DALLAS — For a moment Sunday evening, the Sky looked ready to salvage their road trip.
They led the Wings by 10 in the fourth quarter, riding a string of huge baskets from rookie Sydney Taylor. They were on the verge of toppling a great team and easing the sting of their bad loss to the Sparks two nights earlier.
Then the familiar problems returned.
They could not get stops down the stretch. A poorly timed turnover became a basket at the other end. Another close game began slipping away.
It has been the Sky’s Achilles’ heel all season: putting themselves in position to win, then failing to slam the door shut.
“It’s just not making the plays when we need to,” Courtney Vandersloot said. “That’s what great teams do. You saw it in Vegas. You saw it in Dallas. Great players, great teams make great plays in that moment, and we just haven’t done it yet.
“It’s nobody’s fault. At some point, all of us have made a mistake that we wish we could have taken back. It’s little things like that that seem to slip away.”
The loss dropped the Sky to 7-16, the same record they had at the halfway point last season. Despite an overhauled roster and playoff expectations, they have found themselves in an awfully familiar position.
Their playoff hopes are looking bleaker by the game. They’ve dug themselves into a hole so big that desperation mode is necessary even before the All-Star break.
“We have no time anymore to figure things out,” Vandersloot said. “It has to start now.”
Vandersloot echoed what has been said at every level of the organization: It comes down to execution and attention to detail.
She believes the Sky can get sloppy. They need better screening, smarter shot selection and the discipline to prevent one mistake from bleeding into the next possession.
Those are problems they can address directly, though they’re the same ones they’ve talked about all season.
Others are not as easily solved.
Skylar Diggins, one of the team’s biggest offseason signings, was abruptly benched last week. She then publicly expressed frustration with the decision and with the organization’s communication and resources.
Can those frustrations be addressed?
“Yeah, I think [by] winning,” Vandersloot said. “We have to turn this thing around. At the end of the day, Skylar came here to win. She’s frustrated. We’re all frustrated because we didn’t see this season going this way.
“We have to find solutions. That’s the only way to turn this thing around.”
How soon — or even whether — Diggins can be part of that solution remains unclear. She has since missed three games with a right knee injury, and coach Tyler Marsh has offered no timeline for her return.
Even Vandersloot, the floor general the Sky expected to provide a steadying presence, is still finding her own footing.
She described the six games in her return from an ACL tear as a roller coaster.
In her first game back, the Sky looked unstoppable, scoring 124 points and setting a league record with 38 assists. Two games of 7+ assists followed for Vandersloot, putting her well ahead of what might have been expected from a 37-year-old returning from major surgery.
On this road trip, though, she has not had more than four assists in any game.
“I started really high, and the last couple of games I don’t think personally have been very good,” she said. “I think I have to give myself a little bit of grace, even though it’s hard because we’re trying so hard to get this thing going.
“I don’t want to give myself grace because I want to be really good for this team. But I do have to understand that this is all part of my return to play.”
Vandersloot recognizes that uneven performances are a natural part of returning from a major injury. She also knows the Sky no longer have the luxury of patiently waiting for everything to fall into place.
That is the tense position they’ve reached halfway through the season.
The Sky are clearly still a work in progress. They just can’t afford to keep playing like one.
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