u/Severe-Post3466

Wanted to share this link in case anyone was looking for tickets for the game against Seattle on 8/23: the Wings are partnering with Union Coffee and donating $10 per ticket brought through their link. If you are not familiar, Union Coffee does a lot of social good around the Dallas area and is a great shop overall. The tickets seem to be the same range as AXS from a quick glance, but your money will be going to support a local business that does a lot of local good!

I was thinking about how fun it was to see Paige and Caitlin against each other last game and trying to find a place to rewatch it, and it got me thinking about my favorite match ups. I think off the top of my head it's been Toronto and Indiana this season. What are y'all's favorite match ups either between individual players or teams?

Hi guys!! I'm looking for Wings merch in thrift stores around DFW, and was wondering if anyone knows of some stores that have had any! I want to upcycle it so I don't want to buy new, but this is proving way more difficult than I thought. I've so far found every single Dallas sport and even other W merch around the metroplex (a surprising amount of Sun merch), but I'm yet to find any for the Wings. I'd appreciate any pointers or thoughts or ideas!! Feel free to DM me if you're protective of your thrift spots, I get it haha

AUDIO WARNING: it is loud and has a ton of noise

Yesterday, during the Dream vs Wings game, the commentators asked some "Aflac Question of the Game" or something. The question was "who are the two currently active players who have won an NCAA championship, WNBA championship, Olympic gold, and FIBA world cup?". The correct answer they shared was Breanna Stewart and Britney Griner. However, looking at A'ja Wilson's Wikipedia it does seem like she also has done all four (as I thought last night). Am I missing something? Were they just wrong? I might be misremembering what they said, but I don't have League Pass so I can't go back and watch. This is so inconsequential and unserious, but it's bothering me so I had to ask.

Miss Dallas hoops and talking about then!!

Curious for what everyone's rose, bud, and thorn are for this season so far. If you have never done rose, bud, thorn, rose is something you're happy about, thorn is something you're not happy about, and bud something you're looking forwards to.

Here's mine:

Rose - So much to choose for, but I am just incredibly happy about where we are now compared to last season. We have a competent coach, have had minimal injuries, and our team looks like they have a lot of fun playing together & have a bright future ahead.

Thorn - Maddy :( I love Maddy so much, and I am sad that there doesn't seem to be a clear cut role for her on the team. I loved seeing her usage the last couple games before All Star Break and would love to see more of her going forward. I'll be sad to see her go if we trade her, but I get why it'd be beneficial for everyone involved.

Bud - Alanna! I'm really excited to see Alanna recover again and hopefully be able to get back and stay in a groove this time. I think her defense will significantly impact the team's ability to keep our place in the standings for the next half of the season.

What are y'all's?

Now she’s finally hunting her own shot—and the rest of the WNBA doesn’t have an answer

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For a long time, isolation was the last thing I associated with Paige Bueckers.

The famously unselfish it girl of women’s basketball has always seen herself—and her game—in relation to others. You could map the entire league via six degrees of Paige Bueckers’s friendships.

When Dallas Wings coach Jose Fernandez tells her she’s the best player in the world, she looks completely unmoved. I have never seen such a precise scorer be so perfectly in tune with her teammates’ needs. Even in the midst of a sophomore season that’s among the best in WNBA history, she has deflected credit back to her teammates.

Selflessness has long been considered her greatest strength and the greatest knock against her. She is, as Mirin Fader once put it, a giver. Watching Bueckers dominate, you’d ask yourself: Why isn’t the pick-and-roll maestro demanding more picks? Why does the most efficient isolation player in the league isolate so little?

But this year, those questions have dissipated. Isolation as a philosophy is at odds with who Bueckers is. Isolation as a style of play, however, is something she’s learning to embrace. Per Synergy, she’s going one-on-one on 10.4 percent of her possessions this season, way up from 4 percent in her rookie season. In the past 10 games, that number has jumped even higher, to 14 percent. And while the rest of the league is obsessed with the 3-point revolution, Bueckers ranks no. 2 in midrange scoring, a zag that gives her elite maneuverability against opposing defenses.

Take this play against the Toronto Tempo last Friday, in a game where Bueckers scored 34 points and notched seven points and three assists in the fourth quarter:

Last season, she likely would have responded to the double-team by immediately looking for an open teammate. But this year, she’s hunting her shot. The Tempo send help to the left in the clip above, cutting off her driving angle, so Bueckers dribbles to the right, steps back, and pump-fakes her defender before hitting a contested midrange shot, from an area of the floor where she’s shooting an extraterrestrial 58 percent.

The increased production hasn’t put even the tiniest dent in her accuracy, either, which is still tops in the league. As a whole, she’s shooting above league average this year from nearly everywhere on the court.

