On September 23, 2026, at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, the Dallas Wings closed their regular season with a 103-91 victory over the Storm. The win completed a remarkable numerical transformation: Dallas finished 27-17, exactly 17 victories better than its 10-34 record in 2025.
That year-to-year gain established a WNBA record for the largest single-season turnaround. The Wings also set franchise bests for total victories and winning percentage since the team moved to Dallas, turning a last-place season into a playoff campaign in the space of one year.
One final game sealed three milestones
The official Dallas Wings game report confirmed the 17-win improvement, the league turnaround record and the team’s 27-17 finish. The victory also locked Dallas into the seventh playoff seed.
Paige Bueckers led the Wings with 25 points, reaching 20 points for the 26th time during the season. Arike Ogunbowale added 23. Yet the most unusual individual line belonged to Jessica Shepard: 20 points, 11 rebounds and 12 assists for her sixth triple-double of the year.
From 10 victories to 27
The scale of the change becomes clearer when the two seasons are placed side by side. Dallas won fewer than one-quarter of its 44 games in 2025. In 2026, it won more than 61 percent of them. The team did not merely sneak above .500; it added the equivalent of almost four extra months’ worth of weekly victories.
An Associated Press game recap carried by CBS Sports independently reported the record turnaround and noted that Dallas had won only 10 games the previous season. Local coverage from NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth also confirmed the 17-win leap.
First-year head coach Jose Fernandez shares a related distinction. Dallas reported that the improvement is also the largest in league history for a coach in his first WNBA season.
The turnaround now faces a playoff test
The regular-season finale did more than complete the record. Dallas earned a first-round series against the second-seeded Golden State Valkyries, whose own rise has been historic: Golden State reached the playoffs as an expansion team in 2025 and improved to 32 wins this season.
Regular-season turnarounds do not automatically translate into postseason success, but the Wings have already secured a permanent place in the record book. In twelve months, they moved from 10 wins to 27, produced a league-leading triple-double specialist in Shepard and returned to the playoffs with the largest one-year improvement the WNBA has seen.
Sources and further reading
- Dallas Wings: Final regular-season game report
- CBS Sports/AP: Wings defeat Storm in the regular-season finale
- NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth: Dallas completes record turnaround
