The Dallas Wings are coming off a disastrous 2024 season, but their poor play helped the team earn the No. 1 overall pick and the rights to draft UConn star Paige Bueckers.
Adding Bueckers to last year's core would have made the Wings a contender if everyone was healthy, but this isn't last year's Wings squad. Satou Sabally and Natasha Howard are both gone, which are huge losses for the team. It leaves a lot of questions about what this team is.
Here are three big questions for the Dallas Wings in 2025.
1. How will the Paige Bueckers-Arike Ogunbowale pairing work?
All of the hemming and hawing about whether or not Paige Bueckers would be a Dallas Wing is over. She was the No. 1 pick. She signed her rookie deal. She's the future of this franchise.
But how will the future and the present mesh?
Dallas has a fairly young core aside from one important player: Arike Ogunbowale. The 28-year-old guard is entering her seventh WNBA season, so it's safe to say that she is the player she's going to be, and that player is a high-usage guard with a flair for the big moment.
How she fits with Bueckers will be interesting. To make this work, one of the two will need to work more as an off-ball guard, and at least at first it's likely to be Bueckers who plays more of a secondary ball-handler role for the team, though long-term the team will want Bueckers as the point guard.
2. Can NaLyssa Smith have a bounce-back season?
With Satou Sabally and Natasha Howard gone, the Wings will need to rely heavily on former Baylor big NaLyssa Smith at the four and likely as the backup five as well.
Smith looked like she was on her way to being one of the league's most fun fours in her first two seasons in Indiana, but she really struggled to fit in with the team last year after the addition of Caitlin Clark.
But Smith should have ample opportunities to succeed in Dallas. Teaira McCowan is a tough big to figure out — sometimes she looks dominant inside and other times she looks like she's barely a factor — and we'll likely see the Wings run some small lineups with Smith at the five instead, allowing the team to run up and down the floor.
If we go back to 2023, we see Smith really making a living in the non-restricted area paint, where she ranked 14th in the league in field goals made. Dallas can run a lot of pick-and-rolls now, letting Smith serve as the roller and taking advantage of her athleticism to get down hill.
Of course, Smith could struggle to figure out her role in Dallas just like she did in Indiana last year. Playing with two ball-dominant guards and a paint-bound big? That's the situation she was in last season, so...we'll see, I guess!
3. Is there enough depth in Dallas to make a real run?
Dallas has a pretty solid starting group—Bueckers, Ogunbowale, DiJonai Carrington, Smith and McCowan—and Maddy Siegrist as the main backup wing is a nice luxury, but things are a bit of a mystery beyond that.
Tyasha Harris started 38 games for Connecticut last season, but that was her only year so far of high-level production. Will she be able to sustain that?
The bigger concern, though, is the big rotation. You're got McCowan and Smith as the starters, and then...what? Myisha Hines-Allen is probably the "what," but aside from the 2020 Wubble season, Hines-Allen hasn't really been that good in the W. It's just hard to see what this team does up front if there are any injury issues. You can start Siegrist as a stretch four in that scenario, but it still leaves you scrambling to figure out the rotation at the five.