In late August, the Chicago Sky killed off Sky Guy, their unsettling superhero mascot of 18 years, and introduced fans to Skye the Lioness, a mascot “chosen to embody strength, feminine power, grace, and the courage to overcome obstacles, qualities that the Chicago Sky consistently showcase.” Skye's name allows for too much confusion: the team name, plus a silent vowel? Also, she is wack and badly dressed.
Ellie the Elephant, the New York Liberty's mascot whose runaway success Skye was no doubt meant to reproduce, dashed off some dismissive tweets on the day of Skye’s launch. But insofar as she emerged from a process lacking in vision and one step behind everyone else, Skye really does embody the Chicago Sky’s qualities. A month after the change at mascot, the team fired head coach Teresa Weatherspoon, not a full year after hiring her. General manager Jeff Pagliocca said at Chicago’s practice facility groundbreaking event a few weeks later that the Sky “just felt it was time to make a change.”
Since then, five more WNBA teams have fired or “parted ways with” their head coach. The Weatherspoon news actually created the second coaching vacancy of the offseason. By just a few days, the Los Angeles Sparks beat the Sky to announcing that their second-year head coach Curt Miller wouldn’t return. Seven of the league’s 12 teams—the Sparks, Sky, Washington Mystics, Atlanta Dream, Dallas Wings, Indiana Fever, and Connecticut Sun—currently have no head coach in place. (One of the vacancies might be fake; former Sun coach Stephanie White was discussed as a candidate for the Fever before the job even opened.) Three teams—the Mystics, Wings, and Las Vegas Aces—are also hiring new general managers. A 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 at most the sixth-longest tenured head coach in the league.
As I’ve written before, coaching is hard for me to evaluate. I can scrutinize hiring announcements (see: Nate Tibbetts), and I think I can tell when the locker room vibe is way off (see: Vanessa Nygaard). But it feels weird to watch games and parcel out credit such 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 would be X much better/worse if they hired Coach C. Admittedly, the work of sportswriting is arranging some set of facts to suit a story. Still, as an outsider, I don’t like drawing big conclusions from one eyeroll in a huddle or an animated sideline chat. So many WNBA teams are carelessly constructed that it’s also hard for me to declare in those cases that coaching, and not something else, is the problem.
This blog is not about whether certain WNBA coaches “deserved” to get fired or not. If you want to debate Eric Thibault’s late-game lineups, go for it. To me, a more productive discussion asks what front offices are thinking right now, and whether the firing spree hints at some broader shift in how WNBA teams are being run.
Owners and front offices make coaching changes when they think someone else can do a better job. A lot of them doing that at once might mean:
- The way owners see teams has changed or sharpened
- The pool of “someone elses” available has grown
- The job itself has become different
Some owners have surely read the last year’s worth of headlines and ratings data, noticed the money pouring into women’s basketball, and suddenly remembered that they own a WNBA team—like finding a $20 bill in your coat pocket. In a Los Angeles Times column this season, Bill Plaschke blasted “the Sparks’ dud owners” for being “the least involved with the team as any sports owners in town.” Magic Johnson, who has indeed been a hands-off owner of the Sparks, was interviewed for the column and didn’t disagree with that assessment. “I’m going to get more involved,” he told Plaschke. “It’s probably been my fault that I’ve let [Sparks managing partner] Eric Holoman make all the decisions and us as the owners, we’ve been sitting back a little. I think I have to get more involved, and I’ll do that, that’s a commitment to the fans, that I will get more involved and be part of it more to help bring the Sparks back to a championship level.” Five days after Plaschke’s column ran, the team fired Miller.
For a long time, the Sparks gave second chances to an obviously underperforming coach. Derek Fisher alienated his team’s elite talent but only ever amassed more responsibility. (After a terrible first-round playoff exit in 2019, he was promoted to GM.) If ownership neglect kept Fisher in his role for so long, maybe Curt Miller’s firing is the flip side: ownership attentiveness, and action for action’s sake. Sparks fans would be right to ask questions. Was firing Miller meant to avoid another Fisher-like mistake, or is it a feint toward change, a substitute for the real, pricier investments the Sparks will need to make to attract top talent and build a contender? It was nice to see that Dallas, a disaster franchise whose every scout should be arrested, is restructuring its front office and replacing Greg Bibb as general manager. It was less nice to see that Greg Bibb is leading the search for the replacement and will remain the team’s CEO.
