Courtney Vandersloot is back on the floor for the Chicago Sky, and her return has changed the way the team is closing games. In Friday’s win over the Golden State Valkyries, she lunged for an errant pass, flipped it to Rachel Banham as she hit the ground and watched Banham bury a three before Sydney Taylor sealed it with the game-winning shot.
That sequence mattered because Vandersloot was not just back in uniform. It was another sign that the Sky are leaning on her again after she made her debut for the 2026 season on June 26, just months after spending last season at home while rehabilitating an ACL tear that came early in the 2025 season. She is in her 16th year in the league and her 14th with the Chicago Sky, and since returning she has averaged 9.3 points and 4.9 assists per game.
The reason her numbers are being read so closely is that the Sky have built a point guard rotation around more than one veteran. They signed Skylar Diggins in free agency and added Natasha Cloud just as training camp started, then saw Diggins move to the injured list in early July. That left Vandersloot and Cloud sharing the job, a partnership both players have described as give and take.
Vandersloot said watching the game from the sideline made everything look slower, but playing again has been a different challenge because seeing an opening and executing it are not the same thing. Cloud has said she is learning from Vandersloot and trusts her to lead down the stretch, while Vandersloot has said that one of them sacrifices for the other depending on whose night it is. That is the friction inside the Sky's setup: the team has two veterans who can run the floor, but only one can land the plane on a given possession.
For now, that shared responsibility looks like the point rather than the problem. Vandersloot is back, the Sky are winning late, and the next test is whether that arrangement still holds when Diggins is available again and the backcourt has to sort out who takes the ball when the game is on the line.
