I watched Chicago throw a three-day party for a league its own team wasn’t allowed at, and I kept waiting for the moment that would make it feel less absurd. It never came. The Chicago Sky are hosting WNBA All-Star Weekend in their own building, in their own city, and the roster the front office assembled has zero representation in a single event on the schedule. When the league offered Chicago a consolation invite to Friday’s Shooting Stars competition, just so somebody local could be on the floor for something, the Sky said no.
A mile from that decision, Jonquel Jones was winning All-Star MVP in the building the Sky call home, and I kept thinking about the player who should have been the one Chicago sent instead of an apology. Rickea Jackson was the Sky’s actual All-Star case this year, not a hypothetical one. She opened the season averaging 22 points a game through her first three contests, had the Sky at 3-1 after four, and was up to 18 points and 1.8 blocks a night by the time May rolled around, playing the best defense of her career. Then, driving to the basket against Minnesota on May 17, her ACL gave out.
https://x.com/AnnieCostabile/status/2056158800336347270
That tweet is the whole season in one frame: a young player being walked off in front of a crowd that had no idea it was watching the last competitive stretch of Chicago’s year. Sky GM Jeff Pagliocca said afterward that Jackson was “playing at an All-Star and All-Defensive level early in the season,” which is a nice thing to say about a player you can no longer put on the floor. He wasn’t lying. That’s what makes it worse.
Without her, Chicago has lost nine of its last ten games and sits 9-18, 13th in the standings, and that record is why the Sky are the first host franchise in WNBA All-Star history without a player in any event on their own weekend — no All-Star Game, no Shooting Stars, no three-point contest. Chicago hadn’t gone a season without an All-Star since 2016. It found a new way to make history instead.
None of this happened in a vacuum. The Sky traded away Angel Reese this offseason, and she’s in the building this weekend as an All-Star for the Atlanta Dream, the best rebounder in the league according to the paper that covers the team that let her go. That same piece points out the Sky once held the draft pick that became Olivia Miles before trading it for Reese, and lost Marina Mabrey when she asked out midseason in 2024. Miles and Mabrey are both part of All-Star Weekend too, for other teams, while the rest of the league gets deeper and more dangerous around Chicago.
The Sky will tell you, accurately, that Jackson wasn’t the only injury. Kamilla Cardoso is having a genuinely good season, career highs across the board, but she’s been in and out of the lineup with a right knee issue. Skylar Diggins is dealing with her own knee. DiJonai Carrington had foot surgery. The Daily Herald reports the Shooting Stars pass got chalked up to widespread injury issues, and I don’t doubt that’s the official version. Turning down the Shooting Stars invite reads, to me, less like a scheduling call and more like a front office finally admitting out loud how thin it let this roster get. That’s my read, not a quote from anybody in the building. You don’t get here by accident. You get here because somebody in the front office fucked up the roster math and is hoping a Shooting Stars pass makes people forget about it.
Natasha Cloud picked up a technical arguing with officials the night Jackson went down, and said afterward that referees “failed to protect Rickea; they failed to control the game.” She might be right about that game. Officiating in this league deserves every bit of the heat it gets. But it’s a smaller problem than the one sitting upstairs in the front office, and it’s a lot easier to yell about a missed call than admit you built a roster with zero margin for anything going wrong.
I’m not even angry in the loud way anymore. I’m just tired of watching it happen to this specific team, in this specific way, at the worst possible time to be caught without a bench. The Sky will host the actual All-Star Game this weekend with a suite full of dignitaries and not one player from the home roster on the floor, and somewhere in that building Rickea Jackson will be watching the league throw itself a parade a few miles from a rehab facility. Chicago built a party it couldn’t be trusted to show up to. That’s not bad luck. That’s a roster decision, working exactly as constructed.
