Shakeia Taylor: Firing Teresa Weatherspoon is just another head-scratching decision by the Sky

CHICAGO — The tailspin for the Chicago Sky continues.

After rumors swirled Thursday on social media, the team officially announced Friday they had fired coach Teresa Weatherspoon less than a year after hiring her.

When Weatherspoon was hired 11 months ago, the Sky had zero draft assets thanks to trades done by former GM/coach James Wade, who abruptly left midseason in 2023 to take a position with the Toronto Raptors.

The Sky also saw veterans from the 2021 miracle championship team like Courtney Vandersloot, Candace Parker, Allie Quigley and Azurá Stevens leave after the 2022 season. Unable to attract free agents because of a lack of investment in the team’s practice facilities and elsewhere, 2021 WNBA Finals MVP Kahleah Copper requested a trade prior to the start of the 2024 season, leaving guard Dana Evans as the longest-tenured player on the team. (Evans also requested a trade before this year’s Olympic break, but later decided to ride out the season.)

With first-year coach Weatherspoon at the helm, the Sky navigated an exciting, but tumultuous, season almost from the start. Roster construction was always going to be an issue, and the team was never really whole thanks to injuries, illness and once again a needed player, Marina Mabrey, who hit a game-deciding 3-pointer for the Connecticut Sun in Wednesday’s playoff game, demanding a trade.

The Sky went 3-13 after the Mabrey trade, often looking helpless on the court as they tried to battle back in games they were simply outmatched in. Weatherspoon, who was bothered by the losing, sometimes appeared emotional postgame, a sign she desperately wanted to right the ship. But she should get credit for her role in the developing star rookies Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso and facilitating Chennedy Carter’s breakout season after the guard’s year away from the WNBA.

While there were certainly some close games the Sky should’ve won and the fact that making the playoffs should’ve been a lock, is one season enough for a first-year coach with that roster?

Weatherspoon played the cards she was dealt, and her dismissal is just another head-scratching decision by a team that continues to languish at the bottom of a quickly growing league.

While her firing may seem like an answer for the Sky, it’s just an example of the organizational incompetence that has persisted for years — a dysfunction with which fans of other Chicago teams have become quite familiar.

Hiring Weatherspoon three weeks before naming a general manager looked like an interesting decision last October and it created questions due to the coach and GM being selected out of sync. A move like that often puts the coach in peril of being fired much sooner. Pagliocca had been with the Sky assisting on player development the previous four seasons. Did Pagliocca and Weatherspoon clash? One has to wonder, how will a move like this impact the locker room? Players like Reese and Carter took to social media to express sadness and dismay over Weatherspoon’s firing. And now without Weatherspoon, the team is once again without an identity.

News about a new training facility was expected by the start of the season. But it didn’t land until July, when operating chairman Nadia Rawlinson and the Sky broke news of a $38 million facility in … Bedford Park. While the new location, set to open for the 2026 season, isn’t as far away as the current community center they use in Deerfield, it continues a trend of the team not having a single connection with Chicago.

Do team owners know they play in a world-class city with lots of great food and a diverse culture? Why haven’t they made an effort to be a part of it? With owners across the country investing in multi-million dollar training and practice facilities for their teams, and expansion teams with billionaire owners being announced, the Sky will see themselves quickly become the “broke boys” of the WNBA.

Late in August, the Sky introduced a new mascot called “Skye the Lioness” — an extremely obvious attempt to copy the aura of the New York Liberty’s extremely popular Ellie the Elephant. Without getting into how the mascot isn’t that appealing, the timing was a bit odd. The team was fighting for the eighth and final playoff spot and this is what you’ve been working on? Not only was the mascot a miss, but the timing suggests the team was focused on the wrong things.

The Sky also announced an increase in ticket prices — which isn’t exclusive to them — but the price jump to long-time fans could eliminate the family-friendly environment the games often provided at a time when excitement couldn’t be higher.

When the Sky announced additions to the ownership group like Rawlinson, NBA legend Dwyane Wade, and Cubs and Red Stars owner Laura Ricketts, it appeared as if the team was taking on more investors to propel the team to where it should be — somewhere near the top of the league. With only 12 franchises currently, a team in Chicago should be at the top of every free agent’s list. Instead, players would rather go to Phoenix and Seattle.

In a statement Friday, Rawlinson thanked Weatherspoon for “the energy and passion she brought to the head coaching role” and “for inspiring a competitive, resilient spirit across the team, synonymous with Chicago Sky basketball.”

But throughout the team’s history, the Sky have seen highly talented players and coaches, some homegrown, leave. Something that can only be attributed to the one constant — ownership.