Playoff formats, a coach’s firing, and ripple effects
On August 31, 2018, the Chicago Sky fired coach and general manager Amber Stocks. In her two seasons with Chicago, she posted a combined record of 25–43 and did not make the playoffs. Sky owner Michael Alter had expected big things from the team this season after it had two top-four picks in the 2018 WNBA Draft and returned two 2017 All-Stars in Stefanie Dolson and Allie Quigley. But the 2018 Sky only improved its record by a single game from 2017 and finished last in the league in defensive rating (112.0 points allowed per 100 possessions) and points allowed (90.1 per game).
Given that Alter hired an unproven Stocks in part because she was an assistant coach of the Los Angeles Sparks, a team known for tough defense, some might say this porous defense sealed her fate. Others might say that losing superstar Elena Delle Donne — who was traded to Washington in accordance with her reported wishes to play closer to her family in Delaware — mere months after Stocks was hired was always going to make it tough for Stocks to succeed. Players with Delle Donne’s skill set, size, and resume don’t come around often, and without her, the 2017 Sky had to shift into rebuilding mode.
But here’s a third hypothetical: maybe, just maybe, Stocks’ tenure in Chicago would’ve lasted longer if not for the league’s decision to change how it determined playoff seeding. This decision was made before the 2016 season, while Stocks was still with the Sparks and Pokey Chatman was still the Sky head coach.
How is that possible? Well, it’s important to note that Alter put a high priority on securing a playoff berth in 2018. He told the Chicago Sun-Times, “I didn’t expect we’d be in the championship, but I thought we’d be a [playoff] team.” Since 2016, the top 8 teams in the WNBA, regardless of conference affiliation, qualify for the postseason and are seeded by record. Chicago finished tenth in the league in 2018, two games behind eighth-place Dallas. This playoff format replaced a more traditional conference-based playoff system where the top four teams in each conference qualified and the conference champions met in the WNBA Finals.
The move to disregard conferences in playoff seeding has been widely lauded, giving us heavyweight title matchups in 2016 and 2017 between the Minnesota Lynx and Los Angeles Sparks and a wide-open postseason in 2018. But if you’re Amber Stocks, you might be lamenting that change because, under the new system, the Chicago Sky missed the playoffs in 2017 and 2018 — but they were the fourth-best team in the Eastern Conference each of those years. Under the old playoff system, then, Chicago would have qualified for the playoffs both years, despite being a rebuilding team in 2017 and an extremely young one in 2018.
To continue this hypothetical, under the old playoff format, the 2018 Chicago Sky would have played Eastern Conference regular season champion Atlanta in a three-game first round series. Both teams like to play fast, each finishing in the top 4 in pace this year, and the series would have been an interesting contrast between the league-leaders in defensive rating (Atlanta, at 100.0 points allowed per 100 possessions) and the league cellar dwellers in that category (Chicago).
But beyond the entertainment value, consecutive playoff berths would likely have bought Stocks more time to develop a young roster in her mold. The 2018 roster featured 4 rookies (including 2017 #2 pick Alaina Coates, who missed the entire 2017 season with a foot injury) and only three players with more than four years of WNBA experience. Stocks could easily have made the case that her team was young, was still learning her system, and had gained valuable playoff experience, so they were poised to make the leap to championship contenders in 2019. Without that hypothetical postseason experience, one could still argue that Stocks deserved another year, but the situation looks less promising on paper. Ultimately, Alter decided that getting another lottery pick for the 2019 WNBA Draft was a sign that he needed to make a move.
Speaking of that lottery pick, the Sky will have the fourth pick in the 2019 Draft. Had the Sky qualified for the postseason, they would have been ineligible for the lottery, and Dallas would have been in the mix for the number one pick. Instead, Dallas will pick fifth coming off of consecutive first-round playoff losses as the #7 seed in 2017 and the #8 seed in 2018. Like the Sky, the Wings will also have a new head coach in 2019, as Fred Williams was fired on August 12 after the team lost eight straight games. So, while the old playoff format would’ve likely solidified Stocks’ standing with the Sky, the new format couldn’t save Williams’ job with the Wings.
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