Sky snap skid with 77-61 win over Sun
UNCASVILLE, Conn. — There was no way the Sky were going to lose three straight.
Epiphanny Prince scored 23 points and Elena Delle Donne added 19 to lead the Chicago Sky to a 77-61 victory over the Connecticut Sun on Friday night.
Sylvia Fowles had 14 points, 10 rebounds and three blocks for Chicago (14-7).
Allison Hightower scored 13 points for the Sun (6-14) and Kelsey Griffin had 12 points and six rebounds. Tina Charles, the reigning WNBA MVP, missed 16 of 18 shots and finished with five points and 10 rebounds for Connecticut.
The Eastern Conference-leading Sky had lost their previous two games, both to the Indiana Fever, scoring just 58 points in both losses.
"We want to stay at the top of the conference," Prince said. "And we know that Atlanta (11-6) is right behind us. We came out. We were focused. We had a game plan and we executed it."
Chicago had a four-point lead late in the second quarter when it began to blowout the Sun.
Prince began a 12-0 run with back-to-back 3-pointers. Successive layups by Courtney Vandersloot gave the Sky a 39-23 lead with less than two minutes left in the first half.
"Sometimes you're on, sometimes you're off," Fowles said of the previous two games. "We definitely were hungry (tonight) after those last two losses, so we tried to come in and be more focused tonight. . Just go out there and do what we can do."
Vandersloot added 10 points and six rebounds for Chicago. Prince had four assists and four rebounds and Delle Donne grabbed nine rebounds.
Connecticut shot 32.1 percent from the floor. Delle Donne, Fowles and Prince outscored the Sun through three quarters, 47-43.
"I've said this before, and they've heard this before, but when we don't knock shots down, we lose our focus defensively," Sun coach Anne Donovan said. "So you get Vandersloot into the lane when you're not thinking about your defense. You're not showing on a screen and Epiphanny Prince gets wide-open jump shots when you're thinking about your own missed shot. That, really, that's where it lies."
Chicago scored the first five points and never trailed. It blocked four shots in first nine minutes of the game.
Delle Donne, a 6-foot-5 rookie forward, made three 3-pointers in the third quarter.
"You've got to love her," Fowles said. "You can't really do nothing with her (defensively)."
Prince's driving layup gave the Sky their biggest lead, 68-46, with over seven minutes left remaining in the game.
"This (game) was more about us and what we needed to do, especially on the defensive end of the floor," Chicago coach Pokey Chatman said. "It's something that we need to become more consistent with, and I thought we were throughout every quarter. We were really active with our hands and got a lot of deflections."