Angel Reese’s departure from Chicago to Atlanta is both a
blessing for the mistreated star & the latest devastating blow for Sky fans. Especially because the good people of Chicago know: the leaders of the Chicago Sky franchise have been making baffling choices for a long time — and while many group threads amongst fans in Chicago often function as small investigative units, the fact is… as media, there’s been a historic lack of deep reporting about the franchise.
To start at the beginning… as I wrote about yesterday, two years ago in Chicago was a summer of naked hope, starring Angel Reese and then head coach Teresa Weatherspoon. T-Spoon, while in her first season as a WNBA head coach, is also famously one of the players who held the league up in the first place, starting in 1997. Beyond hitting one of the most iconic shots in history, she spent years as the fiery, floor-slapping floor general of the New York Liberty. And she carries a level of WNBA sage-ness & a capacity to build real trust with players that you’d expect an institutionally-shorthanded franchise like Chicago to honor (I know my own journalism career peaked because of her.)
So it was a shock of a gut punch when, in October of 2024, the Sky fired Teresa Weatherspoon after giving her just one season leading the Sky, never mind that she was clearly bonded with their star player in Angel Reese, and despite the fact that the team had very nearly made the playoffs. Many Sky fans, including me, were devastated.
Things have seemed to go downhill from there. The Chicago Sky’s 2025 roster — constructed by Jeff Pagliocca, the guy said to be behind Spoon’s firing — was lackluster at best, without a core identity and featuring Angel Reese most prominently on the sidelines after voicing deeper issues with the team’s ownership while fans in the arena chanted “Fire Jeff!”
Meanwhile, WNBA players anonymously voted the Sky as one of the worst franchises in the league, while constructions of their new training facility — oddly located in the “village” / made-up-for-zoning-reasons neighborhood of Bedford park — was delayed into 2026. And then, just this past fall, a new lawsuit: minority partner Steven Rogers filed a lawsuit accusing Sky owner Michael Alter of "opportunistic self-dealing” following the Sky’s championship in 2021.
That’s when — at long last — a genuine investigative piece into the Chicago Sky’s front office came out, February of 2026. But it wasn’t published by a big institution or a local Chicago “paper of record.” It came from No Cap Space, one of my favorite independent platforms in women’s basketball digital media world, written by its creator, Andrew Haubner. His piece is a clear-eyed, prescient vision: “Amid Lawsuit, Sky Owner Faces Crisis of Confidence From Investors, City Official.”
Andrew’s work is more relevant than ever now, in light of the franchise’s most epic fumble of Angel Reese. As soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to do a behind-the-scenes interview with him, to better what he’d dug up + how this investigative story came to be — here’s an excerpt of our conversation.
Rough Notes: Oh my god, I have ten million questions for you, but I’ll try to limit it. I can’t stop thinking about the historical perspective here. Like how in the historical arc of women’s basketball, there have been so many men who have access to wealth, who come in to help out women’s basketball when no one else is, but they are really stubborn about doing it in a particular way. And that also feels like it’s part of Michael Alter’s leadership style. Does that feel fair to you?
Andrew Haubner: I will say this, I don’t think the stubbornness is restricted to him. I think there is a protectionism over a lot of this stuff in women’s basketball. There’s such a desire to kind of protect the brand from people who have critiques in bad faith. But that allows them to exert a lot of control over it, too.
Rough Notes: So when Sky fans are coming for Michael Alter - do you think he’s the main villain here?
Andrew Haubner: I think people are trying to affix good versus evil in a lot of this stuff, but everyone is varying shades of like — nobody really knows what the hell they’re doing here. And I think a lot of that’s rooted in the fact that you have an owner that is trying to operate around the fringes instead of just being like, “how much is the check? I’ll write it.” Which is kind of what New York and Golden State and Phoenix are doing right now.
I think that while Michael Alter has the tendency to be a meddler, the problem is he has a blind spot for bringing on influential people that are the wrong kind of influence. Like his radar for sussing out bad people is clearly not very good. If you look at the business that he runs, you look at the stuff that he’s done for Chicago, there’s a lot of social programs and really good stuff that he does in that community. He’s a pretty reliable Democratic Party donor, and he went out of his way to found a WNBA franchise. He’s not a villain in that sense.
But I do think he has brought on some ‘viziers,’ so to speak, who aren’t good. The people he surrounds himself with - down to Adam Fox, the president of the franchise, whose background of running a team at its highest level was an AHL team, which is in the NHL’s minor league. I just don’t think he’s surrounded himself with good people on the basketball side of things.
For example: I think that Jeff Pagliacca wakes up every morning as the general manager of the Chicago Sky, and because of that, it provides the confirmation bias that his way is the right way. The best way I can explain it is this is a guy who really did get it out the mud. He was a school coach and a skills trainer and found his way into the Sky organization - his relationship with helping to train Courtney Vandersloot goes back to the early 2010s.
And then he worked his way through under James Wade and ended up becoming a general manager. When the team won a championship in 2021, it was actually one of the worst things that happened to the franchise in the time since because it created that confirmation bias for Michael and Jeff and a lot of these people. The idea that this way works. I think Jeff tries to make the case that: “I won a title as part of this group and part of this organization and because of that, I know what I’m talking about.”
