Without Paige Bueckers, the Dallas Wings look like what they were last year, when they were also without Paige Bueckers, which was a very bad basketball team. So bad, in fact, that they landed in the lottery and got to draft Paige Bueckers. The first-overall pick has missed her team’s last two games under concussion protocol; she banged heads with Courtney Vandersloot in a Wings-Sky game last week and complained of a headache the next day. The team says she will be re-evaluated this week.
The step after drafting a franchise player is to figure out who else should stick around, and that must be done in Bueckers’s absence. It is unpleasant work. On Tuesday against the Storm in Seattle, the Wings revealed the answer to be “basically no one.” They fell to a league-worst 1-7 on the season in a game they led by 11 in the third quarter. On the strength of their gang rebounding in the first half, the Wings put up some 20 more shots than the Storm, though this did much more for the denominator than for the numerator in the end. Final line: 30-for-86.
When Wings CEO Greg Bibb stepped down from his general manager role and hired Curt Miller to replace him, he ended a nightmarish reign in the Dallas front office and helped cultivate the sense that this would be a turning point for the Wings. They had a new star, a new front office, a new coach, soon a new arena—now, finally, they could start building a new roster that made sense. But the new Dallas looks distressingly like the old one. Since dealing Kalani Brown in the Satou Sabally trade, the frontcourt has lost some of its size but retained its puzzlement on defense. The roster is loaded with one-way players. Maddy Siegrist can score inside but not defend. DiJonai Carrington can defend but not shoot. Arike Ogunbowale can be Arike (compliment) but more often she is Arike (derogatory). To call NaLyssa Smith a one-way player might be spotting her an extra way.
By net rating, there are actually worse teams in the league: the Sky, Sun and expansion Valkyries. (Playing the Liberty, which the Wings still have to do four times, will plunge your net rating in the toilet.) Dallas’s have mostly been single-digit losses. But none of these close losses was particularly flattering or valiant. Chicago entered the home-and-away with Dallas averaging a little more than 74 points per game, and in both Wings games managed close to 100. I could only admire the play at 7:16 here, in which every Wings defender got turned around and Gabby Williams strolled into an open three.
Asked what the Wings should do to stop blowing close games, new head coach Chris Koclanes said, “Just a togetherness. Just a camaraderie that they’re building there in that locker room. The intangible things.” The Wings’ problems probably go deeper than friendship, and the team’s failure has always presented itself as one complicated hash of losing—the coaches, the players, the general managers all illuminating each other’s deficiencies so that everyone and no one is to blame.
Maybe there’s hope. In Tuesday’s game, I noticed startling competence in the frontcourt: A Dallas big defending the rim, setting real screens, even making a deep three to beat the halftime buzzer. Who was she? Where had she been this whole time? She was Glinda the Good Witch telling me I could have gone home all along! Her name, totally mangled by the ESPN broadcast, is Luisa Geiselsöder. A second-round pick in 2020, she made her WNBA debut this season. Before playing 22 minutes on Tuesday night, she had played sparingly in her previous games. Here was something to dream on, a Geiselsöder-Bueckers pick-and-roll. I suppose it is Just Wings Things that Geiselsöder is about to leave for the rest of the month to join the German national team in the FIBA EuroBasket tournament. Wings fans, root hard for the Germans to lose.
