Sydney Taylor did it again. With 0.6 seconds left against the Golden State Valkyries, the Chicago Sky rookie caught the inbound, crossed over to create just enough space, and drained a three that sent the Sky bench into chaos and won the game outright.
Taylor uses a crossover to shake her defender before burying the game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer, finishing with 14 points on the night.
It's not the first time Taylor has ended a game this way. Weeks earlier she hit a go-ahead three with 0.9 seconds left to beat the defending champion Las Vegas Aces 84-83, a shot she called one of the biggest of her life. Stack that with the Valkyries shot and Taylor is now the first rookie in WNBA history to hit multiple game-winners with under 5 seconds on the clock — not just a rookie record, a league record for anyone in that specific window.
What makes it wilder is where Taylor came from. She went undrafted out of Louisville in 2024 after starting her college career at UMass, then bounced overseas to Lithuania and Poland just to keep playing. A training camp deal with the Sky in April and a 23-point preseason showing were enough to earn her a spot on the roster — and now she's a starter averaging north of 18 points a game, with a stretch over her last six games pushing 21.3 per contest.
Taylor celebrates with her Sky teammates after the buzzer-beater, moments after becoming the first rookie in WNBA history to hit multiple game-winners under 5 seconds in a season.
Coach Tyler Marsh has handed her the ball late in games with a level of trust rarely given to first-year players, once letting her take 27 shots in a single outing. For an undrafted rookie who was playing overseas months before this season started, that kind of green light from a coaching staff says a lot about what they're seeing.
The Sky have had a rough go of it as a franchise the last few years, but Taylor is turning into the kind of reason to actually tune in. Two buzzer-beaters in a season is rare for anybody — for a player nobody drafted, it's the storyline of the WNBA summer.