The Sky looked on track for a second straight win over the first-place Lynx — until Ariel Atkins left the game with a leg injury.
She didn’t return after halftime, and the wheels fell off soon after. The Sky gave up 12 threes and turned it over 19 times in a 91-78 loss Monday night at Wintrust Arena.
“[The Lynx] maximized off everything,” Angel Reese said of the turnovers. “They’re the No. 1 team for a reason.”
Despite the loss, the overall trend over the past eight games is positive — a 4-4 stretch that included a signature win over the Lynx on Saturday.
The offense has been clicking. Reese is averaging a double-double, and the Sky have been the best three-point shooting team in the league during that span. Their spacing, ball movement and pace have all improved.
Maybe even more important: the defense had started to stabilize.
Early in the season, the Sky were one of the worst defensive teams in the league, in part because effort and execution weren’t always meeting the bar. The coaching staff made that clear.
“It’s not that they were going out there and not trying,” assistant coach Tanisha Wright told the Sun-Times. “It’s a matter of like, ‘OK, you’re trying, but you’re also not doing it in the way that we designed it.’”
In recent weeks, though, the Sky climbed into the top half of the league in defensive rating.
It wasn’t just about playing harder. It was about playing smarter within the scheme.
Ball-screen coverages. Rotations after breakdowns. Locking into the scout. Those were the technical pieces Wright — a defensive guru — keyed in on.
But from the outside, the easiest sign of improvement was the Sky’s three-point defense.
In May, they were giving up 11 threes a game. That number dropped substantially — until Monday. The Lynx hit six in the first quarter alone and finished with 12.
“We needed to run them off the line,” Reese said. “The three-point line is what they do.”
Losing Atkins — whose ball pressure is a cornerstone of the Sky’s perimeter defense — didn’t help. Without her, the Sky struggled to contain the Lynx’s Big 3. Napheesa Collier finished with 29 points, including 11-for-11 from the line. Kayla McBride had 17. Courtney Williams added 18.
Still, there are worse things than giving up 91 points to the league’s best offense.
Postgame, Reese felt ready to bounce back.
“It wasn’t something spectacular that they ran that we couldn’t stop,” Reese said. “It was just that we didn’t get back in transition. We fouled them a lot.”
Fixable issues, but they can’t let them spiral. Especially not with another tough stretch of games on the horizon.
At 7-14, the Sky sit in 10th place. But they’re only a couple of games out of the playoff picture. And they’ve shown real progress, with that win Saturday standing as their clearest breakthrough yet.
Asked where the team is trending, Wright stretched out her arm like an airplane.
“You want to be a team that’s ascending at this time of the year,” she said. “And we are a team that’s ascending.”
That was true — until the Atkins injury. She’s their leading scorer and a top defender, and they won’t get very far without her. Head coach Tyler Marsh said postgame that she’s still being diagnosed.
