CHICAGO — Tyler Marsh wasn’t sure if this would be the year.
Marsh had wanted to be a head coach for as long as he could remember. But he was happy with his role as an assistant coach for the Las Vegas Aces — and with his mentorship under former WNBA Coach of the Year Becky Hammon.
So every call Marsh took from a WNBA team this offseason was predicated on curiosity, not complacency. He knew what he was looking for in a new team. And by the end of his first call with Chicago Sky general manager Jeff Pagliocca, Marsh began to feel he had found the right opportunity.
“I wasn’t in a position to where I felt like I had to rush into a head coaching job,” Marsh said. “I was very transparent in that and I knew that for me to leave, it had to be with an organization and a situation under the right management that had to make sense for me. It had to be a good fit, and that’s what I felt in Chicago.”
After hiring Marsh as their third head coach in three years, the Sky want to exit the coaching carousel for good. The last two seasons featured the sudden midseason departure of James Wade in 2023 and an unsuccessful debut by Teresa Weatherspoon this year, with the upheaval leaving the team struggling to find a foothold in the league landscape.
Pagliocca said he’s committed to building a long-term future with Marsh. And despite the team’s recent history, Marsh said he needed no assurances of longevity to buy into the Sky. He felt an understanding with Pagliocca that reminded him of his first conversation with Hammon — a shared vision for how a team and a franchise could move forward.
“It was a lot of conversation about building the culture of who we want the Sky to be and what pieces, what people, what personalities fit that mold,” Marsh said. “We aligned a lot in terms of how we viewed the treatment of people.
“It was just a connection of how we view life and how we view people and communication. Once you’ve connected on that level, the basketball part comes kind of second nature.”
Marsh was impressed by aspects of the Sky’s identity last season: effort, intensity, fearlessness. Individual players knew who they wanted to become in this league, but they didn’t have the mechanisms to reach that vision.
That gives Marsh a straightforward task in his debut season: Build a blueprint for success in Chicago.
So what does that look like? Marsh doesn’t want to crack open his playbook for the public just yet, but the big picture already is coming into focus.
Shooting is a primary concern. The Sky took the fewest 3-pointers in the WNBA last season — 14.9 per game, barely half the volume of the league-leading New York Liberty. And the Sky didn’t make up for that disparity elsewhere on the court, finishing with the league’s second-worst field-goal percentage (41.8%).
Addressing that weakness will begin in free agency and the draft, as Marsh and Pagliocca work in tandem to cultivate a stronger cast of shooters. Marsh described their approach to scouting the stacked 2025 draft class as “all hands on deck.”
Outside of improving the backcourt, Marsh has another tall task: maximizing the potential of Kamilla Cardoso and Angel Reese.
Both 2024 first-round picks were out of town for Marsh’s introduction Tuesday — Cardoso in Shanghai while playing in the Women’s Chinese Basketball Association, Reese in Miami as she gears up for the Unrivaled season. But Marsh said he was encouraged by early conversations with both players, whom he characterized as the “cornerstones” of the franchise.
“They’re bought in,” Marsh said. “They want to be great. They’re not content with just making the WNBA. They want to be a force to be reckoned with. And I think that they’re a tandem that can certainly continue to do great things in this league.”
Although both earned All-Rookie honors last season, Cardoso and Reese often found themselves flattened into one-dimensional versions of themselves on the court. They leaned heavily into their strengths of rebounding and working the low post while struggling to finish from close range, create motion off the ball or connect with guards for post-ups.
Marsh wants to change that. He sees Cardoso and Reese as more fluid players than last season might have indicated. A key piece of his vision is utilizing both as active facilitators in the paint, opening the second sides with their passing and capitalizing on the 6-foot-7 Cardoso’s high level of mobility despite her height.
“They both have the ability to be multidimensional,” Marsh said. “We want them to be effective in different phases of the game whilst also still highlighting the strengths of what they do.”
Wealth of mentors
Experience was a key factor for Pagliocca and the front office throughout the coaching search.
