Chicago dropped 34 points in the fourth quarter Wednesday night and turned a game into a getaway, beating Los Angeles 95-88. If you searched up the Chicago Sky vs Sparks final score this morning and thought the margin looked tidy, it wasn't. It was a fourth-quarter avalanche wearing a seven-point coat.
Natasha Cloud, Kamilla Cardoso and Jacy Sheldon each finished with 15. Not one Sky player reached 20. That is the part that should stick with you, because a 34-point quarter usually comes with a name attached, somebody going supernova for 14 in five minutes. This one came from three directions at once.
How Chicago won the fourth quarter
Balanced scoring is the least glamorous way to describe what happened and the most accurate. Cloud is the veteran hand who has been running late-game offense in this league for a decade. Cardoso is the interior problem nobody has solved cheaply, a former No. 3 overall pick who arrived with two national titles from South Carolina and the frame to go get a bucket when the play breaks. Sheldon is the young guard who keeps showing up in the box score in the minutes that decide things.
When your three leading scorers all land on the same number and your team hangs 34 in a quarter, the read is simple: the ball moved, and Los Angeles ran out of answers in the rotation. Defenses can load up on one hot hand. They cannot load up on three at once with ten minutes left.
What the loss means for the Los Angeles Sparks
The Sparks fall to 11-18, 6-9 inside the Western Conference, and the schedule shows them no mercy at all. They are in Minnesota tonight at 9 ET, against a Lynx team sitting at 25-6 with a 15-1 conference mark. Read those two lines back to back and you understand the assignment.
| Team | Overall | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| Minnesota Lynx | 25-6 | 15-1 |
| Los Angeles Sparks | 11-18 | 6-9 |
A 15-1 record inside your own conference is not a hot stretch, it is a different tax bracket. The Sparks head there off a night where they were fine for three quarters and then had the floor come out from under them. That is the cruelty of a compressed WNBA August: you don't get a day to think about the fourth quarter you just lost. You get a plane.
The encouraging part for Los Angeles is that 88 points on the road is not a broken offense. The preview notes for tonight lean on a 28-point outing, which tells you the individual scoring is there. The problem is the ten-minute stretch where the shots stopped falling and the stops stopped coming at the same time. Those tend to travel together, and they tend to travel badly.
What comes next for the Sky
For Chicago, this is the version of themselves worth building on. Cardoso getting real touches, Cloud steering, Sheldon making the game easy for both of them. Nothing about a 34-point quarter is repeatable on command, but the shape of it is: three scorers, no hero ball, a fourth quarter where the offense actually looked designed.
checked the almanac: Cloud has a championship ring from her Washington days in 2019, and you can see it in how she handles the last five minutes of a close one. Some of that is just having been there.
What I'm watching next is whether Los Angeles can hold a lead deep into a fourth quarter against the best team in their conference, because right now that final period is the whole story of their season.
