Hopes were high in the preseason for the Wings. They returned a core that was coming off a 22-win season, the most for the franchise since relocating to North Texas in 2016. In April, the team announced it would be moving from College Park Center in Arlington after the 2025 season to downtown Dallas. Everything appeared headed in the right direction.
So why exactly have the Wings plummeted to a WNBA-worst 3-13 record and dropped a staggering 11 consecutive games?
The problems started in February, when Satou Sabally suffered a shoulder injury while playing overseas. She underwent surgery, and in May, team president Greg Bibb suggested Sabally would be out until the Olympic break, which meant she would miss more than half the season.
From there, the hits kept coming. Jaelyn Brown, a 25-year-old rookie who impressed in the preseason and looked poised to log heavy minutes, played just one game and has been sidelined since due to illness. Natasha Howard broke her foot and has played just four games. Even Arike Ogunbowale, the face of the franchise, wasn’t immune to the injury bug; she was held out of a June 17 loss to Minnesota with a sore Achilles.
The latest player to fall victim to what feels like a curse at this point is Maddy Siegrist, who broke her left index finger on the same night against the Lynx. Siegrist, who is averaging 14.6 points per game and was mentioned around the league as a contender for Most Improved Player, will be reevaluated after eight weeks. The good news—and this is admittedly grasping for silver linings—is that four of those weeks fall during the league’s Olympic break. The injury issues have gotten so severe that the team’s second-leading player in minutes is Monique Billings, who is on a hardship deal and wasn’t on the roster for opening night.
Recall that the Wings had one of the quietest offseasons in the league, which contained no other impactful moves beyond working out new deals for Sabally and Kalani Brown. Dallas entered 2024 with five players on the roster who had never played a minute in the WNBA. It was clear from the get-go that the Wings would be in trouble if they had injury issues, and that’s exactly what has happened. No surprise, but the team has struggled when the starters aren’t on the floor. The on/off numbers highlight this: the Wings’ net rating—a measure of a team’s point differential per 100 possessions—drops 13.6 points when Ogunbowale is on the bench. The pattern repeats for the top five players in total minutes.
There have been some, admittedly small, flashes of hope. Before the injury, Siegrist was playing well. Although her three-ball wasn’t falling consistently, she ranks eighth in the WNBA in two-point field goal percentage and 12th in offensive rebounds per game. The third pick in the 2023 draft, she can play the three and the four and has been particularly impressive on the defensive end, showing she can hang against the league’s top players.
Then there’s Sevgi Uzun. The Wings have a rookie-heavy roster, and had you asked in the preseason who would be the best of those rookies, I doubt anyone would have mentioned Uzun. Why would they? The 26-year-old Turkish guard had spent her career bouncing among teams in the Turkish Super League and had never signed a training camp deal with a WNBA team until this year. But not only did Uzun surprisingly make the team, she has provided a semblance of an answer at point guard. The Wings moved on from their top three point guards from last season, trading Crystal Dangerfield, releasing Veronica Burton and not re-signing Odyssey Sims (although they did bring Sims back on a hardship contract on Tuesday). Many thought rookie Jacy Sheldon would fill the position, and if not her, then Lou Lopez Senechal, a 2023 first-round draft pick who was set to make her debut this season.
Instead, the job went to Uzun, who has started all 16 games. She hasn’t set the world on fire, shooting just 36.2 percent from the floor and 23.6 percent from three, but she’s contributing 4.6 assists and 1.3 steals per game. She has to improve as a shooter to be the long-term solution, but she has shown signs that at the very least she can be a valuable piece off the bench next season.
Of course, many believe the team might finish badly enough to land the No. 1 pick and the chance to draft UConn guard Paige Bueckers. If you’re rooting for this scenario, remember that the WNBA draft lottery is based on a two-year combined record. Because the Wings won 22 games last year, they need to be really bad to end up with the best lottery odds. As it stands, six teams have the same or worse combined record as Dallas. Two of those—Phoenix and Seattle—will almost certainly make the playoffs, but that still leaves four others.
But let’s slow down before we photoshop Bueckers into a Wings jersey. We can’t definitively say Dallas won’t turn things around. The return of Sabally and Siegrist post-Olympics could be enough for this team to sneak into the postseason if the race for the eight-seed remains close. The Sky currently hold that spot at 6-9, 3 1/2 games ahead of Dallas. If we assume Siegrist and Sabally don’t return until after the Olympics, that would mean the Wings have nine more games to get through. If Dallas can go 3-6, it might be enough to keep it within striking distance of a playoff berth.
That’s because Sabally changes things that much. As I wrote before the season, the Wings outscored opponents by 6.04 points per 100 possessions when she was on the floor. When she was off the floor, that number plummeted to minus-4.46. In other words, with Sabally on the floor, the Wings played like a top-three team. Without her, they played like a team that would have been in a fight to get the eighth seed.
If the battle for the eighth seed is close when we get to the final 15 games, Sabally could push the team over the top. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking, though. Because the Wings don’t look like a team that’s one player away from getting back into contention. They need a high-level floor general beside Ogunbowale and another reliable shooter off the bench to keep things running. The team also needs to think about what it wants to do in the frontcourt— Brown and Teaira McCowan can’t share the floor, which makes the injury issues feel even bigger. Should Dallas move on from one of them?
So even with Sabally back, this very much looks like a lost season. Some of it, the Wings could not have anticipated. The rest is a reminder about how a little more offseason urgency might have set this team up to weather better the many injuries that have derailed the 2024 campaign.
