The Sky know what their biggest problem is.
Asked about the gap between the the expectations for the season and their reality, coach Tyler Marsh said it all comes down to consistency.
At 8-16, the Sky are stuck in 12th place, but have shown flashes of competing with the league’s best teams.
“Obviously no one in this locker room is pleased with where we’re at, but we’re not trying to manage other people’s expectations,” Marsh said on Wednesday. “We’re trying to hold up to what our expectations are for ourselves.”
It should be noted that their own expectations are the ones they’re falling short of, not necessarily external ones. Very few of the major preseason power rankings picked the Sky to finish in the top eight.
But they still believe they’re close to validating the confidence they projected.
“We’re in all these games,” veteran guard Natasha Cloud said after the Sky squandered their third double-digit lead against the Wings. “We’re in every single one of them until the last probably three or four minutes, and then we’re not executing on both ends of the floor.”
Lucky for them, the rest of the league keeps leaving the door open.
Pretty much every team has been inconsistent so far. Even the league’s best teams — the Lynx, the Aces — can lay an egg on any given night.
The middle is even more Jekyll and Hyde. The Fever, Liberty and Dream — teams with traditional Big Threes and championship aspirations — all have games when they look totally incomplete.
Start with what that means for Marsh, who has taken the brunt of the heat for this underperforming squad.
If Fever coach Stephanie White, as respected and seasoned as they come, can’t lead a team with three All-Star starters to better than 14-10, Marsh’s campaign with a team that has zero All-Stars looks a little less damning.
That doesn’t let him off the hook. It means he isn’t uniquely failing in a league where more talented teams with more continuity are having the same kinds of struggles.
Then there’s what it means for the standings. The teams sitting between the Sky and the playoffs have plenty of holes, too.
The Sparks recently fired their general manager and could become sellers at the trade deadline. The Tempo, much like the Sky, can challenge a great team one night and look completely overmatched the next.
The burning question is whether this opportunity even matters if the Sky remain their own worst enemy. Just past the midpoint of the season, their late-game dysfunction might be a pattern that has calcified.
Wednesday’s win over the Storm offered a small rebuttal.
Yes, Seattle has the worst record in the league, but the Sky won without their two leading scorers, Kamilla Cardoso and Skylar Diggins. And this time, they didn’t choke away the ending.
It’s not ideal that the Sky’s playoff hopes rest as much on the rest of the league’s inconsistency as on their own strengths. Eventually, they’ll have to prove they can protect a lead against playoff teams, not just benefit when the teams ahead of them stumble.
But that’s the open door waiting for them in the second half — if they can get out of their own way and walk through it.
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