In the hyper-accelerated world of the modern WNBA, where every game is a national referendum and every rookie is judged against a historic curve, patience has become the league’s scarcest commodity.

For the Chicago Sky, a franchise in the throes of a bold and public rebuild, this new reality has created a pressure cooker environment.

With a roster headlined by high-profile rookie Angel Reese, the team’s every struggle is magnified, and in the frantic search for answers, a new and alarming narrative has begun to take hold: that the job of legendary first-year head coach Teresa Weatherspoon is already in jeopardy, a direct consequence of her star rookie’s supposedly “terrible” performances.

To suggest that Angel Reese is having a “terrible” season is a fundamental misreading of what is happening on the basketball court. It is a narrative born of box score-skimming and a misunderstanding of a player’s role and value.

Is Reese a polished offensive force? Not yet. Is her field goal percentage where it needs to be? No. Does she sometimes struggle with foul trouble as she adapts to the physicality of the professional game? Absolutely. But these are the typical, expected growing pains of a rookie.

To focus solely on these flaws is to willfully ignore the monumental impact she is making in the areas that define her game. Reese is, by a wide margin, the best rebounding rookie in the WNBA. She is a relentless, double-double machine who attacks the glass with a ferocity that few players in the entire league can match.

Her motor is relentless, her defensive energy is infectious, and her competitive fire is the very spark the Sky franchise hired her new coach to ignite throughout the roster. Her performance is not terrible; it is raw, it is unrefined, but it is also undeniably impactful.

This is what makes the notion of Teresa Weatherspoon’s job being in “jeopardy” so profoundly illogical. Weatherspoon, a Hall of Fame player whose own career was built on grit, tenacity, and a defensive identity, was not hired to win a championship in 2024. She was hired to perform a cultural exorcism, to strip the team down to its studs and rebuild it in her own image.

She was hired to instill a foundation of toughness that could endure for years to come. In Angel Reese, she was not handed a finished product, but the perfect block of marble from which to sculpt her masterpiece.

Reese’s strengths—her rebounding, her defense, her sheer will—are a mirror image of Weatherspoon’s own basketball DNA. The idea that this coach would be on the hot seat for the development of a player who so perfectly embodies her ethos is a fundamental disconnect from reality.

The source of this panicked narrative is not rooted in Chicago’s front office, but in the wildly inflated expectations of the current WNBA landscape. The “Caitlin Clark Effect” has had an unintended side effect: it has warped the perception of what a successful rookie season and a successful rebuild should look like.

Because Clark has brought an unprecedented level of attention and scrutiny to the league, every game is treated with the weight of a playoff final. In this environment, a team like the Sky, which is deliberately playing young talent and building for the future, is being judged by the impatient metric of nightly wins and losses.

Fans, new and old, see a team with a celebrity rookie and expect immediate, linear progress. When that doesn’t happen, the blame game begins, and the two most visible figures—the star rookie and the head coach—are placed in the crosshairs.

It is almost certain that behind closed doors, the Chicago Sky organization views this situation with far more clarity and patience. They knew what they were getting into. They traded away established veterans to clear the way for a new era.

They drafted Reese and fellow rookie center Kamilla Cardoso as their twin pillars for the next half-decade. To fire the handpicked coach tasked with mentoring these cornerstones less than halfway through her first season would be an act of organizational malpractice of the highest order.

It would signal a level of instability and panic that would cripple the franchise for years. Weatherspoon’s “job jeopardy” is a media-driven fiction, a story that generates clicks and fuels debate but has little basis in the long-term strategic plan of the Chicago Sky.

The real challenge for Weatherspoon is not saving her job; it is the far more difficult task of channeling raw talent into refined skill. Her primary focus is on development.

How does she turn Reese’s relentless energy into smarter, more efficient offensive production? How does she teach her to defend without fouling? How does she manage the on-court pairing with Cardoso, creating a formidable frontcourt duo that can grow together? These are the real questions occupying the coach’s time, not the external noise about her job security.

Her performance should not be judged on the team’s current record, but on the visible progress of her young players over the course of the season and into the future.

Angel Reese’s own high profile, of course, contributes to this pressure cooker. As one of the most famous and polarizing athletes in the sport, she lives under a microscope that few other rookies have ever experienced.

Her every move, on and off the court, is dissected. This level of celebrity means there is no grace in her development period; she is expected to be a star from day one.

When her performance shows the natural inconsistencies of a rookie, the criticism is disproportionately loud, which in turn fuels the narrative that the team is in crisis and the coach is failing.

Ultimately, the suggestion that Teresa Weatherspoon could be fired is a symptom of the new, often irrational, intensity surrounding the WNBA. It’s a fantasy built for hot-take television, not the reality of building a professional sports team.

The truth is that the Sky’s season is unfolding largely as one might logically expect: with moments of brilliant potential interspersed with the frustrating lessons of inexperience.

Weatherspoon’s role is to be the teacher through all of it, and Angel Reese is her most important student. The real story in Chicago is not about a coach on the brink of being fired, but about a legend trying to build a new legacy, one tough rebound at a time.