August 15, 2023
Locked on Women’s Basketball: Greg Bibb talks Dallas Wings and new partnership with Dallas Mavericks
By The Next
Howard and Greg Bibb discuss the new partnership with the Mavericks, rebuilding the team, the leadership group and the young core
It’s time for another Locked on Women’s Basketball podcast episode. It’s been a busy year for Greg Bibb, team president, CEO and partner for the Dallas Wings. Not only was the team rebuilt, from head coach Latricia Trammell to a busy 2023 draft night, Bibb and his executive team have put together a partnership with the Dallas Mavericks that looks different from the ways NBA and WNBA teams have traditionally worked together. He joins host Howard Megdal to discuss these developments, the growth of Satou Sabally and Teaira McCowan, and much more.
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Greg Bibb talks about the partnership deal with the Dallas Mavericks:
“The partnership with the Mavericks is really a relationship that started pre-COVID. Cynthia Marshall, who is the CEO of the Mavericks and I met in early March of 2020 to talk about how we could formalize a relationship between our two organizations. Because at that time, the Mavericks were really starting to lean in on gender equity-type issues. And with being the WNBA team in town since all-natural synergies between the two organizations, as did I with a fantastic launch conversation. And then, about 10 days later, the world was introduced to COVID-19 and the world stopped over the next couple of years. Our organization’s increased the frequency of doing one-off events together, most of them community-focused and most of them related to a program that the Mavericks launched called, Gem Girls Empowered by Mavericks. This past April, when the women’s Final Four was in Dallas, Cynthia and I found ourselves at a bunch of events together. And it really allowed us the opportunity to chat. And we committed to one another that we were going to reengage, trying to formalize a relationship that would be sustainable for years to come.
Cynthia is a loyal Wing season ticket holder. So that conversation continued into the start of the season at some early Wings games. We got our leadership teams involved with for the Wings involved, Amber Cox, our chief operating officer, and Amanda Fusci, our vice president corporate partnerships. Those two took the lead for us. They did the heavy lifting along with the sense leadership team. And what resulted was a multi-year relationship that really, at the end of the day, is community focused and really, the vision is to impact the community, specifically, girls in North Texas, really extending the work that the Mavericks have already begun through their gym program. For us, it’s an opportunity to partner with a NBA team and to lean into a very big platform. For them, It’s an opportunity to plug into the best women’s basketball players on the planet and to utilize our assets to help extend their gym programming. It’s truly going to be a one plus one equals far more than two relationship. And we’re super excited about it.”
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Greg Bibb talks about the process of rebuilding the team:
“So success is never a straight line. And it takes time. We’ve talked about this multiple times in the past. I made a decision four years ago that we were going to basically start from ground zero and rebuild, and it was going to be done largely through draft assets. And that there’s no quick fix. There’s no end around through that process. And there’s pain to be endured. And we certainly have endured the pain. But yes, I think now, the window is open for us; we still haven’t done anything. We sit here today, two games over .500 in fourth place. So that’s great. Those are high watermarks for us. But really, at the end of the day, history is not going to judge us favorably for finishing two games over for .500 and finishing fourth. There’s much, much, much more to do. But as I tell the team now all the time, I feel like the outcomes of the game are more about us than they are about who we’re playing. In the past, I don’t think the talent was there for us that if we played against the team that played their best, we were necessarily going to win. Now I feel like we have enough talent that if we play our best basketball, we have a legitimate shot to beat anybody.
And we’ve shown that this year, we’ve beaten one, we’ve beaten two and we’ve beaten three. Now we’ve also continued to display the inconsistency that has plagued us in the past, where we’ve lost some games; candidly, we shouldn’t have lost, but it’s there. Now the talents there. And it’s for the most part, a young core of talent that we can keep together, as I’ve been talking about for a long time for a relatively long amount of time. So I’m still crazy. I still may not know what I’m talking about, but maybe just a little less crazy than before.”
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