The Wings season is a disaster. Is it too late to determine the right course?

Expectations were high in the preseason for the Wings. They returned a core coming off a 22-win season, the most for the franchise since moving to North Texas in 2016. In April, the team announced it would move from College Park Center in Arlington to downtown Dallas. . Everything seemed to be going in the right direction.

So why exactly have the Wings fallen to a WNBA-worst 3-13 record and dropped a whopping 11 straight games?

The problems started in February, when Satou Sabally suffered a shoulder injury while playing abroad. She underwent surgery and in May team president Greg Bibb suggested Sabally would be out until the Olympic break, meaning she would miss more than half the season.

From then on the hits kept coming. Jaelyn Brown, a 25-year-old rookie who impressed in the preseason and looked primed to see heavy minutes, played just one game and has been sidelined with illness since. Natasha Howard broke her foot and has only played four games. Even Arike Ogunbowale, the face of the franchise, was not immune to the injury bug; she was held out of a June 17 loss to Minnesota with a sore Achilles tendon.

The latest player to fall victim to what feels like a curse at this point is Maddy Siegrist, who broke her left index finger against the Lynx that same night. Siegrist, who averages 14.6 points per game and was named a Most Improved Player contender in the league, will be reevaluated after eight weeks. The good news – and this is admittedly a great promise – is that four of those weeks fall during the Olympic break from competition. The injury problems have become so severe that Monique Billings, the team’s second player in minutes, is on a hardship deal and was not on the roster for opening night.

Consider that the Wings had one of the quietest offseasons in the league, which included no impactful moves other than working out new deals for Sabally and Kalani Brown. Dallas entered 2024 with five players on the roster who had never played a minute in the WNBA. It was clear from the start that the Wings would be in trouble if they had injury problems, and that is exactly what happened. No surprise, but the team struggles when the starters aren’t on the floor. The on/off numbers highlight this: The Wings’ net rating — a measure of a team’s point differential per 100 possessions — drops 13.6 points when Ogunbowale is on the bench. The pattern repeats for the top five players in total minutes.

There have been some, albeit small, glimmers of hope. Before the injury, Siegrist was playing well. Although her three-balls haven’t fallen consistently, she ranks eighth in the WNBA in two-point field goal percentage and 12th in offensive rebounds per game. The third pick in the 2023 draft, she can play the three and the four and has been particularly impressive defensively, showing she can hold her own against the league’s top players.

Then there is Sevgi Uzun. The Wings have a rookie-heavy roster, and if you had asked in the preseason who the best of those rookies would be, I doubt anyone would have mentioned Uzun. Why would they? The 26-year-old Turkish guard had spent her career between teams in the Turkish Super League and had never signed a training camp contract with a WNBA team until this year. But not only has Uzun made the team in surprising fashion, she has also provided some semblance of an answer at point guard. The Wings have moved on from their top three-point guards from last season, trading Crystal Dangerfield, releasing Veronica Burton and not re-signing Odyssey Sims (although they did re-sign Sims to a hardship contract on Tuesday). Many thought rookie Jacy Sheldon would fill the position, and if not her, then Lou Lopez Senechal, a 2023 first-round draft pick who would make her debut this season.

Instead, the job went to Uzun, who has started all 16 games. She hasn’t set the world on fire, shooting just 36.2 percent from the floor and 23.6 percent from three, but she is contributing 4.6 assists and 1.3 steals per game. She needs to improve as a shooter to be the long-term solution, but she has shown signs that she can at least be a valuable player off the bench next season.

Of course, many believe the team might finish poorly enough to land the No. 1 pick and get the chance to draft UConn guard Paige Bueckers. If you support this scenario, keep in mind that the WNBA draft lottery is based on a combined two-year record. Since the Wings won 22 games last year, they should be too Real bad to end up with the best lottery odds. As it stands now, six teams have the same or worse combined record as Dallas. Two of those – Phoenix and Seattle – will almost certainly make the playoffs, but four others remain.

But let’s slow down before we Photoshop Bueckers into a Wings jersey. We can’t say definitively that Dallas won’t turn things around. The return of Sabally and Siegrist after the Olympics could be enough for this team to sneak into the postseason if the race for the eight seed remains tight. The Sky currently holds that spot at 6-9, 3 1/2 games ahead of Dallas. Assuming Siegrist and Sabally don’t return until after the Olympics, that would mean the Wings still have nine games remaining. If Dallas can get to 3-6, that could be enough to keep the team within striking distance of a playoff berth.

That’s because Sabally changes things up so much. As I wrote before the season, the Wings outscored opponents by 6.04 points per 100 possessions when they were on the floor. When she was off the floor, that number plummeted to minus-4.46. In other words, with Sabally on the floor, the Wings played like a top-three team. Without her, they played like a team that would have been competing for the eighth seed.

If the battle for the eighth seed is close as we get to the final fifteen games, Sabally could push the team over the top. Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking, though. Because the Wings don’t look like a team that’s one player away from returning to contention. They need a high-level general in addition to Ogunbowale, and another reliable shooter off the bench to keep things going. The team also needs to think about what it wants to do in the frontcourt; Brown and Teaira McCowan cannot share the stage, which makes the injury problems seem even worse. Should Dallas leave one of them?

So even with Sabally back, this looks very much like a lost season. Some of it the Wings couldn’t have anticipated. The rest is a reminder that a little more urgency this offseason could have allowed this team to better weather the slew of injuries that derailed the 2024 season.