Opinion: Dallas Wings No. 1 Pick Azzi Fudd Deserved Better Journalism In Her Introductory Press Conference

DALLAS — The Dallas Wings introduced Azzi Fudd as the No. 1 overall pick Thursday at a Hyatt Regency press conference. At the podium, general manager Curt Miller described his evaluation process. Head coach Jose Fernandez made the basketball case for the selection in detail. Fudd fielded questions about her physical preparation, defensive approach, development priorities, college program at UConn, family, plans for the Dallas community, and her message to Wings fans.

Kevin Sherrington chose to write about whether she is still dating Paige Bueckers.

That was a choice. It wasn’t a journalistic one.

The Column That Got Written

Sherrington’s piece in The Dallas Morning News is framed as a press-freedom argument. It is not one. It is a media professional who leverages two young women’s personal lives into 900 words of traffic, presenting that leverage as a principle.

The tell is in the column itself. Sherrington repeatedly concedes that the relationship is not, in fact, a story. He concedes Bueckers made it public a year ago. He concedes other WNBA couples have played together, won titles together, and gotten married. He concedes the Wings have handled couples on the roster before. He concedes Fudd and Bueckers didn’t deserve the framing he was about to give them.

Then he filed the column anyway, because the relationship angle is the traffic, and the traffic is the point.

The Press Conference He Skipped

The Wings held two press conferences this week. Sherrington skipped one and built a column around the other.

The first happened Monday night on Zoom, immediately after the draft. Miller and Fernandez sat for a full Q&A on the entire process: how the front office identified the four players they believed had separated themselves from the rest of the class, the role free agency played in clarifying the pick, the consultation with Bueckers and Arike Ogunbowale during the evaluation, the second-round pick that followed, the relentless pace of the WNBA’s compressed offseason, and the roster-construction logic that produced the team Fudd would walk into Thursday.

It was, in every respect, the press conference a serious basketball columnist attends. Sherrington did not.

By Thursday morning, the basketball case for the Fudd selection was already on the record in detail, made by the people who made the pick, in a setting designed for exactly that purpose. A columnist genuinely interested in the front office’s process, the franchise’s direction, or the construction of the roster Fudd was joining had everything he needed three days before the introductory presser even happened, and an opportunity to ask. He could have written that column on Tuesday morning. Nothing prevented it.

He chose to wait until Thursday and write a different one.

The Column That Should Have Been Written

Even at the press conference Sherrington attended, the basketball material was abundant. Miller, asked about the pressure of consecutive No. 1 picks, described the Wings’ evaluation process in plain language.

“When you have the No. 1 pick, you control the process,” Miller said. “The pressure isn’t as great as people think. We take an ‘eyes, ears, numbers’ approach, watching, gathering intel, and using analytics. That process ultimately points you to the right decision.”

Fernandez, asked what stood out about Fudd, did not hedge.

“Her basketball IQ, work ethic, leadership, and resilience,” Fernandez said. “When you look at our roster and what we did in free agency, she fits perfectly. She can space the floor, she’s willing to be coached, and she’s grown defensively. She stood out to me and our front office.”

Asked specifically how lineups featuring Fudd, Bueckers, and Arike Ogunbowale would work defensively, Fernandez answered that too.

“We’ll find out. We have 15 practices in 20 days before May 9, along with two exhibition games,” Fernandez said. “We’ll evaluate everyone and find the right combinations. People worry about defense, but other teams also have to guard them.”

That is what a roster-construction question sounds like when it is asked in good faith and answered on the record. Sherrington had access to every word of it. He wrote about something else.

The Precedent That Undercuts the Principle

Sherrington’s column frames the Fudd selection as the first time a Dallas front office has put two players in a relationship on the same roster and declined to account for it publicly. That framing requires pretending last season did not happen.

DiJonai Carrington and NaLyssa Smith played for the Wings together in 2025 as a couple. However, last season, The Dallas Morning News did not send a columnist to demand that the organization justify that pairing. There was no 900-word column framing their relationship as an unresolved culture risk that the front office owed the public an explanation for.

That is how this kind of coverage normally works. A front office builds a roster, whether or not it includes a couple. The team plays basketball. Nobody in the Dallas media market decides the arrangement is a franchise-level culture question requiring public litigation.

Then a high-profile name arrives, and the same arrangement becomes a crisis that demands a podium confession.

If the principle were genuine, it would have applied last year. It didn’t. What changed is not the principle. What changed is the traffic ceiling.

