Dallas Wings Check-In: What’s Gone Wrong During This Three Game Losing Streak
Dallas Wings Check-In: What’s Gone Wrong During This Three Game Losing Streak
The Wings have fallen under .500 for the first time this season.
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The Dallas Wings have lost three straight, dropping the team below .500 for the first time this season. After starting 3-1 and looking like one of the league’s best teams, the Wings have struggled, going just 2-5 over the last seven games.
So, what’s gone wrong for Dallas? Let’s take a look at some of the things that haven’t been working over this losing streak.
Defensive struggles
If we look at the last three games for every WNBA team, the Dallas defense stands out as being particularly bad over that span. The team’s defensive rating over the last three games is 118.4, the worst mark in the league, and they’ve allowed 96.7 points per game in that span, which is also the worst in the W. That includes giving up 109 points to Seattle, a team that’s averaged 71 PPG in their other contests. Something’s been off defensively.
What’s “off” is an inability to stop teams on the perimeter. Despite being the only team in this span to allow over 90 points per game, the 34.0 points in the paint allowed per game is actually tied for the league’s fifth-best mark over that span. Teams are seeing a weakness outside the paint and they’re exploiting that.
In the loss to Seattle, the Storm shot 17-for-34 from deep, fueled by Jewell Loyd’s 7-for-12 mark. Ezi Magbegor was 4-for-4 from behind the arc. Kia Nurse was 3-for-8. It was just a barrage, and Dallas wasn’t able to defend against it.
Sure, some of that is because certain Storm players were on a heater. For instance, sometimes Loyd’s just going to go off, and there’s not really much you can do about it.
But there’s also some evidence that the Wings defense contributed to that shooting barrage. Per Synergy’s tracking data, the Storm had three times as many unguarded catch-and-shoot attempts as the Wings did, which seems like a bad thing if you want to win a basketball game.
You can see above that the Wings defense felt out of sorts from the jump. This is the first possession of the game, and all five Wings defenders end up with at least one foot in the paint on this play where Loyd’s got the ball on the block, while three different Storm players are wide open behind the arc. Loyd finds Nurse and while Satou Sabally makes the late attempt to close out, it isn’t enough, as Nurse’s shot swishes through.
Some of the defensive woes are about miscommunication, but some of it’s just about how much is being asked of certain players. In the Storm game, Sabally was one of five Wings players to play 29 or more minutes, and four of those five took double-digit shot attempts. Depth was supposed to be one of Dallas’ strengths this season, but injuries have really stunted that part of the team, and the core group is having to expend a lot of energy offensively. As long as they’re doing that, it seems likely that something will have to give defensively.
It’s also worth noting that Veronica Burton—who was known for her defense in college—has seen a drop in minutes. After playing 24 or more minutes for the team’s first six games, she’s played 22 or fewer in every game since. Her struggles to score—she’s scored exactly three points on 1-for-14 shooting over the last five games—have taken her off the floor, further limiting the team’s defensive upside.
The offense has (mostly) been fine
Here are the scoring totals over the three-game losing streak: 93, 61, 103.
That 61 really stands out. Theoretically, you should win games when scoring over 90 points—there’s been just seven games this season where the losing team scored at least 90 points—but you probably aren’t going to win when you score 61, considering the lowest score in a victory this season was the 66 points Seattle scored in a win over the Sparks on June 6.
The offense has obviously not been as big an issue as the defense, but that showing against the Sparks did feature some worrying signs, especially when it came to 3-point shooting, as the team was just 4-for-21 from deep.
To me, that game showed what happens when the team’s two offensive engines—Sabally and Arike Ogunbowale—don’t get going. The two both shot under 35% from the floor and were a combined 3-for-15 from beyond the arc. For an offense that’s so reliant on those two players, poor shooting like that dooms them.
Ogunbowale has shot under 40% seven times this season, and Dallas is 2-5 in those games. They’re 3-1 when she shoots over 40%. As for Sabally, the Wings are 1-3 when she shoots under 40%. The team’s 0-3 in games where both shot under that mark. This offense relies really, really heavily on those two, to the point where even other players stepping up doesn’t help much. Kalani Brown was unstoppable against the Sparks, going 10-for-14 from the floor. Didn’t matter—Dallas lost by 18.
Is there a turnaround in sight?
Sure, but not immediately.
Dallas has two big problems. One is that the lack of depth has hurt them on both ends, but particularly on defense. The other is that they don’t have the ability to withstand a bad game from Ogunbowale and Sabally.
Both of those have the same solution, and it’s called “getting healthy.” Teaira McCowan will be back after EuroBasket, and the gravity she creates inside should make for easier attempts for the rest of the Wings players. It’s a small sample, but per PBP Stats, the Wings had a +53.68 net rating in the 16 minutes she’s played this season. Of course, a better sample would be last year’s numbers—per WNBA.com, the Wings had a +5.9 net rating last year with McCowan on the floor and a -3.3 net rating with her off the floor. Different teammates and all that in 2023 so it’s also not a perfect indicator of her importance this season, but all signs point to her making a pretty significant impact.
Note: McCowan has returned from EuroBasket and could play as early as Tuesday night.
Meanwhile, getting Lou Lopez Sénéchal and/or Diamond DeShields back helps too. Sure, we haven’t seen Sénéchal play a WNBA game yet, but the No. 5 pick in this year’s draft shot over 40% from deep in three of her collegiate seasons, and she learned how to adapt to a smaller role last year at UConn. As for DeShields, there’s less certainty around when she’ll return, but she’s someone who can give you 10-plus points, taking some pressure off the other scorers. If she returns this season, that’s another plus for the Wings.
So, yeah, things could and should get better. This team plays hard and is almost always competitive, even in the losses. That Sparks game is the only one where Dallas lost by double-digits. But these last three games have showcased some of the issues with this team, and until other players are back in the lineup, it’s hard to see those issues going away.
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