The new money and attention in women’s basketball should also be growing the pool of available coaching talent. The league’s recent wave of NBA hires suggests this has been happening for a few years already: Becky Hammon, Nate Tibbetts, Weatherspoon, and Nakase all got the bulk of their coaching experience as NBA assistants before making the switch. Hammon and Tibbetts are reportedly the two highest-paid coaches in WNBA history, each earning at least $1 million in salary. “On the front office side and the coaching side, there is no salary cap,” Aces owner Mark Davis said in 2022, explaining his decision to give Hammon her record-breaking contract.
When Tibbetts was hired, l wondered whether the new money on the front office and coaching side could actually end up shrinking the number of black women and former players in head coaching roles, the same way Title IX had made jobs coaching women more appealing to men. The league and players’ union have worked specifically on that issue for years, allowing teams to carry more assistant coaches and making it easier for WNBA players to take jobs on NBA benches. Six of the WNBA’s coaches were black in the 2022 season. Of the five employed non-expansion head coaches now, 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 be a major WNBA coaching feeder anytime soon. But some of the conditions that made WNBA jobs less appealing than college positions—the travel, the pay, the smaller staffs and fewer resources—are improving. And as many huffy college coaches will tell you, college coaching is getting harder, too.
If college coaches are becoming de facto general managers, their jobs now more focused on player recruitment and retention, the WNBA might hopefully move in the opposite direction. These past WNBA Finals offered many occasions to remember James Wade, Weatherspoon’s predecessor in Chicago, a now-divisive figure in the league after he dealt away the Sky's important draft picks and left for an NBA job in the middle of the 2023 season. Wade's gifts were undeniable: He led the franchise to its first WNBA title in 2021. He drew up lovely ATOs and had a great eye for pro scouting. He brought Alanna Smith back stateside and got competent point guard play out of Courtney Williams a year before they joined 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 worked normally and gave good head coaches the support they needed, he wouldn't have been coach and general manager. He could trust his team’s ownership to retain talent—to build a real practice facility, to treat players right, to do everything the Sky have not 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 might arise, given his coaching mandate to win as many games as possible—would be left to someone else.
This problem plagues a lot of WNBA front offices, which is why the coaching carousel may not be as intriguing as the GM turnover. Former Aces general manager Natalie Williams won two championships in three seasons before she was fired; her third season showed that having A'ja Wilson might not be enough anymore. A team built through the draft might have to start building in other ways, too. The Minnesota Lynx showed in their playoff run that a team can compensate for lack of size or star power with versatility and depth. Those qualities take a little more work to find and cultivate.
Accordingly, future WNBA coaches will have to be smarter about rotations and bench development. A steadily expanding schedule means more minutes, which hopefully means more reps for more players, and more rest for the stars expected to play big playoff minutes. It is often perplexing to see Arike Ogunbowale or Diana Taurasi trotting up and down the court in the fourth quarter of a blowout. (Ironically, Hammon, trained in the land of load management, might be the league’s worst offender.)
When the Sky hired Weatherspoon last year, Annie Costabile of the Chicago Sun-Times reported that she was “the top candidate from the start of their coaching search,” and that the parties had been in talks for months. The team Weatherspoon was hired to coach, helmed by Kahleah Copper, ended up being very different from the team she did coach, which was built around two non-shooting rookie bigs and a guard who panned out but didn't take any threes. By the end of the season, the Sky had traded away their only real three-point shooter at her request, and injuries had killed the team.
Costabile wrote that Weatherspoon’s inexperience had shown throughout the season, but Weatherspoon was of course inexperienced. Anyone who had taken that job would have been a new coach in charge of a weird-ass roster at a team that had long struggled to keep good players around. Whether Weatherspoon’s bad rotations or the locker room “disconnect” Costabile references were worthy of firing is up to Pagliocca, but a coaching change is fundamentally a bet that you can do better, and bets can be risky. The hasty firing of a coach might signal serious business or high standards. It might also tell good, qualified coaching candidates exactly what it’s like to work for the Chicago Sky.