It is also easier, structurally, to assign the question to the columnist whose role is provocation than to a beat reporter who has to maintain working relationships across the franchise. When a newsroom routes Fudd’s first Dallas press conference to the writer paid to stir debate, that is not an individual call. It is an editorial decision about where to spend the outlet’s provocation, and who is safest to spend it on.

The Same Week, the Same Outlet

The Fudd column did not run in a vacuum. It ran in the same week that The Dallas Morning News published two other pieces that, together, illustrate how the outlet allocates its critical energy across the Dallas sports landscape.

On April 13, sports reporter Brad Townsend published a long interview with Patrick Dumont in which the new Mavs governor offered effusive praise for Jason Kidd. The piece is built around relayed quotes, presented at length, with no follow-ups and no challenge. Townsend frames one of Dumont’s lines as “the most telling Dumont comment of all,” and the comment in question is an endorsement of the head coach. There is no scrutiny in the piece of the Nico Harrison firing process, no challenge to the front-office decisions that reshaped the franchise over the past year, no question about ownership’s stewardship during the transition out of the Mark Cuban era, and no pressure on the Adelsons’ interest in a new arena and the public infrastructure conversations that come with it. The piece reads as a vehicle for the governor to communicate to the fanbase through the paper of record.

Two days later, on April 15, Sherrington filed a column framed in its headline as a tough-love message to the same franchise. Read what is actually in it. He endorses the front office’s preferred GM target. He defends the Adelsons against speculation about a Vegas relocation in language that reads like ownership PR, instructing readers to “Repeat after me” before delivering the franchise’s preferred talking point. He frames the new arena push as a worldly inevitability he is too experienced to argue with. The headline-level criticism that the Mavs should “act like a big-time franchise” is abstract enough that no one in the organization could meaningfully disagree with it. It is a critical posture with no critical content.

The next day, the same columnist walked into Azzi Fudd‘s introductory press conference and brought 900 words of moral certainty to her relationship status.

The energy is not random. It is allocated by power. The billionaire who fired his general manager in November and is currently negotiating for a new arena gets the deferential register. The 23-year-old WNBA rookie, whose access to the outlet is already mandated by league media policy and whose cooperation it does not need to earn, gets the lecture. There is no principled reading of those two editorial choices. There is only one version where the outlet protects its access and spends its critical energy on the people who cannot make it pay a price.

The Question That Wasn’t About Basketball

There is also the matter of what actually happened in that room.

“Paige announced last year on TikTok that you two were a couple,” Sherrington said. “Is that still the case, and have you talked to other couples in the league about navigating that dynamic as teammates?”

Wings public relations lead Pam Flenke answered on behalf of the team.

“I understand why you have to ask that question, but we’re going to respectfully decline from commenting on our players’ personal lives,” Flenke said.

Read that exchange twice. It is a communications professional acknowledging the reporter’s instinct and still declining, with grace, to discuss the personal lives of a player who did not come to the podium to discuss them. Sherrington characterized it as something close to obstruction.

Thursday was also the first time most of the Dallas media had been in the same room as Fudd. There are countless venues across the season ahead where editorial questions about a player can be raised in settings designed for that kind of conversation. Sherrington has access to every one of those. The Dallas Morning News had access to one of those avenues on Thursday. Like multiple local outlets, other personnel from the outlet spoke with Fudd in a one-on-one off the podium, away from the cameras and the family in the room. They did not raise the question of the relationship there. They raised it at the introductory press conference, with national media watching, where any response, including the polite decline that came, would convert into a column. The setting was the point. The setting is always the point when traffic is the goal.

The “we ask male athletes about their personal lives, too” defense cannot carry that framing. Coverage of male athletes’ relationships is overwhelmingly event-driven. An engagement. A wedding. A podcast appearance that the player agreed to sit for. A feature the player participated in. It is not a columnist cornering a 23-year-old at her introductory press conference and treating a polite decline from the team’s PR lead as evidence of a cover-up.

Bueckers is not contractually obligated to provide status updates on demand, and neither is Fudd.

What the Column Actually Is

Newsrooms have always had traffic incentives. What makes this one worth writing about is the gap between what the column claims to be and what it is. It is not a defense of press access. It is not a roster-construction analysis. It is not a principled argument against the front office’s culture-first philosophy. It is two public figures’ personal lives turned into a column, dressed up in journalistic language to make it feel respectable.

Fudd is 23. Bueckers is 24. They have both made basketball the center of everything they do in public. They are entitled to the same baseline professional courtesy that The Dallas Morning News has extended to every male athlete it has ever introduced in this city in my time covering basketball.

Thursday was a test of whether they would get it.

The column is the answer.

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