That’s kind of the deal with him: he has a belief that he’s unimpeachable because he helped bring the championship to Chicago. I don’t think that’s necessarily a unique story in business or sports teams. It’s a very normal story of people who have one major windfall, and because of that, they get stubborn. I think the Chicago Sky story right now, more than anything else, is one of stubbornness.
Rough Notes: Can you give me an example of how that stubbornness operates internally?
Yes. For example, I’d heard a lot of different things as to why Spoon had been let go… and what I found was, the rationale given internally was so preposterous. Basically, there was a meeting held with all the owners about firing Spoon. Jeff, Nadia, and, and Michael were the three people that led that meeting and were in kind of lockstep according to my sources. And when I first talked to my source about what happened in that meeting, I expected to hear that they were more forthcoming with all of the owners about what the issue was. I was expecting to hear some type of real intrigue and some rationale around why.
Through reporting however, I’ve learned that it was actually what Jeff Pagliocca told the press, via Annie Costabile, that he’d heard free agents were “skeptical of joining the Sky” with Spoon as the coach. I always thought that that was something that they had just kind of put out into the public as like something to kind of BS. But over time it proved that indeed the reason they gave to the owners was just that. And I was stunned. I could not believe that something that flimsy was the thing that was given to the people with the money. I was just stunned that there was that little respect it seemed for the people that were writing the checks for Jeff and his staff.
Now, there’s a faction within the ownership group that is more than a few people who have invested money into the team that thought Angel was getting hung out to dry. They felt she was the reason for a lot of the business successes the sky was having. More than a couple of people approached it from an investor’s perspective: “I put money into this. We’re now finally getting returns. You’re gonna fuck this up over pride and get rid of the cash cow? What are you, nuts?” At the end of the day, these guys are capitalists. They’re trying to make money. They haven’t made money on this product for years and now you have someone that is responsible, they feel, for the fact that you are finally making money and now someone - like your GM, or whoever - is gonna blow it up. And I think a lot of Chicago Sky fans understand that, too.
Rough Notes: Just to get into the media critique of it all - one of the things about your article that makes me giggle to myself is — I have a couple of friends who are hardcore Sky fans, who have been dying to figure out what’s going on inside the Sky front office for so long. And when I told them that you’d written this, and that you don’t even live in Chicago, they were like “what!?” What made you feel like you were the guy to investigate this? Or that you could actually find more information that others have?
Andrew Haubner: Yeah, honestly, I got, I got lucky because I had a rock solid source that reached out to me after my initial column that I wrote about the Sky.
Rough Notes: Yes, I loved that piece.
Andrew Haubner: So yeah, this story doesn’t come together unless that source calls me. And some of that is luck, admittedly, but also this source reached out to me specifically because they didn’t trust the Chicago writers from the major newspapers. And sometimes that’s because you’re a victim of your own outlet’s reputation. Like the Chicago Tribune‘s reputation precedes its writers, especially when last year they ran some pretty nasty shit about Chennedy Carter, like their their editorial board saying that she should have been charged for assault.
Rough Notes: Oh I remember! I was livid. I think some writers at the Tribune might have been, too.
Andrew Haubner: Yeah, I feel bad for them in that sense.
And also, to be honest, I just looked up government documents while writing this. I think people miss that 90% of reporting is literally waiting for records or requests to come back. That’s a big reason some of that shit takes so much time is because like, you know, a FOIA could take you 4 weeks.
Rough Notes: But also, to your credit, you’re willing to publish reporting where you also voice your opinion, where you have a perspective.
Andrew Haubner: And that’s also part of what we’re sometimes lacking in women’s basketball. I think people are scared of it, especially if they’re talking about an ownership group. But I also think some of it, for me, is that I came from college football in general assignment writing. So I’ve had college football coaches threatening to beat my ass, I’ve had government officials threatening to depose me. I don’t really have an inherent fear of what will happen.
Rough Notes: Did you end up hear back from the Sky after publishing your piece?
Andrew Haubner: A Sky employee emailed me back after the story ran and asked me to issue a correction. I said, “OK, what is the correction you want me to issue?” And they said, “well you said Michael Alter and Nadia and Jeff through Sky PR declined to comment. This is a misinterpretation because they’re not the ones saying no to the request. Sky PR is, and someone declines a request only if they are specifically asked in a formal interview setting for comment.”
And I was like, “no, I would be acting inappropriately if I went over your head and called Michael Alter straight up. It’s your responsibility to take it to the people that I’m asking questions of.” And so in my follow up, I emailed them back saying, “just so we’re clear, are you telling me you just blew off my request entirely?” Because clearly there’s a block here, and it’s not me. Did you just not do your job?
Thanks for this Maya! I have been feeling a little disappointed with mainstream coverage of WNBA and NCAA wbb in that we keep seeing the same stories and messages at high level but it seems very few are reporting ( or getting answers) about details and substantive facts below the surface.
I totally understand if there are HR concerns, and maybe the issue is that players and staff are reluctant to say anything negative or destructive especially during this particular evolution in WBB.
But the fans are then left with rumors and the less careful "media" are just repeating rumors to get more viewers, and I don't think this is good for anyone's mental health.