This is why fans, coaches, and analysts have always clamored for her to shoot more, dating back to her days at UConn. Bueckers’s surgical analysis, midrange mastery, deft touch, and ballhandling sorcery give her one-on-one game limitless scalability that peaks in crunch time. She will begin the game by cutting, screening, passing, and assessing the opponents’ weaknesses. And right when the defense has forgotten about her and shifted its attention to tracking Azzi Fudd’s movements or Jessica Shepard’s drives, Bueckers strikes. She leads the WNBA in fourth-quarter scoring, and she’s fifth in clutch scoring.

“She’s such a competitor and a winner, and she just refuses to lose,” says Fernandez. “Certain guys don’t want the ball in their hands at the end or don’t want to take the big shot, and she never shies away from the big moment.” 

In the fourth quarter, she has become downright relentless about getting open, using her skill as an off-ball mover as a counter. Against the Chicago Sky this week, during the Wings’ sixth double-digit comeback victory of the year, she thwarted Natasha Cloud’s ball denial by cutting hard to the rim and then cutting back, before using the threat of running a dribble handoff to spin back and score at the rim:

Even with her increased isolation dominance, Bueckers hasn’t lost the patience and clock awareness that have always been a hallmark of her greatness.

More than anyone else I’ve watched, save for maybe Chris Paul, Bueckers plays like she has an internal metronome dictating her pace. She plays fast, but she’s never rushed. Take this play against the Seattle Storm, which ends with Bueckers coming off a handoff and hitting a contested 3. But it starts with her giving up the ball, setting a screen, and passing to another big:

Or look at her eventual game-tying middy. A lot of young players would have taken the first opportunity Bueckers was presented with: an uncomfortable, heavily contested jumper. Last year, she might have faded into the background of the play after kicking the ball out. But here, she gets it back, drives, fades away, and hits a similar shot from a similar place against the same defender—just with a lot more space and rhythm.

Simply put, Bueckers is having the opposite of a sophomore slump. In fact, she might be having one of the best second years the WNBA has ever seen, at least on offense. She is eighth in points and fourth in assists of all time at this juncture of a sophomore season. Skylar Diggins is the only other player in WNBA history to be in the top 10 in both points and assists 23 games into their second season. This season, Bueckers is also the most efficient shooter among the top 20 scorers and has the best assist-to-turnover ratio of the top 20 passers.

Bueckers is operating on a unique plane right now, where comfort, skill, and resolve have given rise to experimentation and innovation. Nothing exemplifies that, or the way she’s leveraged her reputation as an unselfish player to create scoring opportunities, more than this moment against Toronto from a few weeks ago.

As she’s coming off a dribble handoff with Shepard, two opponents are ready to impede Bueckers’s path to the rim. The simple, plus-EV basketball decision, the decision she’s been making her whole life, would be to kick the ball to Shepard. Everyone knows it, and she knows everyone knows it. So she takes the pass fake to an entirely new level, bouncing the ball in Shepard’s direction, but with so much spin that it boomerangs right back into Bueckers’s hands. The defense falls for it, and Bueckers takes the ball to the rim for a layup: 

Pardon my French, but the English she put on that thing was fucking mind-boggling.

“She does things every single day that, you know, now you’re not surprised anymore, right? How many times did she win the half-court shot? Eight or nine times out of whatever,” says Fernandez. “I should just come in every day with $100 for the day of the game and just give it to her.”

Bueckers has always seen basketball as a collective problem—one she is now realizing she often has the best answer to. At 24 years old, she’s just scratching the surface of her potential. Every contested jumper that falls through the hoop is an affirmation that the greatest service Bueckers can do for her teammates is to continue exploring the limits of her own individual ability.

Hi!! I was thinking of organizing a watch party for the Lynx game on August 9th, since I'd love to make some Wings friends and watch the game together! I know it's still a ways out, but if you're interested, I'd love to know what region of DFW you'd prefer! Would also love to hear any and all thoughts about this!

View Poll

As serious or unserious as you want, what are some rivalries you want to see developed in the league? I feel like we have so much potential for rivalries that we are not capitalizing on. After watching last week and yesterday's game, I'd love to see the Wings vs Tempo or Arike/Paige vs Marina into a strong rivalry.

I don't care for the Caitlin Clark discourse that has happened over the last months (and years) because it is so obvious (to me) how much we have all become pawns in a game that isn't ours. Regardless of what "side" you're on, you're engaging in a right wing storyline that inherently isn't that of the league's or most of the fans'. This piece explores how this has come to be really well, and I think it is a valuable read for all of us.

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by Seerat Sohi

I’m surprised it took this long, but the most online White House has finally weighed in on the most online league. On Monday, President Donald Trump gave his two cents on the Alyssa Thomas–Caitlin Clark fracas, saying he thought Clark was “treated rather rough” in what he called “a bad event.” On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee sent a letter to WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, demanding the league take accountability for “unnecessary physical hostility and violence” against Clark.

