 home defeat by the Mystics on 17 September, then 106-81 at Atlanta on 19 September, a fifth straight loss.

The counterweight is Kamilla Cardoso, who put up the best numbers of her career at 14.7 points and 8.7 rebounds a game, and who used her exit interviews to back the coach rather than bury him — "I think Tyler is an amazing coach... I think he's the right fit" — while insisting the squad was good enough to reach the playoffs and win a championship. Rookies Jaquez and Aicha Coulibaly both showed enough to keep. Nine of the 13 players are under contract for next season, Cardoso enters the last year of her rookie deal, and the two first-round picks banked in the Reese trade are still in the drawer. Whether Marsh survives a second missed postseason was the open question as the season closed.

Bricks, and the largest crowd the league has drawn

Off the floor, the year was better. The Sky's own performance centre in Bedford Park, next to the Wintrust Sports Complex, became operational in the spring of 2026 after slipping from a December 2025 target; the budget grew to close to $46 million and the footprint roughly doubled from the original plan, with two full courts, strength and conditioning space, a film room and a content studio. It is one of only two WNBA facilities to come online in 2026 — Portland's opened in June — which gives Chicago something finished to show recruits in the 2027 free-agency window while Indiana, New York and Los Angeles are still building larger and more expensive versions.

The city also hosted All-Star weekend from 23 to 25 July. The game itself, at the United Center on 25 July, drew 19,783 — the best-attended All-Star Game in WNBA history, and the first to outsell the NBA's equivalent, which had 15,973 in Los Angeles in February. Team Spoon beat Team Coop, and Jonquel Jones, named Most Valuable Player, pointed at the gate figure as the evidence: having 19,000 people in the building, she said, showed the league was growing.

The shape of a Sky night now

Home is still Wintrust Arena at McCormick Square, a 10,387-seat building opened in 2017 and shared with DePaul's basketball programmes, and the Sky continue to move their two biggest dates north-west to the United Center — 28 June against Las Vegas and 8 August against Indiana in 2026, following the two largest crowds in franchise history there the previous year. The 44-game schedule was kinder than most: no back-to-backs at all, a home opener against Dallas on 20 May, and a five-game home run from 30 July to 8 August. Group-stage Commissioner's Cup fixtures were folded into the calendar between 1 and 17 June, with the final on 30 June. Local coverage sits with Weigel's WCIU, The U, for a second season.

The final home game, on 22 September against the Toronto Tempo, was a fair sample of the team at its best and its most unreliable in the same two hours: 19 lead changes and five ties in a first half that ended 44-44, then a 28-11 third quarter built on a 16-0 run off Tempo turnovers, and a 97-85 win that snapped the five-game slide. Sydney Taylor and Jaquez scored 18 each, Cardoso 17, Sheldon 12 off the bench, Vandersloot 10, and Elizabeth Williams took 11 rebounds. Toronto still won the season series 2-1, which is roughly the shape of the whole year.