What do the Dallas Wings need to do to contend for the WNBA Finals next season?

At the end of the 2023 season, the Dallas Wings were one of the top four teams in the WNBA.

The team had increased its regular season win total and the length of its playoff runs over the last several years, including a trip to the 2023 semifinals, where they lost to the eventual champion Las Vegas Aces.

“The expectation was that 2024 was going to be another step forward,” Wings president and CEO Greg Bibb said in an interview this week.

Instead, the Wings took a step backward, missing the playoffs and finishing 9-31, their worst win percentage since 2019 after a spate of injuries. They also found themselves on the losing end of 14 games decided by 10 points or less. Had these games gone their way, 23-17 would have made the playoffs.

For the Wings to achieve their goal of reaching the WNBA Finals — in which the Minnesota Lynx hold a 1-0 lead over the New York Liberty going into Sunday’s Game 2 — Bibb said a few things need to happen, but players staying healthy tops the list.

“Disappointing is the best word to use to describe the ‘24 season,” said Bibb, the organization’s president and CEO since 2017, though he doesn’t want to make excuses.

“In our business, you are what your record says you are,” Bibb said. “But that said, we did experience a significant number of injuries.”

The biggest star to catch the Wings’ injury bug was forward Satou Sabally, the No. 2 overall draft pick in the 2020 WNBA draft, who was sidelined with a shoulder injury for the first 25 games of the season. The league’s Most Improved Player in 2023 had averaged a career-high 18.6 points and 8.1 rebounds and was named to the All-WNBA First Team.

Other key players struck by injuries included forwards Natasha Howard and Maddy Siegrist, the third overall pick in the 2023 WNBA draft.

That left guard Arike Ogunbowale to carry much of the load. The veteran averaged 22.2 points per game, became the franchise’s all-time leading scorer and was named to the All-WNBA Second Team in 2024, but her performance couldn’t overcome the team’s personnel issues.

“Our lineups kept changing because of injuries and we didn’t really get into a groove,” said Siegrist, who suffered a finger injury this year. “We were dropping a lot of close games early and then we had a couple more injuries and we couldn’t really as a team get over that hump.”

As the Detroit Shock and the Tulsa Shock, the organization won WNBA titles in 2003, 2006 and 2008. Last season’s semifinal appearance was the organization’s best finish since since moving to Dallas-Fort Worth in 2016 and rebranding as the Wings.

“We were really bad defensively this year, so I think we need an organizational recommitment to the defensive side of the ball,” Bibb said. “From a specific roster perspective, some additional veteran leadership and some experience at the point guard position, this early in our offseason evaluation, are probably the two items that are at the top of our priority list.”

Siegrist said a finals appearance would also depend on how well the team is working together come playoffs.

“You’ve got to be gelling at the right time,” she said. “You need all the pieces. You need seven, eight deep of real strong players because of different lineups, stuff like that. You want to be able to feel comfortable every time with the group you’re putting out.”

The Wings are already looking ahead to 2025 by collecting information from the previous season, which ended with a 98-84 loss to the Aces, and strategizing.

“There are some complexities to go forward,” Bibb said, “not only for us, but for every team around the league as we head toward next year and beyond, because you’ll have an expansion draft.”

The WNBA is adding a 13th franchise, the Golden State Valkyries, in 2025. They’ll start to assemble an inaugural roster with a Dec. 6 expansion draft that Golden State the ability to choose from a pool of available players as designated by each of the WNBA’s current 12 teams.

Portland and Toronto will also participate in an expansion draft when they add WNBA teams in 2026.

“There are some other things on the horizon that just make the next couple years a little bit different and more difficult than a typical cycle of years,” Bibb said.

Big changes are coming for the Wings, too. In April, the Dallas City Council approved a 15-year, $19 million use agreement for the Wings to play in Memorial Arena, at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center downtown, starting in 2026. The Wings’ home court has been at UT Arlington’s College Park Center.

Bibb said upcoming projects, including the construction of a practice facility, will create “more opportunity to generate revenue, more ability to impact the community and first and foremost, services to help our athletes be the best they can be, which ultimately leads to championships.”

The upcoming expansion drafts and the Wings’ pending move to Dallas are emblematic of the women’s basketball boom. In 2023, the Wings saw record attendance. The organization sold out season ticket memberships for the first time in its history, with individual ticket sales up more than 1,100%.

“I just knew it was a matter of time until the right set of circumstances aligned and the league really started to take off,” said Bibb, who’s been involved with the WNBA since 2007. “And that’s what’s happened the last few years.”