Dallas Wings Check-In: Veronica Burton’s Growing Importance
The second-year guard continues to establish herself in Dallas.
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Through six games, the Dallas Wings sit at .500 on the year and have lost two in a row, falling by close margins to the Mystics and Sun.
These last couple of games have revealed a major issue with the Wings: depth. For example, against Connecticut on Sunday, the team’s bench players combined to shoot 1-for-10 from the floor. With Diamond DeShields and Lou Lopez Sénéchal injured and Teaira McCowan at EuroBasket, the Wings are having to rely heavily on their big three of Arike Ogunbowale, Satou Sabally and Natasha Howard.
But those aren’t the only three players who are helping Dallas stay afloat. The bench might be inconsistent, but the starting lineup has five players in it, not three, and the other two players who are starting right now—Crystal Dangerfield and Veronica Burton—have played a key role in keeping this team competitive.
This week, I want to specifically focus on what Burton’s been bringing to the court for the Wings.
First, some background!
The Dallas Wings have made a lot of first-round picks over the past few years, and quite a few of those picks haven’t worked out. In 2021, for example, the team drafted three players in the first round, and just one of those players—Awak Kuier—is still on the team. But 2022 No. 7 overall pick Veronica Burton hasn’t just made the team; she’s solidified her place in the starting lineup.
Burton arrived in Dallas after a four-year career at Northwestern. As a senior, she averaged 17.8 points, 6.4 assists and 4.0 steals per game for the Wildcats—that steal number led the nation, and she was sixth in assists. While she had some consistency issues when it came to her shot—she shot above 40% in just half of her college seasons—she brought playmaking and defense to the W, making her a good fit on a Wings team that wasn’t really in need of much backcourt scoring, since the ball tends to end up in Ogunbowale’s hands a lot.
As a rookie last season, Burton started six games for the Wings and averaged 15.2 minutes per contest. She didn’t shoot particularly well—32.9% from the floor, which ranked in just the fifth percentile—but you could see the makings of a good WNBA point guard in her assist/turnover ratio, which ranked 30th in the league. Her defense was also strong in limited action—her 2.5 steals per 40 minutes ranked fourth in the league, and her 0.8 blocks per 40 minutes ranked 38th.
Burton’s 2023 season
Burton opened the 2023 campaign as the starting point guard, beating out Crystal Dangerfield for the job initially. In the end, that didn’t really matter that much, as circumstances have actually forced the Wings to start both players together in the backcourt in five of the six games so far.
This season has seen Burton’s importance magnified. She’s averaging 5.2 assists per game, the eighth-best mark in the WNBA, and 1.5 steals per game, which ranks 15th. I mentioned above that her strong assist/turnover ratio last year was an encouraging sign. Well, that number looks even better now, as her 4.43 assist/turnover ratio is third-best in the league.
Looking at Burton’s assists again, two things really stand out. The first is the precision of her passes no matter which direction she’s tossing them. It can be a well-timed rocket into the post. It can be a play like the one above, where she throws the ball horizontally right to Natasha Howard on the pick-and-roll. Whatever it is, more often than not a Veronica Burton pass arrives exactly where it’s intended to. The passes might not always be flashy, but they get where they need to be.
The other thing is that there’s just a complete lack of hesitance to Burton’s passes.
On this play, an Ogunbowale miss turns into a Burton offensive rebound. She hasn’t even landed back on the ground before she’s finding Howard, who scores on the layup. That’s just one example, but time after time when watching Burton when the ball’s in her hands, she’s so fast to identify where the ball needs to go. She doesn’t even need to be the primary ball-handler. There was one play where Crystal Dangerfield is the one with the ball in her hands, and she finds Burton at the top of the arc. Almost instantly, Burton sees Howard posting up in the paint and directs the ball into her. It’s like she’s got the kind of court awareness that Courtney Vandersloot or Chelsea Gray has, though maybe not quite as refined just yet.
The one thing that really separates point guards like Vandersloot and Gray from Burton though is that they’re much bigger scoring threats. Burton’s not someone who’s going to take a lot of shot attempts—she hasn’t taken more than five field goal attempts in a game yet—but if she can at least start to knock down open shots more often, then that’ll expand the ceiling for this Wings offense.
Defensively, Burton has six steals over the past two games. A lot of that’s just from being aggressive, especially in the post after rebounds from the opposing team. Against the Mystics, for example, two of those steals came from pressuring the rebounder from the opposing team. Burton swarmed in, and the ball ended up in a Dallas player’s hands.
This isn’t to say that Burton’s been perfect this year. It’s still a small sample, but the Wings have an offensive rating of 93.8 with her on the floor for 61 minutes, while the offensive rating in the 61 minutes with her off the floor is 130.65, per PBP Stats. Much of that is noisy, because a 130.65 offensive rating is abnormally high. Some of that is because the 12 minutes that the Wings played a Dangerfield/Dickey/Ogunbowale/Sabally/Howard lineup has been really good, with a 151.9 offensive rating. Again, that feels like it’s more about the small sample than anything else, especially when a lot of those minutes came against the Storm.
Still, the lineup data does show that the Wings have played better with Burton off the floor—slightly on the defensive end, but the difference has been much more stark on offense. It doesn’t really mesh with the eye test or the impressive passing skills she’s shown so I don’t want to buy into that lineup data too much after six games, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Of course, some of that also comes down to who isn’t available for the Wings. The current lineup’s lack of size accounts for some issues, and you can’t really blame Burton for Ogunbowale shooting under 40% in all but one game this season. And of Burton’s 179 minutes, 168 of those have come with Ogunbowale on the floor—another thing that likely skews the lineup data.
Overall, Burton appears to be the answer at point guard for the Wings. Her ability to not turn the ball over is a huge plus, and she’s consistently making good passes. She needs to get more consistent at hitting her own shots, but her shooting numbers also feel skewed by a really bad two-game stretch against the Sky and Lynx, when she was just 1-for-9 from the floor and 0-for-7 from deep. Burton’s performance this season has mostly been an encouraging sign for the Wings.
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