“I think the time I spent in Chicago prior to going to Phoenix were some of the best years of my career.”

Diamond DeShields is returning to the Windy City on a one-year deal with the Sky – just two years after she won a WNBA championship with Chicago. However, the city and team have a different feel than when she was here from 2018 to 2021.

“It doesn’t matter to me that the team is different. It doesn’t matter to me that the staff is different. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just really looking forward to a chance to hear that buzzer sound off and be a part of a rotation and play a basketball game. There’s no better place to do it than Chicago where it all started for me,” DeShields said in her introductory press conference.

It’s been over 300 days since DeShields has laced up her kicks and stepped foot on the hardwood. From her surgery to remove a tumor from her spinal cord in 2020 to a knee injury in 2022, it’s been a rough, bumpy road for the guard’s WNBA career that forced her to sit out the 2023 season shortly after signing with the Dallas Wings.

Now, looking ahead to 2024, a healthy Diamond DeShields is “good for any organization” as she put it in her introductory press conference in February. New Sky general manager Jeff Pagliocca saw that from his early interactions with DeShields when he joined the organization in 2020.

“What she can do physically kind of pales in comparison to what she overcame,” Pagliocca said. “I think that having her back here as a veteran now, as a leader and Chicago being the destination from her perspective is very exciting for us. 

“What she is capable of doing is second to none. Physically, she’s exciting, she’s got an incredible personality…that leadership from players like her is another reason why we’re so excited to have her because that’s something that we’re going to fall back on a lot.”

Those intangibles along with DeShields’ career average of 13.2 ppg, 2.2 apg and 1.1 spg are going to be crucial for a youthful Sky team with DeShields and Dana Evans being the only two players on the team with WNBA Finals experience. With the average age of the roster at 27 and half of the team boasting under 5 years of WNBA experience, this is an opportunity for DeShields to step into a leadership position both on and off the floor. 

“I’m to a place now where this is something I don’t take for granted at all,” DeShields said. “If that’s something that I can have permeate the locker room and create a sense of responsibility to the game, knowing that it can be taken from you at any point. I’ve had to deal with that twice…How can I be as supportive as a vet, as a leader, as somebody who has survived some pretty traumatic stuff so that the team can have a sense of resilience very early on.“

That fire has new head coach Teresa Weatherspoon “geared up” to have a veteran who’s won it all in the city of Chicago. The seeds DeShields sowed with the Sky from 2018-2021 are now coming full circle for the fertilization of the new regime. 

“She wants to come here and win again and that’s the attitude that we want for every player: to come here, know what Chicago is all about because she is in the know,” Weatherspoon said. “She knows what it’s about. So she wants to come back. The return of Diamond DeShields.”