Paige Bueckers sat out the second game of a back-to-back set on Saturday against the Mystics, but the Wings won their fourth in the team’s last six games.
ARLINGTON, TX — On the second night of a back-to-back set, with only eight available players on the roster and with rookie superstar Paige Bueckers on the shelf with right knee soreness, the Dallas Wings (5-13) may have played their best first half of the season on Saturday.
But if this topsy-turvy (mostly turvy, you’d have to admit) Wings season has taught us anything, it’s that volatility is the only constant with this team. After building an early 21-point lead, the Wings outlasted the Washington Mystics’ (8-9) comeback attempt to preserve a 79-71 win at College Park Center.
The Wings started Friday’s 94-86 loss to the Indiana Fever at American Airlines Center in a serious funk, just like they did the first time they met the Mystics on Sunday, in what ended up as a 91-88 overtime loss. The Wings started both of those games in the freezer, with matching 1-for-13 cold spells from the field.
They allowed the Fever to hit 13 of their first 14 from the field in Friday’s loss at the big house. But, oh, how the turntables, on both fronts. Dallas connected on 11-of-18 attempts in the first quarter and held the Mystics to just 3-of-17 shooting from the field. They led 28-9 after one, despite coming in facing deficits in rest and roster availability. The nine points Washington scored in the first are the fewest allowed by Dallas in any quarter this season.
The Wings cobbled together a 17-2 run over a nearly five-minute span from the 2:08 mark of the first quarter to the 7:38 mark of the second, fueled by — get this: backup big Myisha Hines-Allen, rookie point guard JJ Quinerly and the seldom-used forward Hayley Jones, who joined the team on a hardship contract on June 17 after long-term injuries to guard Ty Harris and forward Maddie Siegrist, as well as the departures of both Teaira McCowan and Luisa Geiselsoder. McCowan (Turkey) and Geiselsoder (Germany) are Over There for Eurobasket competition, which wraps up on Sunday.
“We need to come out punching like we did tonight,” Quinerly said. “Just show [the opponent] that we’re going to make that stand for the game. That was a big piece of us winning tonight.”
The first-half effort was as scrappy as it was crucial for Dallas. The Wings were gathering momentum with wins in three of four games last week, but followed that stretch with a somewhat deflating loss to the Caitlin Clark-less Fever on Friday in front of the biggest crowd of the season.
Without Bueckers and her 18.4 points, 5.8 assists, 4.4 rebounds and 1.8 steals per game, the onus fell early on Arike Ogunbowale to generate the scoring punch the Wings were missing. But the cavalry, though limited in sheer numbers, was en route when the second team put its stamp on the first half. Quinerly led the Wings with 13 points, four boards and four assists at the half. Ogunbowale added 10 more by creating solid looks in the mid-range and finishing through contact when necessary.
The Wings may have taken a 45-31 lead into halftime, but the Mystics had already embarked on a game-changing 22-6 run in response to the Wings’ earlier 17-2 jolt. Washington outscored Dallas 10-4 over the last 2:46 of the second quarter, then continued with another 12-0 spurt out of halftime to bring the Mystics to within 45-43 on rookie Sonia Citron’s wide-open corner 3-pointer with 7:33 left in the third. Citron led the Mystics with 22 points and 10 rebounds, but shot just 6-of-15 from the field in the loss.
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This is a team trying to figure out how to win consistently. There are going to be wild swings in performance from time to time — sometimes quarter to quarter, sometimes game to game as the Wings continue to make the pieces fit.
“We’re at our best when all five players on the floor are hunting within their roles,” Wings head coach Chris Koclanes said. “We are searching as a team for our identity, because it changes night to night. You know Paige and Arike are constants, and that’s all defenses are going to focus on, so I keep talking about our competitive depth and how it’s a strength for us, and you’ve seen it. We’ve just got to win in all sorts of different ways, and tonight we had to muck this game up. It didn’t look the prettiest, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get wins in this league.”
And this time down the stretch, something clicked for Dallas. They didn’t buckle under the pressure of the Mystics’ run. They answered it, this time with a 17-5 run spanning the last three minutes of the third and first three of the fourth quarter to extend their lead to 71-56. Aziaha James hit two 3-pointers as part of that decisive run and scored 15 points on 3-of-4 shooting from deep in the win. Quinerly matched James’ team-high scoring mark of 15 points, and Ogunbowale added 14 more in a win that required contributions from all over the roster.
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“Down the stretch we got off the ball — gave the ball to [Hines-Allen] and let her bring it up the court to relieve the pressure on our guards,” Quinerly said. “And she kind of just took that over. She was getting to the hoop, was getting a lot of spray outs to shooters and we we’re getting paint touches out of that.”
So in the end, it was two rookies not named Bueckers who led the Wings to the win over Washington. The future appears to be brighter than a 5-13 record may indicate.
Koclanes said in his pre-game comments that Bueckers’ absence against the Mystics was “precautionary.”