The letter, signed by 11 Republican members of Congress, alluded to using the weight of the Department of Justice, Department of Labor, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to come down on the WNBA.

Sigh. It’s official. The right vs. the WNBA is here. The Republican Party has officially entered the WNBA culture wars, going straight to the commissioner’s inbox.

If you’re not too exhausted, feel free to do your best impression of Sophie Cunningham pointing her finger and tap the “The WNBA has gone 0 days without being unnecessarily dramatic” sign.

None of this happened overnight. As I wrote just two weeks (two weeks!!!) ago, the WNBA’s failure to manage Clark’s arrival created this opening, allowing right-wing grifters to hijack a story the WNBA failed to seize hold of, and essentially allowing the league to become a political punching bag.

There’s a reason the WNBA is such fertile ground for these types of shenanigans. The league has exploded in popularity at the same moment the country has become embroiled in a cultural, political, and legal fight over the role of women in society. In that time, the WNBA has gone from the margins to the mainstream, alongside its primarily Black, openly queer, politically outspoken, and increasingly wealthy employee base. They represent the antithesis of the messaging the modern conservative project wants women—or anyone—to see, because it’s built around values they insist cannot coexist with excellence and achievement. Their only recourse against the WNBA’s increasing influence is using the perception of Clark’s treatment to separate her from and demean her peers. In the past three years, the league has not done enough to quell this misguided perception, nor has it offered a solution to the underlying causes of the skirmishes Clark ends up in.   

The right cares about the WNBA for a lot of the same reasons it cares about who plays Disney princesses: It understands the power of a good story.

If you watch a female coach of color thrive, it’s a reminder that expanding opportunities for historically marginalized groups doesn’t have to come at the expense of excellence.

If you go to a game and find your chosen family, you might feel less inclined to conform to a role in a nuclear family that doesn’t fit. 

If the league puts a spotlight on women like Dearica Hamby, who is outspoken in defense of her rights as a mother—not against the rights of mothers—it flies in the face of the narrow conception of choices the right wants women to believe they have. 

The right’s worst nightmare is not Caitlin Clark getting hurt. 

Their worst nightmare is more people finding out about the Golden State Valkyries, where the energy of a Game 7 meets a gay pride parade and woke has gone anything but broke. 

It’s the joie de vivre of the StudBudz, who are the antithesis of the humorless scolds the conservative movement would like to paint the league’s Black, masculine lesbians as. 

It’s Chelsea Gray kissing her wife and hugging her son after winning the WNBA Finals.

It’s WNBA core, Part 1 and 2.

It’s a league in which athletes, whether white or Black, straight or queer, are the main characters in a story that does not villainize, does not pity, does not evoke feelings of superiority or anger, but offers dimension, complexity, and courage.

This is the league as it actually is, but you’d have to dig through endless layers of rage bait and controversy to know about it.

It’s a league that can organically, just by way of existing, remind America that the lifestyles its stars lead don’t lead to despair and dysfunction. 

The things that the WNBA represents stand in stark contrast to the conservative movement’s fixation on curtailing the power of women. In January, the Heritage Foundation—the nation’s most influential conservative think tank—released a report called “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” which lays out a blueprint to incentivize early marriage and childbearing, while critiquing no-fault divorce, contraception, and IVF outside heterosexual marriage and arguing that federal funding for higher-education subsidies delays marriage. In their fantasy world, Clark—who rose to fame by way of becoming a college basketball folk hero—might not even have attended college. 

Every compelling lie is built on a kernel of truth. The truth is, there are divides between Clark and some of her peers. She just came in 11th among guards in All-Star voting. But the failure to address these divides—or worse, the attempt to gaslight fans into pretending they don’t exist—has allowed the league’s enemies to portray situational fissures between Clark and a few players as an unbridgeable divide between an entire league and its biggest star. In failing to address concerns around player safety, refereeing, and online discourse, the league has allowed bad-faith actors to use those issues as a Trojan horse to tell a story about the WNBA as a league in which liberal institutional failures run amok.

It also paints Clark, who has spoken up multiple times about the harassment her peers face, including recently, as an ally of the right’s cause. In part to counter that perception, the Fever released a statement saying neither Clark nor any other member of the organization interacted with the congressional group, and saying that they were unaware of the letter.

Right now, this is a battle that the WNBA’s enemies are winning, because they understand the league’s power as a symbolic vehicle better than the WNBA does itself. Commissioner Engelbert, time and time again, has shown up to this knife fight with an empty task force and a rote statement. Her regime has rested its laurels on television rights, sponsorships, and expansion fees while ignoring its biggest asset: its story. The longer it takes for the league to figure out how to tell it, the longer other people will.