Streaking Sky makes it three in a row with 78-75 win over Sun
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
There could have been plenty for the Chicago Sky to choose from Tuesday night.
• Candice Dupree couldn't find the basket.
• Sylvia Fowles couldn't stay out of foul trouble.
• Jia Perkins couldn't keep her legs from feeling fatigued.
Separately, each scenario is trouble for the Sky. Especially during crunch time.
But together, when the team's three best players are all struggling at the same time and a game is on the line, disaster is usually the result.
Not this time, though.
The Sky managed to overcome a bit of late-game fatigue by Perkins, a 2-point effort from leading scorer Dupree and 5 fouls by Fowles to get a 78-75 victory over the Connecticut Sun in front of 2,396 at the UIC Pavilion.
And if that wasn't enough, the Sky also overcame an 8-point, early fourth-quarter deficit.
No wonder the Sky is one of the hottest teams in the WNBA. Now 3-1, the Sky is on a three-game winning streak, a feat that has happened only one other time in the history of the 4-year-old franchise.
"The beauty of our team this year is that we have depth," Fowles said. "We have people."
Confident people.
Even with all that was stacked against the Sky, no one seemed rattled or defeated.
"(Winning in such conditions) should reassure everyone on our team, to let them know that the people we have here, the players we have here, the chemistry we're building here is the right thing," Sky coach Steven Key said. "We can win without our all-star player (Dupree) doing anything more than going out and playing hard and getting through it. (Connecticut) knows Candice and took away a lot of what she likes to get done. We were able as a team to back her up."
Perkins did more than her share of that, which is why her legs felt a bit wobbly by the end. She was a workhorse in the fourth quarter after the Sky got off to a slow start.
Connecticut entered the quarter down 61-60 but took a 69-61 lead by reeling off a 9-0 run.
Then Perkins went to work. She rolled up 11 of the Sky's next 13 points to cut Connecticut's lead to 75-74 with 2:25 left. A defensive stop by the Sky and a baseline jumper by Fowles (17 points) with 57.9 seconds left gave the Sky the lead for good.
"I don't know if we would have been able to do this last year," said Perkins, who poured in a game-high 25 points. "This is a great feeling and our fans get to enjoy it with us, but we're not content with this. We want to be a playoff team."