Could the Chicago Sky hand the No. 1 draft pick to the No. 1 team in the WNBA?

Chicago Tribune

3 days ago

The Chicago Sky are entering a dire turning point of the season.
With a 7-19 record, the Sky are the second-worst team in the WNBA. Starting guard Ariel Atkins is sidelined indefinitely. Star Angel Reese is battling through minor injuries. With fewer than 20 games left in the regular season, the playoffs are a far-off dream.
This isn't what the Sky envisioned for their first season under head coach Tyler Marsh. But in any other year, all of this failure and frustration would come with a shiny silver lining: improved odds at another lottery pick in 2026, a draft class studded with top talent including Azzi Fudd and Olivia Miles.
But that's not the case this year for the Sky, who don't own their natural first-round pick in 2026. Instead, Chicago will spend the latter half of the season fending off a worst-case scenario — handing the No. 1 pick to the best team in the league.
In 2024, the Sky struck a deal with the Minnesota Lynx to acquire the No. 7 overall pick in the 2024 draft in exchange for the No. 8 pick in 2024, a second-round pick in 2025 and a first-round pick swap in 2026. The Sky then added a final bow to this trade in a 2025 trade to acquire the No. 11 pick in the draft, ceding the rights to the 2026 pick swap to give Minnesota outright ownership of Chicago's first-rounder.
Those two deals were monumental for the Sky, paving the way for the acquisition of Angel Reese (No. 7 in 2024) and Hailey Van Lith (No. 11 in 2025) as building blocks for a team developing around youth. But they also handed an unexpected boon to Minnesota, a 22-win team already dead set on steamrolling the rest of the league on their road back to the WNBA Finals.
At best, the Sky are currently set to hand the Lynx a lottery pick to bolster a roster already headlined by stars like Napheesa Collier and Courtney Williams. And if they can't slow a slippery descent of losses amid a rash of injuries, the Sky could be on track to give the No. 1 pick to the league's heaviest hitter.
The lottery system in the WNBA draft is complicated by a two-season weighting, which differs from most other draft lotteries in leagues like the NBA. The five lottery slots are determined by the teams that finish outside of the playoffs. From there, however, lottery odds are based on a team's record over the past two seasons.
The non-playoff team with the worst two-season record will have a 40% chance of receiving the No. 1 pick. The remainder of the lottery is weighted by this two-season record, with exponentially decreasing odds — 25% for the team with the second-worst record, 17% for third-worst, 11% for fourth-worst and 7% for fifth-worst.
This approach to odds drastically changes the outcome of lottery seeding in the WNBA. For instance, despite a dismal four-win showing this season, Connecticut's lottery odds are artificially deflated by their 28-12 record in the 2024 season, when they finished third overall in the league. Their two-season win percentage is still 49.2%, which traps them in the lowest odds despite being the bottom-ranked team in the league this year.
Five teams are jockeying in the bottom rung of the league — the Sun, the Sky, the Golden State Valkyries (12-13, 48% two-year percentage), the Los Angeles Sparks (11-15, 28.8% two-year percentage) and the Dallas Wings (8-19, 25.4% two-year percentage). Three of these picks are owed to other teams — Connecticut to Chicago, Chicago to Minnesota and Los Angeles to Seattle.
While the Sky are only one loss behind the Sparks in two-year win percentage, they remain 14 losses behind the Wings, who are favorites to finish with the top odds at the No. 1 pick. Barring a truly disastrous end of the season — which would involve the Wings going on a breakneck winning streak — the Sky are unlikely to finish above second in the draft lottery odds.
This is still, however, somewhat disastrous. If the Sky hand the Lynx a top-three pick, they will be allowing the best team in the league a choice between Fudd, Miles or Lauren Betts. A top-five pick still isn't much better. And there's little the Sky can do to prevent either outcome from occurring.
The best-case scenario for the Sky? Make the playoffs.
That's been true all year. Conveying a first-rounder to Minnesota immediately negated the concept of tanking away this season. And the only way for the Sky to block the Lynx from potentially landing the No. 1 pick is to knock them out of the lottery altogether. If the Sky somehow make the playoffs, they would drop their draft pick down to No. 8 overall due to the presence of expansion teams in Toronto and Portland, which will receive the No. 6 and No. 7 picks.
The likelihood of that outcome, however, is slim at best. The Sky are six games back from the Washington Mystics, who are currently eighth overall with a 13-13 record. They've won only four of their last 10 games, the second-worst streak in the entire league.
If Atkins returns, a turnaround could still be on the table. But for now, the Sky are charting a course toward a disastrous result for the entire league — handing the Lynx even more ammunition to load up for yet another WNBA title conquest.