The Dallas Wings will move to the American Airlines Center for all their home games next year.
It’s a big step up for a team on the rise, Wings CEO Greg Bibb told NTX Now Monday morning. The Wings finished at the bottom of the league in 2025, but they made it to the playoffs in 2026, loising to the Golden State Valkyries — the eventual winners of this year’s WNBA Finals.
The Wings are supposed to have a long-term home at Dallas’ Memorial Auditorium once renovations are complete. That’s still the plan, but the timeline is unclear, Bibb said. For now, he’s focused on a promising 2027 season for a team that’s benefiting from the talent of young stars like Paige Bueckers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is this the right time to move to Dallas from UTA’s College Park Center?
We’ve simply outgrown the building. We have essentially sold the building out for three consecutive years. We need more seats to be able to provide live Wings basketball to more Wings fans, and that’s what the American Airlines Center provides. We’ll go from a little over 6,000 seats to nearly 20,000 seats per game.
It also brings us to the city of Dallas, which has been long-term objective of ours.
Why is moving to downtown Dallas the goal when the Mavs and Stars are leaving?
It’s an interesting phenomenon. If you are the biggest brand in sports, i.e. the Dallas Cowboys, or a major league baseball team, i.e. the Texas Rangers, there doesn’t seem to be a philosophical discount that fans place on those teams being outside of the city of Dallas and in Arlington.
And there shouldn’t be, by the way. Arlington is a spectacular destination for many reasons.
But when you’re an emerging sports league like the WNBA, there seems to be a discount people put perceptually on our brand not being in Dallas, and we’re seeing that. We’ve now played, I believe, five games in the city of Dallas over the last two seasons in preparation for the full-time move, and we have generated far more ticket sales and far more ticket revenue by playing within the city limits.
Why is the WNBA booming in popularity right now?
I think, one, society is finally ready to accept the fact that women can be on the same stage and be as athletically dominant as a male can be. It took a long time to get there, but I think we’re getting there.
Two, I think the increase of social media has allowed us to catch up with traditional sports, because we don’t need to rely solely on traditional media.
But three is traditional media. We now have more broadcast partners paying higher rights fees than ever before.
Finally, the athletes themselves. We’ve always had the best women’s basketball players in the world in this league, going back to the late 90s when the league started. But the athleticism and the quality of play today is significantly different than then.
If you look specifically at 2024 and Caitlin Clark coming into the league, and then 2025, we had the good fortune to draft Paige Bueckers, and then this year, Azzi Fudd. And if you look what is coming down the pipeline, in terms of the quality of player that’s going to be entering our league for the next two, three, four, five years and beyond, it just continues to get better and better.
Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning are the hosts of KERA’s NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Miranda at msuarez@kera.org or Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
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