The Wings team had just authored the biggest single-season turnaround in WNBA history, jumping from 10-34 last year to 27-17 this season. Now, after 44 games of growth, they find themselves one loss away from elimination. In her WNBA postseason debut, Paige Bueckers was the one player who consistently gave the No. 2-seeded Golden State Valkyries a hard time. But with the Wings now backed into a corner after a 104-80 loss, analyst Tyler DeLuca believes the recent game exposed a major concern for Dallas.

“They could have shot like 30% this game and still blown the Wings out because they were just able to decide, ‘Hey, every possession if Jessica Shepard is on the court, we’re going to attack her, and we’ll live with what happens from there.’ And also, yeah, ‘We’re gonna triple-team Paige Bueckers every time down the court because we don’t believe that anybody else here can really punish us, and we will trust whatever rotation or one-on-one, whatever form it takes after Paige Bueckers does not have the ball in her hands. We’ll figure it out.’” DeLuca said on the Her Hoop Stats show.

“And I mean, Paige do what she had to do. Paige scores 21 on nine-of-10 shooting, and they lose by 24. Then, not to oversimplify this game, but there just isn’t enough help around. If this is what the attention is on Paige Bueckers, it’s always, ‘Oh, you’re doubled, someone’s open.’ You wouldn’t have known it in this game. You wouldn’t have known that very simple concept: ‘If there are two people here, that means somebody isn’t elsewhere’, and it didn’t matter at all for the Wings’ offense over the course of this game,” he added.

Paige Bueckers certainly did her part. The 24-year-old finished with 21 points on an almost perfect 9-of-10 shooting night, including 2-of-2 from three, while also grabbing a team-high six rebounds. She had already scored 17 points by halftime, setting a Wings record for most points in a half during a postseason debut. However, the other four starters managed just 14 combined, as the rest of the Dallas offense struggled to make the Valkyries pay.

The Wings shot just 28-of-60 from the field and 6-of-20 from beyond the arc, while Golden State knocked down 18 of its 36 three-point attempts. Dallas stayed within one possession after the opening quarter, but a 20-3 Valkyries run before halftime turned the game on its head. So by the time Bueckers and the other starters sat out the fourth quarter, the damage was already done.

But perhaps the most heartbreaking stat to come out of this game belonged to Jessica Shepard.

The 30-year-old went 0-for-7 from the field and failed to score a single point, a particularly difficult outing considering she was recently voted the AP WNBA Most Improved Player of the Year. She had also entered the playoffs after producing five triple-doubles during the regular season, more than she had recorded across her first five WNBA seasons combined.

In the WNBA draft earlier this year, the Wings selected Azzi Fudd with the No. 1 overall pick, hoping to create a dynamic duo alongside Bueckers after the two had already built a strong connection during their time at UConn. But Fudd’s injury ultimately sidelined her for the rest of the season, leaving Shepard as one of the players expected to take on a bigger role.

Now, for most of the regular season, she did exactly that. Shepard averaged 14.5 points and 11.1 rebounds per game, becoming one of the most reliable pieces alongside Bueckers. But when the playoffs arrived, she went silent in Game 1.

The problem for Dallas is that Paige Bueckers can only do so much on her own. She needs help from players like Shepard, but the Valkyries’ tight defense exposed just how difficult things become for the Wings when those secondary options are taken away.

Dallas technically had three other double-digit scorers, but much of that production came too late to change the game. Laksa, for example, scored all 11 of her points in the fourth quarter, long after Golden State had turned the game into a rout. The Wings’ bench scored 36 points, but again, every one of those points came after halftime.

Interestingly, Golden State walked into a playoff environment it had never experienced at Chase Center before. Last season, the Valkyries’ playoff home game had to be moved to San Jose because of a scheduling conflict with the Laver Cup. This time, 18,064 fans packed Chase Center for the franchise’s first true home playoff game, and “Ballhalla” got exactly the kind of night it had been waiting for. Six different Golden State players made multiple three-pointers, the first time a WNBA team had accomplished that in a game. Their 104 points marked the highest-scoring game in franchise history and delivered the Valkyries their first playoff victory.

What’s next for Paige Bueckers and the Wings?

With this loss in their bag, Bueckers and the Wings have no option but to secure a win in their next game on Wednesday. Round 1 of the playoffs is a 3-game series. So, with one game already over, another loss would mean elimination.

But it will be far from easy, and Paige Bueckers knows that.

“All my buckets were tough. They make it extremely hard. They show strengths; they have people in gaps, they show multiple bodies, they blitz, they make every shot tough. So, nothing about tonight was easy. And their defense has, like I said, always been their calling card, and I know every single time, and as a team, they’re really well connected,” Bueckers said during her post-game media appearance after the loss to the Valkyries.

“And Coach Nat, I’ve been around her enough to know that her team is always going to be prepared and give you your best shot defensively. So, I know she’s not pleased that they gave up 80 points. So, I know every single night against them, it’s going to be tough.”

The Wings and the Valkyries locked horns three times in the regular season, and all three of them were won by Golden State. Dallas will have to find a way to finally solve the Valkyries’ defense, and to do that, they will need a better outing from players other than Paige Bueckers.