Paige Bueckers is a huge win for the Dallas Wings — Sonia Raman talks New York Liberty

Basketball Wednesday

Presented by The BIG EAST Conference

With Bueckers signing her rookie scale contract this week, the victory is complete. It is hard to overstate how important the Wings securing Bueckers at this moment specifically is for the team, but much of the rest of the afternoon’s announcements reinforced exactly why the Wings need Bueckers so much at this point in time.

Bibb, in his prepared remarks, revealed that the Wings and KFAA have agreed to a distribution deal which will put 29 Dallas games on the air in 12 markets, reaching an estimated 6.3 million people. Put another way: the durability and ability to build on that deal will have a lot to do with how compulsively watchable the Dallas Wings are in 2025.

The players who will make that determination on the court in 2025 and beyond are still largely unknown. Bueckers, along with Aziaha James, Madison Scott, Aaronette Vonleh and JJ Quinerly were all selected in the 2025 WNBA Draft. Will they all make the team? Possible, though expect them to be pushed by training camp invitees Kaila Charles and Joyner Holmes. Still, they are the only five Wings under contract for 2026, should they stick with the roster, now that Kalani Brown has been traded to Phoenix. Everyone else on the team will be a free agent after 2025, although let’s be clear: this isn’t a Wings thing. This is a WNBA thing, as the league continues to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. Everyone is there to prove themselves to the Wings, but just as clearly, the Wings are there to prove themselves to everyone.

Just how critical is this simultaneous on-court and off-court metric of success in 2025 for the Wings?New head coach Chris Koclanes put it this way at the press conference: “We talked about this early on, just trying to define success and establish it. And so for me, it’s — we have exit interviews at the end of every season. And in those exit interviews, if a majority of our players can walk in there and say, I enjoyed that season, regardless of wins and losses, this is a place I want to be. These are people I want to be around. I want to be back. Can you please re-sign me? Then we’ll have begun on the right direction of establishing our foundation.”

That, truly, is the moment, the opportunity the Wings can either rise to or fail to meet now. We could spend days on all the reasons so many players have asked out of Dallas since the franchise relocated from Tulsa. Some of them have been limitations of the franchise itself, areas Bibb and company not only acknowledge, but have worked to address. Some of them have to do with the basketball decisions made — and Curt Miller, the team’s new general manager, has had an outstanding offseason by any measure. Some of them are very specific to the players who asked to leave.

But now the Wings have added a player, in Bueckers, who is everything a franchise could ask for. She is unselfish, on and off the court. She is preternaturally talented at a position of scarcity in this league. She excels under pressure, she’s used to the microscope from her years at Connecticut, and assuming good health, no one in any WNBA front office I’ve spoken to has the slightest doubt she will be an immediate star.

Oh, and let’s not forget: Dallas got her at the old CBA rookie scale price. However they need to build their team in the new CBA era, even if the league and players agree to some kind of backdated smoothing of any rookie scale increase, they have one of the most valuable players under contract for the next four years at what will be far from the max salary in any new agreement. It’s hard to overstate how valuable that alone is for the Dallas Wings.

But the Wings cannot make themselves a destination on the back of Bueckers alone. In fact, they need to elevate the standard, as Bueckers put it on draft night, in order to keep Bueckers happy. If Bueckers asks out the way Skylar Diggins-Smith or Liz Cambage did, no one is going to see it as a split with multiple parties to blame. The challenge for the Wings, then, is just beginning.

Bueckers demurred when I asked her what metric she thought would best exemplify elevating the standard in Dallas, but here’s a useful list for you all to keep an eye on: ticket sales, engagement on social, merch sales, new sponsor money, training and wellness options and, critically, where the team plays and how often they fill it.

As of now, the Wings are preparing to play in Dallas Memorial Arena in 2026. That seats 9,800. It is obviously a huge jump in class over the College Park Center at UT-Arlington, not just in size. Regular sellouts there will be a step forward. But.

The Dallas Mavericks play at American Airlines Arena, seating capacity 19,200, built nearly 50 years after Dallas Memorial Arena. If the Wings do this right — and the Indiana Fever managed to show the way forward with how they capitalized on Caitlin Clark — 9,800 won’t cut it. Anything less than fully equal opportunity for growth is, we know now more than ever, willfully leaving money on the table for women’s basketball. Changing that — whether by design in places like Minnesota and New York or by dint of Lin Dunn brilliance and accident of fate in Indiana — is how you elevate the standard.

Plus: there are a whole lot of Dallas basketball fans looking for a team that isn’t actively trolling them right now. The Dallas Wings, then, aim to be that team. (I don’t want to tell Greg Bibb how to run his business, but the advantage of having different owners for the NBA and WNBA teams in town is a chance to use the slogan “Come see the basketball team who didn’t trade Luka Dončić.”)

At a moment the WNBA is redefining what its ceiling looks like, changing what qualifies as its floor matters just as much, if not more, for its bottom line. The Dallas Wings have an opportunity to rise well above that floor now. The stakes for everyone couldn’t be greater.

(P.S. Golden State and Atlanta got first-round talents in Shyanne Sellers and Te-Hina Paopao, respectively, at 17 and 18. The steals of the draft.)

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Five at The IX: Sonia Raman, New York Liberty

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