How Did The Dallas Wings Ever Win A Trade?

A Wings-ier game than Wednesday night’s against the Fever has never been played. Dallas’s signature defensive scheme, “just looking around a lot,” gave Caitlin Clark the runway she needed to break the WNBA single-game assist record. When she kicked the ball out to an open Kelsey Mitchell for a 19th assist, passing Courtney Vandersloot's 18-assist performance against the Fever in 2020, there were still more than two minutes left in the fourth quarter. The game got sillier from there. It ended, naturally, with an Arike Ogunbowale circus shot to ice things. Classic Wings.

Then again, a more representative Wings game might have ended in a loss. Dallas enters the three-week Olympic break 6-19, tied with the Washington Mystics for worst record in the league. Unlike the Fever, who began their season 1-8 but now sit 11-15 thanks to a rapidly improving Clark and Aliyah Boston, the Wings have looked more dismal by the game. Injuries to Natasha Howard and second-year forward Maddy Siegrist peeled away at an already misshapen, rookie-reliant roster. It says some unflattering things about the team that it signed veteran guard Odyssey Sims off the street to an emergency hardship contract a month ago and she immediately looked like its best player.

The team's state also says many flattering things about Satou Sabally, the injury-plagued unicorn forward who dragged this team to a three-seed last year. Sabally, a restricted free agent, signed a one-year extension with Dallas before undergoing an offseason shoulder procedure that caused her to miss the first half of the season. I wouldn't read much into the contract term; every player is signing short-term deals while they wait for a renegotiated CBA. But sometimes one watches the Wings and wonders why she would ever re-sign when the year is up.

Since relocating to Dallas eight years ago, the Wings fans have enjoyed one winning season (go ahead and make it one in nine years, since they'd have to win out to finish this season above .500) and a truly impressive display of bad luck and incompetence. General manager Greg Bibb spent the 2021 offseason wheeling and dealing to acquire three first-round picks in what turned out to be the worst draft in league history; in retrospect, its best player was Dijonai Carrington, taken 20th overall. Charli Collier, drafted first overall by the Wings that year, is no longer in the WNBA. Bibb has never made clear what this front office is building toward or building around. Insofar as basketball is an entertainment product, Ogunbowale has been a valuable face of the franchise. But it's also clear that she's overextended as a primary option and can't be the best player on a championship team.

Many of Dallas's problems—limited ballhandling on the roster, shallow depth at point guard, turnstiles in the backcourt—would be solved by Paige Bueckers, the UConn star projected to go first overall in next year’s draft. Bueckers can score, defend, create for teammates, and most importantly, she is basically idiot-proof to build around. The Wings just don't have math on their side: The WNBA uses lottery teams' records over two seasons to determine odds, and the Wings finished 22-18 last year, well ahead of their tank competition. They should also get better when Sabally returns after the break, and with the Mystics and Sparks hovering nearby in the standings, it doesn't seem like the Wings have dug themselves a deep enough hole in the first half.

There could be another way. Hockey fans know the infamous (now disappeared) Juris Skrastins tweet: “It’s cool how every year in the NBA the biggest news is like ‘The literal best player in the league has been traded’ and the biggest news in the NHL is usually like ‘Latvian superstar Juris Skrastins has signed a 1 year, $800,000 contract with the Boise IcePigs.’” Frankly, the WNBA trade deadline would welcome even a Juris Skrastins swap. It typically comes and goes unnoticed. (I, a professional WNBA writer, had to look up the date to make sure it wasn’t, like, tomorrow or something.) The new CBA made offseasons more exciting by simplifying the path to free agency. But it kept rosters small and left most teams right up against the hard cap—a killer for midseason trades. The short schedule doesn't help either. A GM may not want to bother with all the math to bring in a player for 10-ish regular-season games. 

Which is why it was honest-to-god bombshell news Wednesday when Annie Costabile of the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the Sky were dealing former Wing Marina Mabrey to the Sun for picks and two players. Mabrey landed with Chicago in an equally shocking four-team trade in 2023. After a disastrous winter that saw the Sky's 2021 championship team dismantled, head coach and GM James Wade chose to keep the team competitive, at any cost. The cost for Mabrey, who had led the Wings to a playoff berth in 2022, was exorbitant: the rights to solid rotation piece Leonie Fiebich, three second-round picks, a third-round pick, their first-round picks in the 2023 and 2024 drafts, plus Dallas got swap rights to their first-round pick in the 2025 draft. Wade then left the Sky midseason to take a job with the Toronto Raptors. (You can read the U.S.-Canadian extradition treaty here.)

Mabrey never played up to her max contract in Chicago, but she accounted for a good chunk of the Sky's scoring and an even bigger chunk of their league-low three-point volume; the trade gives the Sky some cap flexibility and draft capital, but probably makes them worse. Fresh off a close win over the Aces, the Sky's emerging young core seems talented enough not to spiral down the standings in the second half of the season, but Dallas would certainly welcome another kick at the lottery if they did. At one time, the Wings held Atlanta's first-round pick, too—one poised to be in the lottery this year—but they traded it to the Mystics so they could draft Stephanie Soares, who did not play a minute of Wednesday's game. That the Wings were ever on the winning end of an all-time managerial screwup makes for a sobering WNBA lesson: No matter how terrible your front office is, someone else's is probably worse.