Chicago Sky have green light to ‘let it fly’ from 3-point range

The Chicago Sky refuse to take the fewest 3-pointers in the WNBA again.

The Sky tried to get by without taking 3s last season, attempting a league-low 14.9 per game and averaging only 4.8 makes. It simply didn’t work. Abandoning the arc allowed defenses to smother the paint, leaving then-rookies Kamilla Cardoso and Angel Reese burdened with double teams.

It’s hard to fully contextualize just how dire the Sky’s 3-point crisis became in 2024. The New York Liberty more than doubled their production with a league-high average of 10.1 made 3s in 29 attempts per game. Even the closest team to the Sky, the Connecticut Sun, averaged 18 attempts — more than three per game higher.

“We want (3-pointers) to be part of our game,” first-year Sky coach Tyler Marsh said. “We’re not sure how it will come — some of it will be in transition, some of it will be off how Angel’s able to attack the paint and how we’re able to utilize Kamilla in the post as well. That’s part of how we emphasize our spacing. That’s what we want to create.”

Last year the Sky relied on one player, Marina Mabrey, for the bulk of their 3-point shooting. Mabrey accounted for 161 of their 347 attempts (46%) before the All-Star break, when she was traded to Connecticut. The lopsided structure weighed heavily on Mabrey, who sunk into a shooting slump as opponents blitzed her at the arc while leaving other Sky guards alone.

This year the Sky are trying to own the arc by committee. They acquired Rebecca Allen and Ariel Atkins via trades and signed Kia Nurse in free agency, adding a trio of players that combined to make 4.7 3s per game last season.

“There were a couple of times we looked around camp just like, ‘There’s so much shooting here,’” Nurse said. “Our job as guards and perimeter players — especially on the wings — is to knock some of those down to give space to our bigs on the inside to have more one-on-one opportunities.”

The payoff has been immediate for the Sky, who averaged 27.5 attempts from 3-point range in their first two preseason games against Brazil and the Minnesota Lynx.

Exhibition games aren’t always the most accurate predictor of what’s to come, but the early showings reflected a transformed offensive approach for the Sky — and an eagerness to embrace the new style.

“It’s just fun,” guard Rachel Banham said. “It’s fun for a shooter to know that you can shoot at any opportunity. We’re all looking for each other, we all believe in each other. It’s an emphasis at all times — if we ever have an open look, let it fly.”

That ethos — “let it fly” — has been repeated since the first day of training camp. But the flippancy of the phrase belies the detailed precision with which the Sky plan to manufacture 3-point looks.

Last season the previous coaching staff routinely insisted the team wasn’t opposed to 3-pointers. If players were open, coaches repeated, they were encouraged to take the shot. But the staff also seemed uncertain of how to create opportunities for those shots to materialize in the flow of the offense.

The lack of direction was painfully obvious to opponents, who felt the Sky became defined by aimlessness.

“There wasn’t as much direction in the sense of how they played,” said Allen, who played for the Phoenix Mercury. “It was a bit more ad hoc. I remember you had to be pretty alert as a defender against Chicago last season, just because you didn’t know what was going to happen next — and I don’t think that they did either.”

Marsh aims to be more purposeful in the construction of shot opportunities. While he doesn’t have a 3-point quota for a given game, the staff hopes to regularly attempt close to 30 shots behind the arc.

So where will those looks come from?

Before anything else, the Sky will try to produce 3-pointers on the run. Taking a 3 while both the defense and offense are getting set can seem unnecessarily risky — a miss feels like a wasted opportunity to run a play or take a seemingly smarter shot.

But transition 3s are actually among the highest-efficiency shots on the court for a guard. The defense is on its heels. Most players are coached to run down the center of the court to prevent rim running before spraying back out to the perimeter. That gives guards the opportunity to fly down the wings and corners for spot-up looks before a defender is able to contest.

The Sky hope to be transition specialists this season. As their primary rebounder, Reese has been tasked with initiating transition by immediately triggering passes or advancing the ball across the half-court line on her own. And point guard Courtney Vandersloot has been quick to advance the ball full court with a pass rather than taking the time to dribble, probing the defense for weaknesses in the opening seconds of possession.

Once the Sky get into their half-court offense, the 3-point arc will remain a focus. Those looks will be driven by a variety of simple actions — stagger screens, handoffs, ball screens — that create opportunities for catch-and-shoot 3s.

These play designs rely on the Sky’s confidence in the passing ability of their three bigs: Cardoso, Reese and Elizabeth Williams. All three are mobile frontcourt options who can make reads on the perimeter, in the midrange and with their backs to the basket in the post. That allows the Sky to utilize their bigs to initiate actions at the perimeter, such as dribble handoffs that create options for guards to cut, shoot or set up a new screen.

While ball screens often get the bulk of attention as a shot-creating mechanism, the Sky also have been using a high volume of handoffs to create quick windows.

In these scenarios, defenders have to bounce back onto their heels, creating an inflated amount of space — and giving the guard an immediate advantage in the first step to cut into open space and catch a quick flip pass for a rapid-fire shot. For shooters such as Nurse, these actions are a building block for creating opportunities around the arc.

“The defense ultimately has to make a decision right away,” Nurse said. “The moment the ball leaves my hands, I see what the defender is doing and I get to pick where everything goes next.”

This might seem like a lot of emphasis on shooting for a team centered around two second-year bigs, but the Sky believe there’s a symbiotic relationship.

Marsh sees 3-point shooting as the key to opening the paint and rim for Cardoso, Reese and Williams. Threes pull defenders away from the basket. Once that spacing is created by establishing a shooting threat, guards can go to work setting up the bigs down low. This approach will disarm an opponent’s ability to double-team and pack the paint while also providing the Sky more varied scoring options.

All of this is still theoretical. But in a week against the Indiana Fever — one of the league’s best shooting teams — the Sky’s new offense will get its first regular-season introduction to the WNBA.

Can the Sky shoot their way to success? The answers will come on the court.