After a season of failure under head coach Chris Koclanes, the Dallas Wings let him go and once again pressed the reset button on their rebuild.
They still have Paige Bueckers, brought back Arike Ogunbowale and added No.1 pick Azzi Fudd to the roster. They also hired Jose Fernandez to lead the charge and turn this franchise around.
With this being Fernandez’s first time as a head coach in the WNBA, it was unknown how he would run things.
Well, based on his tirades during press conferences, the one thing we do know is that things won’t be boring in Dallas while he’s in charge.
After the Wings lost to the Minnesota Lynx last Thursday, he called out his players in ways you typically do not hear. Here’s what Fernandez said:
It’s real talk, and it’s accountability. That’s what I told them. I go, “There’s selfishness in this locker room.” There is. You gotta look in the mirror and be accountable on how you played. And don’t get upset if you think that you should have played more, or you didn’t play enough, or you didn’t get the shots that you think you should have gotten.
Really good teams, they don’t give a s–t about that. You know what they give a s–t about? They give a s–t about winning. Because that’s what matters.
Wow.
That left no room for interpretation. He flat-out said players were selfish. While that kind of talk might be standard in college or even applauded for its bluntness, it’s rarely what one hears at the pro level.
The reaction on social media was extreme from both ends.
Swin Cash, a former WNBA player and now an insider for Prime Video, thought that these kinds of comments should’ve remained private.
Fellow former WNBA great Cynthia Cooper felt so bewildered by Fernandez’s presser that she started speaking Italian during the Prime Video segment.
Did this blow over and die down afterward? Nope.
That might be the approach for other coaches, but when Fernandez starts a fire, he keeps on blazing. He responded, showing off his mastery of Italian as well, and seemed to take a shot at Cooper, inviting her to see how they run their offense in practice.
Look, social media nonsense can be fun, but there are bigger, more important questions: Will any of this help at all? What is the objective of reacting this way?
Back in the day in elementary schools, there used to be posters that hung on the walls that said: “Before You Speak, THINK, are your words… True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, Kind”
Fernandez certainly thinks his words were true and necessary. Helpful and inspiring is up to the players to decide, but kind, they were not.
Fernandez has the keys to the franchise, and if this is how he wants to run it, then that’s his prerogative. But he must remember that there is a lot of youth on this team, and they need a leader they want to follow. Winning a social media war with banger quotes is an easy way to be remembered on the internet, but forgotten in your profession.
I think it’s safe to assume he has this position because of his basketball acumen and how he runs a program. It worked in college at the University of South Florida, where he went 485-317 and led the Bulls to nine of the past 12 NCAA Tournaments.
But for it to work at this level, some adjustments may be needed. Because while all-time rants a couple of weeks into the season can be fun, winning is much, much more fun.
And ultimately, it’s not about a certain style of coaching that will decide his or the Wings’ fate. As Fernandez himself has said for over a decade now “tape convicts.”
The trial will continue the rest of the summer, and if Fernandez wants to have a longer tenure than Koclanes did, he’ll have to figure out how to get buy-in, improve Dallas’ win total and accentuate his best attributes and limit his worst.
