The Chicago Sky Cost Themselves Angel Reese

The Chicago Sky were supposed to be getting a franchise building block when they drafted Angel Reese with the seventh overall pick of the 2024 draft. Instead they ended up with a player who didn't even make it through her rookie deal. The Sky announced Monday morning that Reese had been traded to the Atlanta Dream, in exchange for two first-round picks and a second-round pick swap.

Devoid of certain context, this is a trade which the Sky could defend on its merits. While Reese was the best player on the team and an All-Star in each of her first two seasons, the Sky have won a total of 23 games since drafting her and are in desperate need of a rebuild. Then there's the way the 2025 season ended for Reese: with her being suspended for the first half of a game after she offered a sharp and accurate assessment of the franchise to the Chicago Tribune. It would be safe to assume that Reese wouldn't have been keen to continue her tenure in Chicago once she became a free agent, and so it stands to reason that the Sky would use her as a trade asset to try and kickstart their latest roster overhaul. They received 2027 and 2028 first-round picks from the Dream in today's trade.

That said, the Chicago Sky and merit are concepts as distant from each other as Earth and the Moon. This is possibly the worst organization in American pro sports. The Reese trade is a culmination of numerous managerial fuck-ups that have turned the Sky into the clowns of the WNBA. One reason the Sky might have been so desperate to get their hands on a 2027 first-round pick is because they already traded swap rights on their own first-round pick in that draft to the Washington Mystics. That swap was made as part of a trade in which the Sky received Ariel Atkins for the 2025 No. 3 draft pick, which the Mystics turned into All-Rookie guard Sonia Citron. Oh, and Chicago would've had the second overall pick in this year's draft, if not for a last-minute swap with the Minnesota Lynx right before last year's draft.