In late August, the Chicago Sky killed off its 18-year-old volatile superhero mascot Sky Guy, and introduced fans to Sky the Lioness, a mascot “epitomizing the qualities of strength, feminine power, grace and the courage to overcome obstacles.” Symbol Chosen” Chicago Sky performs consistently. The name Sky creates a lot of confusion: The name of the team, plus a silent vowel? Besides, he is useless and badly dressed,
Eli the Elephant, the New York Liberty’s mascot whose tremendous success Sky was undoubtedly meant to reproduce, went down somewhat dismissive tweets On the day of Sky’s launch. But insofar as she has emerged from a process lacking vision and being a step behind everyone else, the Sky truly embodies the qualities of the Chicago Sky. A month after the mascot change, the team fired head coach Teresa Weatherspoon just a full year after being hired. At the Chicago practice facility’s groundbreaking event a few weeks later, general manager Jeff Pagliocca said that Sky “felt it was time to make a change.”
Since then, five more WNBA teams have fired or “parted ways” with their head coaches. The Wetherspoon news actually created the second coaching vacancy of the offseason. Within days, the Los Angeles Sparks defeated the Sky and announced that their second-year head coach Kurt Miller would not be returning. Seven of the league’s 12 teams—the Sparks, Sky, Washington Mystics, Atlanta Dream, Dallas Wings, Indiana Fever and Connecticut Sun—currently do not have a head coach. (One of the vacancies may be bogus; former Suns coach Stephanie White was Discussed as a fever candidate Even before the jobs start.) Three teams — the Mystics, Wings and Las Vegas Aces — are also hiring new general managers. The 13th WNBA team, the Golden State Valkyries, will begin play next season, and former Aces assistant Natalie Nakase has been named head coach of the expansion team. Nakase, who has not coached a single game, will be the sixth-longest tenured head coach in the league.
as i have done wrote firstIt is difficult for me to evaluate coaching. I can check the appointment announcements (Look: Nate Tibet), and I think I can tell when the locker room atmosphere is off (see: vanessa nygardBut it seems strange to watch sports and apportion credit in such a way that Player A is 70 percent responsible for the team’s success and Coach B is 30 percent responsible, so therefore Player A’s Team Have kept. Supposedly, the function of sportswriting is to organize some set of facts to suit a story. Still, as an outsider, I don’t like to draw big conclusions from a glance in a crowd or at an animated sideline chat. So many WNBA teams have been carelessly constructed that it’s hard for me to even declare in those cases that coaching, and not something else, is the problem.
This blog is not about whether certain WNBA coaches “deserve” to be fired. If you want to debate Eric Thibault’s late-game lineup, go for it. To me, a more productive discussion would be to ask what front offices are thinking right now, and whether the firing incident signals some broader change in the way WNBA teams are run.
Owners and front offices make coaching changes when they feel someone else can do a better job. Too many of them doing this at once could mean:
- The way owners view teams has changed or intensified
- The pool of available “someone else” has increased
- the work itself has become different
Some owners have certainly read last year’s headlines and ratings data, seen money pouring into women’s basketball, and suddenly remembered that they own a WNBA team — like finding a $20 bill in your coat pocket. . one in Los Angeles Times pillar This season, Bill Plaschke criticized the “Sparks’ lousy owners” for having “the least involvement with the team of any sports owner in the city.” Magic Johnson, who has actually been an accomplished owner of the Sparks, was interviewed for the column and didn’t disagree with that assessment. “I’m going to be more involved,” he told Plaschke. “It’s probably my fault that I let (Sparks managing partner) Eric Holloman make all the decisions and as owners we sat back a little bit. I think I have to get more involved, and I will do that, it’s a commitment to the fans, that I will get more involved and be more a part of it to help get the Sparks back to championship level. Five days after Plaschke’s column ran, the team fired Miller.
At long last, Sparks gave a clearly underperforming coach a second chance. Derek Fisher set aside his team’s elite talent, but only gained more responsibility. (After a disastrous first-round playoff exit in 2019, he was promoted to GM.) If ownership neglect kept Fisher in his role for so long, perhaps the firing of Curt Miller was the other side. Is: Caution of ownership, and action for the sake of action. Sparks fans are right to ask the question. Whether firing Miller was meant to avoid another Fisher-like mistake, or is it a feint toward change is an alternative to the real, expensive investments the Sparks will need to make to attract top talent and build a contender. ? It’s nice to see that Dallas, a disaster franchise whose every scout should be arrested, is reorganizing its front office and replacing Greg Bibb as general manager. Less pleasing to see is that Greg Bibb is leading the search for a replacement and will remain the team’s CEO.
