With three games left in the regular season, the Dallas Wings are 25-16. Their 25th win against the LA Sparks on Thursday tied the franchise record for the most wins in a single season and gave them their best record since the franchise moved to Dallas in 2016. For a team that finished last in 2025, first-year head coach Jose Fernandez has turned the ship around.
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Under Fernandez, the franchise made several moves to bring in key players. Yet it is one thing to have the players, and another to have a system that actually works. The results so far certainly suggest that the Jose Fernandez system works, with the coach’s approach popularly being described as a Euro-style offense, Alysha Clark weighed in.
“I feel like when people talk about Euro focus, it’s more like positionless… When you have Jessica Shepard and Paige and Arike, like players that can handle and create an open space and go.”
Paige Bueckers’ teammate said, on Friday’s episode of No Offseason: The Athletic Women’s Basketball Show, as one of the veterans operating within that system.
“So I think from that standpoint, yeah, it’s accurate, and I think we have players that can fit that style when you have versatile players. I personally like to just think it’s just the way our game is evolving.”
“You go from traditional bigs inside to now you have the fours and fives that are spacing the floor, handling the ball off the rim, like being able to move… I think it’s pretty accurate when you look at it from my interpretation of Euro style. I think that’s kind of where we are. Yeah, it’s fitting.”
However, Clark’s explanation isn’t exactly a reflection of what basketball enthusiasts have come to know as the European style. The primary focus of European basketball is team-oriented, high-IQ basketball that emphasizes spacing and working as a unit.
“In Europe we play more as a team. In general our style involves more ball movement and more player movement off the ball.”
Austrian coach Thomas Roijakkers said about the European style, as per a EuroProBasket.com report. Meanwhile, Bulgarian coach Nikolai Gospodinov explained the more prevalent approach in American basketball.
“American basketball relies primarily on the individual actions of their players based on their athleticism and good physical performances,”
To an extent, this description appears to agree with coach Jose Fernandez’s own explanation of the system in 2025 during his introductory press conference as the 14th head coach of the Dallas Wings, but also differs in the fact that the Wings have also relied on their star players like Bueckers.
“Make no mistake, if you’ve seen us play at USF and you’ve seen the system, it’s a pro-style system,” coach Fernandez said.
“It has a lot of Euro-influence in the amount of things that we do offensively with player movement and with ball movement. Our best players are going to get the basketball. We’re going to play with great spacing and we know the importance of putting the entire five on the floor where they’re comfortable.”
Before joining the Dallas Wings, Jose Fernandez spent 25 seasons as the head coach of the University of South Florida (USF) Bulls. He was the mastermind behind the program from 2000 until he made the jump to the WNBA. And at USF, Fernandez built a massive reputation for running a highly structured, pro-style offense with heavy European influences.
And of course, that system worked spectacularly well. Fernandez took over a historically struggling USF program and turned it into a sustained national powerhouse. He led the Bulls to 10 NCAA Tournament appearances and captured a WNIT Championship in 2009. He also won four American Athletic Conference (AAC) titles, including two regular-season and two tournament championships, while repeatedly going toe-to-toe with powerhouse programs like UConn.
So far, that pattern of success is becoming quite visible with the Wings. Following two of the toughest seasons in franchise history, a 9-31 record in 2024 and a 10-34 record in 2025, Fernandez has now delivered one of the best seasons in Wings history. With his pro-style, Euro-influenced system producing results in Dallas, every Wings fan will surely be pro-Euro-style basketball now.