Weatherspoon’s short-lived tenure saw a lack of discipline and strategic nuance that left veteran players openly frustrated and the locker room in disarray. The disconnect was visible on the court, where the Sky often ran half-baked offensive sets that underutilized Cardoso and Reese while completely ignoring the 3-point arc.
Yet despite homing in on experience as a top criterion for the position, Pagliocca feels confident in his decision to hire a first-time head coach — in part due to the coaching talent Marsh has been surrounded by during 12 years as an assistant in the G League, NBA and WNBA.
“He really brings a wealth of experience,” Pagliocca said, “and not just experience, but he really played a pivotal and vital role in helping bring championships to those organizations.”
Before his three-year tenure with the Aces under Hammon, Marsh worked for two of the NBA’s preeminent coaches in the Indiana Pacers’ Rick Carlisle (2020-22) and the Toronto Raptors’ Nick Nurse (2018-20), who’s now the Philadelphia 76ers coach. While Marsh served primarily as a player development coach, his responsibilities included scouting and play design — two areas Pagliocca highlighted as fundamental to the hire.
Marsh knows which of his mentors’ traits he wants to adopt as as a first-time head coach.
The fearlessness Nurse employed when innovating his schemes to fit personnel, quickly earning him respect as one of the NBA’s most adaptive coaches.
The savviness with which Carlisle exploited mismatches on both ends of the court to keep opponents uncomfortable from buzzer to buzzer.
The way Hammon bridged gaps within her locker room to forge deep connections with players that resulted in fierce loyalty on and off the court.
And Marsh has another mentor to pull from: his father, Donnie.
Family foundation
Donnie Marsh has been coaching college basketball since 1980, including Division I head coaching stints at Florida International (2000-04) and Alabama A&M (2017-18). He rarely misses watching a game Tyler coaches — in the G League, in the NBA and now in the WNBA.
And Tyler typically calls his father on the drive home from the arena, talking through what went right and wrong, laying out a plan to learn from a loss.
Tyler doesn’t always agree with his dad. They have been locked in the same debate over the course of their careers. Donnie is a defense-first coach. Tyler embraces the new realities of high-volume shooting. And neither will budge from his opinion.
“Those days of 50- and 60-point games that he’s used to — yeah, those days are over with,” Tyler joked. “We want to score and we want to score a lot. It’s a good back and forth that we have every now and then.”
Donnie and the entire Marsh family drove up to Chicago from Birmingham, Ala., for Tyler’s introduction Tuesday at Wintrust Arena, taking turns entertaining Tyler’s 2-year-old son, Jaxxon, in the back row of the news conference. Whenever Tyler needed it, he could glance over at Donnie in the crowd, a reminder of the foundation for how he hopes to carry himself — as a coach, as a father and as a man.
Marsh knows who he wants to be as a head coach. He isn’t one to raise his voice. His even-keeled nature is one of the primary traits emphasized by those who have worked with him in all three leagues. That will be a significant change for the Sky — and one the front office believes will benefit the development of both new and veteran players.
For all of the promise of last season, the Sky are a team still seeking an identity — and the players are hungry for it. In their early conversations with Marsh, veterans such as Rachel Banham emphasized their desire to build a rigorous structure for a disciplined culture.
“I told him right away — I’m a culture kid,” Banham said. “I believe the culture on a team is super important.”
But it also means Marsh has to balance his reserved demeanor with an immediate need to instill discipline. That was a weakness last season for a young roster under a fledgling coaching staff. Former Sky guard Marina Mabrey, for instance, noted a steep improvement in professionalism when she joined the Connecticut Sun after a midseason trade in July.
“A disciplined team looks like a team that doesn’t beat themselves,” Marsh said. “If you’re going to lose, you better lose because the other team is just better than you that night, not because you stripped yourselves of a win.
“For us, especially with such a young team, it’s the level of professionalism that you approach day to day.”
Forging that new level of professionalism will be the ultimate challenge for Marsh as he attempts to get the Sky back on course as a WNBA contender.
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