The new money and attention to women’s basketball should also increase the pool of coaching talent available. The recent wave of NBA hires in the league show this has already been happening for a few years: Becky Hammon, Nate Tibbetts, Weatherspoon and Nakase all got the bulk of their coaching experience as NBA assistants before making the switch. . Hammon and Tibbets are reportedly the two highest-paid coaches in WNBA history, each making at least $1 million. “On the front office side and the coaching side, there’s no salary cap,” Aces owner Mark Davis said. said in 2022Explaining his decision to give Hamann his record-breaking contract.
When Tibet was hired, L Wondered if the new money The front office and coaching side may actually have fewer Black women and former players in head coaching roles, in the same way that Title IX made women coaching jobs more attractive to men. The league and the players’ union have worked specifically on this issue for years, allowing teams to hire more assistant coaches and making it easier for WNBA players to take jobs on NBA benches. Six WNBA coaches heading into the 2022 season were Black. Of the five non-expansion head coaches now serving, four are women, and three are former WNBA players, but just one is Black: Seattle’s Noelle Quinn.
Most WNBA jobs still pay less than top NCAA jobs, so don’t expect college basketball to become a major WNBA coaching feeder any time soon. But some of the conditions that make WNBA jobs less attractive than college jobs – travel, salaries, small staffs and fewer resources – are improving. and as many hafi college coach Let us tell you, college coaching is also becoming difficult.
If college coaches are indeed becoming general managers, with their jobs now more focused on the recruitment and retention of players, the WNBA may be moving in the opposite direction than expected. In the last WNBA Finals, Chicago provided plenty of opportunities to remember Wetherspoon’s predecessor, James Wade, who is now a divisive figure in the league after her. Sky dealt away important draft selections And moved for an NBA job in the middle of the 2023 season. Wade’s gifts were undeniable: She led the franchise to its first WNBA title in 2021. He drafted beautiful ATOs and had a keen eye for pro scouting. He brought Alanna Smith back to the state and took over the capable point guard role from Courtney Williams a year before joining the Lynx.
Is Wade to blame for taking the Sky out of two important draft lotteries? Yes. But in a just world, in a league and franchise that functioned normally and gave good head coaches the support they needed, he would not have been a coach and a general manager. He can rely on his team’s ownership to retain talent Build a real practice facilityTo treat players righteverything to the sky haven’t done By most accounts—and focus on the things he was good at. The things he was bad at – the big-picture strategy issues that could arise, given his coaching mandate to win as many games as possible – would be left to someone else.
This problem plagues many WNBA front offices, which is why the coaching carousel may not be as interesting as GM turnover. Former Aces general manager Natalie Williams won two championships in three seasons before being fired; His third season showed that having A’Ja Wilson would no longer be enough. A team built through the draft may have to start building in other ways as well. The Minnesota Lynx showed in their playoff run that a team can compensate for a lack of size or star power with versatility and depth. It takes a little more work to discover and develop those qualities.
Accordingly, future WNBA coaches will have to be smarter about rotation and bench development. The ever-expanding schedule means more minutes, which hopefully means more reps for more players, and more rest for stars hoping to play big playoff minutes. It is often astonishing to watch Arike Ogunbowale or Diana Taurasi run up and down the court in the fourth quarter of a blowout. (Ironically, Hammon, trained in the land of load management, may be the league’s worst offender.)
When Sky hired Wetherspoon last year, Annie Costabile’s Chicago Sun-Times informed that she was “the top candidate from the very beginning of their coaching search” and that negotiations between the parties had been ongoing for months. The team that Weatherspoon was hired by Kahli Copper to coach was very different from the team he coached, which was built around two non-shooting rookie veterans and one. the guard who passed out But no three was taken. By the end of the season, the Sky had sold their only true three-point shooter. at his requestAnd injuries had killed the team.
Costabile wrote that Weatherspoon’s inexperience was on display throughout the season, but Weatherspoon was certainly inexperienced. Whoever took that job would have been a new coach in charge of a strange roster on a team that had long struggled to retain good players. Whether Wetherspoon’s poor rotation or locker room “disconnect” Costabile references were worthy of firing is up to Pagliocca, but a coaching change is basically a bet that you can do better, and the bet can be risky. The hasty dismissal of a coach may be a sign of serious business or high standards. It can also give good, qualified coaching candidates a taste of what it’s like to work for the Chicago Sky.