Wings lock No. 7 seed and a WNBA-record turnaround in Seattle finale

SEATTLE - The Dallas Wings closed the regular season the way the franchise has spent most of 2026: ahead of where anyone expected them to be.

Paige Bueckers scored 25 points, Jessica Shepard finished with 20 points, 11 rebounds and 12 assists for her WNBA-leading sixth triple-double, and Arike Ogunbowale added 23 points as Dallas beat the Seattle Storm 103-91 on Wednesday night.

The Associated Press game story put the Wings at 27-16 after a 10-win season a year ago - a 17-win single-season improvement the AP and NBC 5 both described as a WNBA record.

The result also locked Dallas into the No. 7 seed for the playoffs after Atlanta's earlier win over New York. The Wings already knew their seed before tipoff; they still treated the finale like a get-right after Monday's one-point collapse in Phoenix.

Record jump, first Storm sweep

NBC 5 noted this is the Wings' best regular season since the franchise relocated from Tulsa in 2016, and that Dallas had never won more than 22 games in Arlington. Finishing 27-16 changes that ceiling. The same report said Bueckers ended the year with a team-record 878 points.

Dallas also completed a four-game sweep of Seattle for the first time in franchise history, the AP recap said. The Wings have won seven of their last eight, with the lone loss the 87-86 Monday night giveaway in Phoenix after leading by 14.

Wednesday's script flipped that memory. Dallas led 90-71 with 6:55 left in the fourth before Seattle cut it to 94-88. Awak Kuier and Bueckers answered with consecutive 3-pointers, and the Storm (8-36) never got closer.

Dominique Malonga scored 29 for Seattle. Awa Fam had a season-high 22, Flau'jae Johnson 21, and Natisha Hiedeman finished with 10 points and 14 assists, per the AP box.

What No. 7 actually buys

A seventh seed is not a parade, but it is October basketball for a club that missed the postseason a year ago. NBC 5's overnight report said Dallas opens on the road against either the Golden State Valkyries or the Las Vegas Aces, then hosts Game 2 at College Park Center in Arlington in the middle of next week.

A decisive Game 3, if needed, would follow later that week on the road again.

The matchup board was still live Thursday morning. Golden State draws Dallas if the Valkyries beat the already-eliminated Los Angeles Sparks; Las Vegas becomes the opponent if the Aces beat Phoenix and Golden State loses, NBC 5 reported. Either path puts Dallas against a top-half seed that finished well clear of the Wings in the regular-season table.

Shepard's sixth triple-double gives the Wings a second creation engine beside Bueckers and Ogunbowale. The AP noted Shepard has doubled her scoring average from her first five seasons. Bueckers, meanwhile, closed with a third straight game of 20-plus points and five-plus assists.

From 10 wins to a first-round ticket

The turnaround number is the one that will travel farthest outside North Texas. Seventeen wins of improvement in one season is the kind of climb franchises usually need two coaching cycles to chase. Dallas did it in one calendar year and still had enough left to finish with a road win after a late Phoenix collapse.

Playoff basketball starts Saturday. The Wings will not control which top seed they draw, and they will open away from Arlington. What they do control is the roster that just posted the largest single-season leap in WNBA history and a finale that looked nothing like Monday's fourth quarter.

Game 2 tickets at College Park Center are already on sale, NBC 5 reported. For a franchise that spent last season outside the bracket, that sentence alone marks the distance between October 2025 and October 2026.

Sources

abcnews.com

NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

ESPN