Chicago Sky Make Key Decision on Qualifying Offer for Star Player
The 2025 WNBA Free Agency is unofficially underway. Yesterday, the Chicago Sky extended qualifying offers to guard Dana Evans and forwards Michaela Onyenwere and Nikolina Milic. Noticeably left off this list is guard Chennedy Carter. This makes Evans and Onyenwere restricted free agents and Milic a reserved free agent. If no qualifying offer is extended to Carter, she will become an unrestricted free agent. From January 11th to 20th, WNBA teams are able to core key players and extend qualifying offers. Official negotiations begin January 21st, but contracts cannot be signed until February 1st.
Chennedy Carter is arguably the Chicago Sky’s best player, which begs the question as to why she was left off the Sky’s choice of players to provide qualifying offers to. Carter led her team in points with 17.5 points per game and finished the season with 3.1 assists and 3.5 rebounds per game. Carter’s current offseason plans include playing with the Wuhan Shengfen of the Women’s Chinese Basketball Association, where she is tearing up a storm. She is averaging 30.7 points per game at 50.4% from the field and has scored upward of 40 points in multiple games.
There are two possible reasons why the Chicago Sky are choosing to refrain from positioning themselves to lock in Carter for their 2025-2026 roster. The first may be their attempt to rebuild the Sky, specifically around center Kamilla Cardoso and forward Angel Reese. The Sky recently fired head coach Teresa Weatherspoon to replace her with Tyler Marsh, a former assistant coach for the Las Vegas Aces. They also lost their great three-point shooting threat, Marina Mabrey, in a trade to the Connecticut Sun, which marked a significant downturn in the Sky’s performance for the remainder of the season. Although Carter is a scoring threat, she averages 0.3 three-pointers made per game and typically resorts to shooting high volume from mid-range. This oftentimes leads to poor spacing amidst the Sky’s style of play, which currently finds most of its strength in its bigger lineup. Although this likely is not reason enough to gut your team’s leading scorer, especially while extending a qualifying offer to a less impactful guard instead, the Sky may just be going all in on their efforts to rebuild their franchise. However, this is likely not the case, which leads to a second possibility: Carter may bring internal personality or behavioral problems to the Sky. Carter has a history of controversy during her time in the WNBA.
She was drafted fourth in the 2020 WNBA Draft to the Atlanta Dream, but was suspended indefinitely for “conduct detrimental to the team.” Carter was traded to the Los Angeles Sparks for the 2022 season, where she played a smaller role and was benched at one point for “poor conduct.” She was ultimately waived for the 2023 season by the Los Angeles Sparks and was unable to receive offers from other teams, which led her to play a successful stint overseas in Turkey for the remainder of the season. In the 2024 season, Carter was picked up by the Sky, and despite some concerning history, Carter appeared to gel well with her new team, expressing praise and appreciation for her teammates and coaching staff publicly on multiple occasions. Carter had her scuffles, notably her controversial body check against Caitlin Clark, but overall exhibited relatively normal and acceptable behavior to the general public. It will be interesting to see whether or not the Chicago Sky extend a qualifying offer to Chennedy Carter before the January 20th deadline, why they make their decision, and what their performance will look like next season amidst their rebuild.
