RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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When Tyler Marsh stays up late thinking about the season, no single moment sticks out.
Not Rickea Jackson going down in the fourth game of the season. Not Skylar Diggins' Instagram post about being benched. Not any one of Sydney Taylor's buzzer-beaters.
For Marsh, the mental montage is all about what could have been.
"It's a culmination of the close games we were in, where it felt like we coulda won," he said.
Despite Friday night's impressive win over the title-contending Valkyries, sealed by another Taylor dagger, the Sky are 15-22 with virtually no shot at the playoffs — and the games earlier in the season that came down to the wire are to blame.
It's not that they haven't played good basketball this season. Their net rating — point differential per 100 possessions — sits just 1.5 points behind the Mystics, who are a lock for the playoffs. The difference has been closing.
The missed opportunities weigh on the second-year coach, especially given what the offseason promised.
"The pressure [was] more this year," he told the Sun-Times on Thursday after practice. "There are so many moves made this year. There was a picture and an idea of what this was going to look like.
"We saw moments of that early on in the year while still being down some important bodies. We started off 3-1 and didn't have Sloot and Azura. And then it was like, when someone came back, someone else went down."
Maybe the biggest indictment of the Sky's season, beyond the record, is the inconsistency. There were stretches of pesky defense and stretches of dominant offense, but the two synced up only on occasion.
Whether Marsh gets a third season comes down to how the front office reads that: as a coaching failure, or as the cost of the injuries and the moving pieces. Courtney Vandersloot, Azura Stevens and DiJonai Carrington all returned at different points, each time redirecting the flow of the team.
One thing stayed constant, though, and it's the value Marsh talks about most: selflessness. No team in the league finishes a higher share of its baskets off an assist. On Friday, nearly 80% of them were assisted.
"Tyler has done a great job of playing his players through their strengths," Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase said before the game. "He gets them moving, a lot of false action. Brings back memories when we would go at it in practice in Vegas."
Marsh, who coached alongside Nakase as an assistant in Las Vegas, often talks about how impressed he is by the way she has gotten the Valkyries' play style to mirror her hard-nosed identity. Which leaves a question for the Sky front office: Do the Sky mirror Marsh?
His players always vouch for what he's trying to be — present and consistent. They say his belief in them shows. He gives everyone a voice and lets players be themselves. On the play that won the game Friday night, the idea was simply to get it to Taylor and let her rock.
That approach has started to show up in the results.
Since the All-Star break, the Sky are 5-3 in clutch games — those within five points in the final five minutes. And with the last-second win against the Aces earlier this month, when Marsh used one of Becky Hammon's old plays against her, they've now beaten each of the league's top three teams.
That doesn't erase 22 losses, and Marsh can't claim all of the progress; Taylor's emergence as a stone-cold killer and Natasha Cloud's emotional leadership deserve credit, too.
But it does leave the front office with a harder decision than the record suggests. They'll have to decide whether the progress in the clutch and the buy-in to Marsh's selfless approach are enough to let him try again.
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