The Chicago Sky snapped a six-game losing streak Sunday, and they did it the way losing teams almost never do: on the road, in a two-point game, in Seattle. Final was 82-80 over the Storm, with Kamilla Cardoso going for 22 points and 12 rebounds and Natasha Cloud putting up 20.
Six straight losses does something to a young team. You stop expecting the last four minutes to break your way, and then they stop breaking your way, and the whole thing feeds itself. That is why this one matters more than the standings line will ever show. A two-point road win is not a fluke of variance so much as a test of whether anybody wants the ball, and Chicago passed it.
Cardoso is the reason. Twenty-two and twelve on the road is a center imposing herself on a possession-by-possession basis, and it is exactly the player Chicago thought it was getting when it took the national champion out of South Carolina near the top of the 2024 draft. Big kids take time. She is taking less of it than people assumed.
Cloud's 20 is the other half of the story, and it is a familiar half. She is a champion guard, having won a title in Washington, and the specific thing champion guards do is refuse to let a huddle go quiet when the lead is one possession. You can coach a lot of things. You cannot coach the voice.
The Storm are the ones stuck with the sour taste here. Losing a home game by two to a team on a six-game skid is the kind of night that hangs around a locker room, and Seattle has too much pride and too much history for that to sit well.
It was that sort of Sunday across the league. Indiana needed overtime to hold off Atlanta 95-91, and Portland ran down Phoenix 88-85 on a night the Mercury had set aside to celebrate Diana Taurasi.
Next up for Chicago: the New York Liberty come to town Tuesday night. That is the real measuring stick. One good closeout in Seattle is a start. Doing it against the Liberty is a statement.