The Sky looked to be on track for a second consecutive victory against the first-place Lynx until guard Ariel Atkins left the game with a leg injury in the first half.
She didn’t return after halftime, and the wheels fell off soon after. The Sky gave up 12 three-pointers and turned the ball over 19 times in a 91-78 loss Monday night at Wintrust Arena.
‘‘[The Lynx] maximized off everything,’’ Sky forward Angel Reese said of the turnovers. ‘‘They’re the No. 1 team for a reason.’’
Despite the loss, the Sky’s overall play in their last eight games is positive: a 4-4 stretch that includes a signature victory against 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 WNBA during that span. Their spacing, ball movement and pace have improved.
Maybe even more important is that their defense has started to stabilize.
Early in the season, the Sky were one of the worst defensive teams in the league, in part because their 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 in to the scouting report. Those were the technical pieces Wright, a defensive guru, keyed in on.
From the outside, however, the most obvious sign of improvement was the Sky’s three-point defense. In May, they were giving up 11 threes a game. That number had dropped substantially — until Monday. The Lynx made 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 three. Napheesa Collier finished with 29 points, including 11-for-11 from the free-throw line, Courtney Williams had 18 and Kayla McBride had 17.
Still, there are worse things than giving up 91 points to the best offense in the league.
After the game, Reese felt ready to bounce back.
‘‘It wasn’t something spectacular that they ran that we couldn’t stop,’’ she said. ‘‘It was just that we didn’t get back in transition. We fouled them a lot.’’
Those are fixable issues, but the Sky 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 have shown real progress.
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 Atkins’ injury, that is. She’s their leading scorer and one of their top defenders, and they won’t get very far without her.
Head coach Tyler Marsh said after the game that Atkins still was being diagnosed.
