The Chicago Sky Might Have Bet Big Too Early

After making win now moves in the offseason, the Sky's early results have not reflected that investment.

When you make win now moves, the hope is to certainly win, well…now. The Sky have yet to find those wins as their 2025 WNBA season has started with back-to-back losses to the Fever and Liberty.

It is one thing to lose to teams who will likely be at worst two of the top-4 teams in the WNBA this season, but the fashion in which they lost is too large to ignore.

Per ESPN’s Alexa Phillippou, the -60 point differential over the first two games is the worst ever for a WNBA team to open the season.

Yikes.

If you kept up with the No Cap Space YouTube channel over the course of the offseason, you likely witnessed my descent into insanity over teams making win now trades when they weren’t ready to take that leap.

When the Sky made their move for Rebecca Allen and bringing in Courtney Vandersloot I thought those were *fantastic* additions. Now just use your third overall pick in the WNBA Draft and keep building! Right? RIGHT?

Let’s play a quick game. Which player would you rather have so far this season?

Player A: 9.5 PPG, 3 RPG, 1.5 APG, 1 SPG

Player B: 14.7 PPG, 3.7 RPG, 2.0 APG, 1 SPG

Now what if I also told you that Player B is a rookie that you could have had longterm contract control of under what is soon to be the old CBA?

Player A is Ariel Atkins, Player B is Sonia Citron, the player the Mystics drafted with the third pick that the Sky traded them for Atkins.

Simply put Atkins hasn’t been good enough so far, but she is far from the only one.

By the time the season had come around and I was doing my team previews I had actually come around to the idea of the Sky being the best lower seeded team to make a Cinderella run in the WNBA Playoffs.

All of that projection relied on both Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso taking the next steps in their growth. So far? Both players have struggled greatly for various reasons.

And I do understand that the teams that the Sky have faced so far are contenders, but to me that actually makes this all feel so much worse. These are teams that you made these moves to go beat!

The energy isn’t there on defense, the fluidity has yet to be found on offense. Overall, not great!

The hopeful shift that the new vets were bringing has yet to be seen and while this absolutely can turn around and into a playoff appearance for Chicago, the early struggles are simply too blatant to write off as early season growing pains.

Now we wait to see if Chicago has what it takes to climb out of this early hole.