Amid losing season, Sky GM Jeff Pagliocca still sees playoff potential and an underrated young core

LAS VEGAS — In an essay titled "The Chicago Sky Have Nothing to Look Forward To," WNBA writer Maitreyi Anantharaman captured the anxiety that hangs over this team.

The Sky are stuck in no man's land. At 6-13, they don’t look like a playoff team. But they don't get the silver linings of a rebuild, either.

They aren't the Storm, riding the ascent of young star Dominique Malonga. They aren't the Sun, waiting on a top-two pick to come save them. The Sky traded away draft capital chasing a win-now roster. And while the league is brimming with young talent from college and overseas, they signed three point guards in their mid-30s.

To skeptics, that looks less like a franchise with a clear next chapter and more like a banged-up team playing out the twilight of its careers.

The sunnier view lives in general manager Jeff Pagliocca's office. Now in his third losing season with the franchise — with the pressure to turn things around — Pagliocca still believes in the vision he touted in April.

"I stand on the success of the offseason," Pagliocca told the Sun-Times. "We added a cornerstone of the franchise [Rickea Jackson], we added championship experience [Azurá Stevens], we added All-Defensive players [DiJonai Carrington], another future Hall of Famer in Skylar Diggins."

Pagliocca doesn’t have a smoking gun for why a roster that looked good on paper hasn't produced many wins. He acknowledged that losing Jackson, the team's leading scorer, to a season-ending injury so early took the wind out of the Sky's sails. It should also be noted that Stevens started the season hurt and Carrington still hasn't played a game.

But Pagliocca wouldn't pin it on injuries.

"I know that [if] we execute better, we come out on top of a number of these games," Pagliocca said. "We have to own that. We easily could have closed out three or four games that we lost, and that is on us. We have to own the lack of execution late in games. We're not going to blame the officials, we're not going to blame the injuries."

Late-game execution has killed them. What could have been a June stretch proving the Sky could beat top teams turned into a run of last-minute losses, capped by an epic fourth-quarter collapse in Dallas.

Still, Pagliocca sees the momentum shifting. He thinks the Sky have what they need to compete and that the playoffs are still in reach. More than that, he thinks this team does have something to look forward to: its young core.

Sky center Kamilla Cardoso, drafted No. 3 in 2024, and Jackson, a former lottery pick they traded for over the offseason, have both shown flashes in their first three years in the league.

But they don’t usually come up in the same conversations as the Storm's Malonga, the Mystics' Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen, or the Wings' Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd. When Pagliocca's peers voted on the league's most promising young cores, the Sky didn't make the cut.

Some of that skepticism is fair. Jackson shot only 42.7% last season and didn't defend especially well. Cardoso's penchant for foul trouble takes her out of games, and most of her scoring still comes right at the rim.

But Pagliocca doesn't see his group as less-than.

"There's a number of teams with strong young cores," he said. "We feel strongly ours is in that same echelon."

The best evidence is Cardoso's last three weeks: 19.8 points on 73% shooting to go with 8.5 rebounds. She has had great stretches before, and the burden is still on her to prove this one sticks. But it has never looked quite like this.

"I think what you're seeing now is progress," Pagliocca said. "I think it's important to note that she's 25 years old. I know the world had high expectations. I did and continue to have them, but not every success story has a linear path.

“I know she wants to be great. She's very reflective, and I think she knows when she's not at her best.

"I think you play a good game and then you struggle the next one, or the next three — it allows everyone to ask questions. She'll be the first to say that doubt will creep in from time to time. She just might be sick of it.”

If that’s true, Pagliocca’s vision might be closer than we think. But the Sky's ace in the hole is Sydney Taylor.

Pagliocca discovered the undrafted guard in a Polish league this past offseason. She worked her way into the starting rotation and now has four games with 25 or more points.

"She has a chance to be a star," Pagliocca said. "She has qualities that players would dream of having athletically. She is a very creative player. She is understanding the importance of defending now. I think she wants to be a two-way player. The sky is absolutely the limit."

But even if Pagliocca is right about his core in the long-term, his aggressive dealings have put pressure on the team to succeed immediately.

The clearest example is the 2027 pick swap he traded to the Mystics to get veteran guard Ariel Atkins last season. Pagliocca bet the Sky would finish ahead of Washington. Instead, the Mystics are the better team. If the season ended today, the Sky would hand Washington their lottery pick and get only a late first-rounder in return.

That would mean missing a chance at college phenoms such as JuJu Watkins, Madison Booker or Hannah Hidalgo, who could all be available in the 2027 draft.

Such is the cost of not protecting his lottery picks at a time when he acknowledges the talent coming into the league is significant.

So how concerned is Pagliocca about that deal?

"It's on my mind at all times as we go through the season," Pagliocca said. "But it doesn't necessarily dictate how I feel about the games or playoff picture. Of course, the goal is to make the playoffs. Of course, we'd like to finish above Washington. We'd like to finish above all the teams in the league. It's a little bit of extra motivation due to the nature of the deal. It's not something I'm obsessing over."

For Pagliocca, the justification comes down to what the trade ultimately netted: Jackson, who he believes is an All-WNBA caliber player. He flipped Atkins to the Sparks for Jackson.

"We're gonna [do that] every single time," Pagliocca said. "If that costs a few spots [in the draft order] ultimately, which isn't even guaranteed yet. I feel passionate about where our team is going and what our trajectory is."

The Sky have been playing better basketball behind Cardoso and Taylor, with two commanding wins over the Fire last week and a narrow loss to the Aces. But the problems haven't gone anywhere. They need to rebound better. They need to prove they can close. They need to actually knock off a top team.

"We are aware we need to dig ourselves out of a hole," Pagliocca said. "I'm definitely confident where we are moving forward the second half of the season, and for the future, because of what we were able to build in the offseason."