“Are you ever going to make a three?” general manager Jeff Pagliocca asked Natasha Cloud early in the season.
Cloud is telling the story during her exit interview, a huge grin on her face. She’s close with Pagliocca and she loves those kinds of challenges.
“I literally started making threes after that,” she said, and it’s true: after a slump to start the season, she ended up shooting a career-best 35.7% from deep.
Cloud, who will become a free agent after this offseason, proved her point to Pagliocca. She also proved her value to the whole league.
Despite the accomplishments in her 11-year career — a championship and three-All Defense selections — she went unsigned until the Sky picked her up a week into training camp. Her former team, the Liberty, passed on her and Cloud felt burned in the process.
But Cloud is the kind of player who loves a revenge game. She dropped 35 points on New York in what may have been the Sky’s best win of the season, showing she still has the speed that most younger players can’t contain.
And it wasn’t just a one-time deal — her overall stats actually improved across the board, up to 11.1 points on 49% shooting, to go along with 4.8 assists.
Cloud’s broader point was this: she’s far from washed, and as a matter of fact, she’s the exact kind of veteran presence you want in your locker room.
She pulls young stars like Sydney Taylor aside mid-game to teach her tricks about how to defend. She sticks her neck out for her head coach, who’s now on the hot seat for the team missing the playoffs.
“If you’re going to blame Tyler [Marsh], you can blame me just as much as the point guard on the floor as well,” she said.
Organizational flaws and all, Cloud still believes in the Sky. After just one season in Chicago she’s become the organization’s loudest and proudest ambassador. She reitirated on Friday her belief that the team would have made the playoffs if they had been healthy, and that she trusts Pagliocca to make the right offseason moves.
The Sky need hardcore believers like this. They need players with underdog stories that the fans can get behind.
But there’s something else they need, and they’ve needed it for while. They need a point guard of the future. That’s no dig at Cloud, but at 34-years old she’s not going to be leading the Sky into the next decade.
The Sky’s other two point guards under contract for next season are Courtney Vandersloot, 37, and Skylar Diggins, 36.
Does this mean they should move on from Cloud? Or that they should trade Diggins or Vandersloot?
The first step in the Sky’s point guard dance will be determining whether Cloud even wants to come back.
One positive sign from her exit interview was that she’s planning to spend part of her offseason in Chicago working out unti she heads to Unrivaled in January. But it did sound like come free agency, she’ll want to explore her options.
“My goal this offseason is to get back to it and work my ass off and come back better for wherever and whatever,” she said.
That’s wise, as her services will be much more in-demand this offseason.
The Sky will also need to figure out whether they can make a deal work under the salary cap. On one hand, they’ll owe Taylor a much bigger deal. On the other hand, if they let Rachel Banham and DiJonai Carrington’s contracts roll off, they’ll end up with enough flexibility.
Here are a few ways the point guard situation could play out next season.
Reasonable Scenario #1: The Sky bring back Cloud while also finding a young point guard in the draft to take a flier on. In this scenario she starts at the three, which worked well this season. They trade Diggins to make it all work. (The Sky’s deep ties to Vandersloot will likely keep them from trading her).
Reasonable Scenario #2: Cloud finds a better deal elsewhere. With Diggins and Vandersloot alternating at point guard, the Sky punt the point-guard-of-the-future question to next season.
Unreasonable but Possible: The Sky are crazy enough to run back the experiment of a Cloud, Diggins, and Vandersloot backcourt.
Unlikely but One Can Dream: The Sky land superstar Jackie Young in free agency, who decides that given the leap in her playmaking, she’s actually ready to run the point full-time. That gives the Sky one of the most exciting perimeters in Young, Taylor, and Rickea Jackson. Vandersloot comes off the bench.