In 2013 AAU coach Gary Knox posted a photo of a smiling girl, hands clutching her backpack straps, orange headband perfectly coordinated with her orange T-shirt. “Remember the name,” he wrote on X. “Paige Bueckers. 6th grade, think Diana Taurasi. Best 6th grade G I’ve ever seen.”
Knox wasn’t wrong. Bueckers arrived on the women’s college basketball scene in 2020 as the year’s top recruit, when she – like Taurasi years before her – joined the University of Connecticut and immediately made an impact. Everyone wanted a piece of Bueckers, although she was just happy to finally have arrived at the school, even with the Covid-19 pandemic raging.
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Playing at UConn for Geno Auriemma was a lifelong dream come true, she told the Hartford Courant at the time, and she entered her freshman year at the school after having won just about every single basketball-related award a high schooler can grab: Gatorade Female High School Athlete of the Year, Gatorade National Girls Basketball Player of the Year, Naismith Prep Player of the Year, Morgan Wootten National Player of the Year … the list went on.
She couldn’t be accused of a lack of confidence: she told the Courant that winning four championships in four years was feasible because “it’s just never a plan for me to lose.” Her mentors – Taurasi, Breanna Stewart, Sue Bird, Napheesa Collier, and Katie Lou Samuelson – were all former UConn greats who went on to star in the WNBA. Bueckers duly dominated her freshman year and racked up awards, notoriety, and statistics. Everything was lining up exactly the way it was meant to.
Until it didn’t. In December of her sophomore year, Bueckers fractured her tibial plateau and suffered a lateral meniscus tear in the final minute of a game. She returned in February 2022 and finished out the season, only to tear her ACL during a pick-up game that August. The injury resulted in Bueckers missing the entire 2022-23 season, just when the Huskies’ point guard was busy becoming a household name.
Bueckers and Caitlin Clark were recruited at the same time. Clark fans may be surprised to learn she was only the No 4 recruit in her class – preceded by Bueckers, Angel Reese and Cameron Brink – and UConn, the school she also aspired to attend, never even called Clark, partly because they had already committed to Bueckers. And though Clark was getting buckets throughout her freshman year (when she scored more than 26 points per game), Bueckers was hogging the awards and attention. When they met at the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA tournament in 2021, Bueckers and UConn beat the Hawkeyes by 20, even with Clark’s 21 points.
It’s tempting to draw comparisons between Bueckers and Clark based purely on what’s easy to identify: they’re both white, they’re both women, and they’re both ridiculously talented. Clark came back to school in 2022 on a mission, and while Bueckers was sidelined the entire 2023-24 college season, Clark was busy smashing records (she led the country in points per game with an average of 27.8, led in assists per game with 8.0, and broke the record for most points and three-pointers in an NCAA tournament).
Clark, unlike Bueckers, became a national figure at the 2023 NCAA tournament when she and Reese battled during the championship game and Reese gestured toward her ring finger to indicate who was about to take home the trophy – and who was not. Though the pair both played down the perceived drama (Clark immediately took reporters to task for focusing on a “fabricated” rivalry between the pair rather the game), the impact was huge. Suddenly Clark and Reese’s names were everywhere, and in a lot of ways the rivalry was directly responsible for Clark’s meteoric media rise. The two met again the following year when the Hawkeyes sent the Tigers home during the Elite Eight, and Reese joined Clark on stage at April’s WNBA draft, where she was selected in the first round by the Chicago Sky.
Unlike Clark, Bueckers doesn’t have a perceived “enemy” on the court; right now, there are a lot of players who can match her intensity and skills, but none of them have been pitted against Bueckers the way Reese was against Clark. It’s not clear if there will be a media flashpoint that catapults Bueckers past the basketball stratosphere into a type of fame only experienced by a handful of athletes, and it’s unlikely Bueckers wants that to happen, anyway. She has long advocated for the attention she receives to be more evenly dispersed across women’s basketball, something she reiterated in her 2024 ESPYs speech (this is something Clark has been more vocal about as well, most recently in her recent Time Athlete of the Year profile).
The two women also have different personalities and relationships with the media. Clark hasn’t always had the smoothest reactions to the intense media attention she has received (an understandable response for someone who clearly just wants to play basketball), while Bueckers (along with teammate Azzi Fudd, UConn’s ridiculously talented guard who has also experienced a lot of injuries) has a much more natural relationship with social media.
Unfortunately, it still seems difficult for most people (including many sports journalists and analysts) to exist in a world where several women can be good at the same thing at the same time in different and in similar ways. We saw this with the Clark-Reese drama, and we’re seeing this over and over again throughout coverage of women’s sports. The Clark fanbase is responsible for this as well, to a degree, but it’s hard to fault fans for feverishly supporting their favorite player (though you can fault them for being racist while doing so), and Bueckers certainly has her own fanbase who would run through a brick wall if she asked them to.
In a dream world, fans of NCAA women’s basketball would have been able to live in a world in which we got to see Bueckers and Clark go head-to-head four years in a row. The 2024 draft should have been a race between Clark and Bueckers for the No 1 overall spot. If anything, the online discourse and arguments in bars across the United States should have been more intense, and we should have been able to bask in the excitement surrounding the simultaneous draft of two of the most promising women’s basketball prospects in years.
Instead, we got to enjoy something possibly better: two back-to-back drafts with so much energy around them that it has catapulted an entire league to the next level. NCAA and WNBA viewership records have been shattered. The WNBA is the fastest-growing brand in the entire US according to Morning Consult. Teams are selling out men’s NBA arenas, over and over again.
When UConn took on the University of Louisville at the Barclays Center on Saturday, the teams came out to thunderous applause and an enthusiasm so intense it was palpable – all things that were unimaginable for fans of women’s college basketball only a few years ago. Despite scoring only eight points in the game, Bueckers was pulling the strings for the Huskies from the backcourt. When Fudd went down after a hit to the knee, Bueckers called a timeout on her own. When plays needed to be called, half the time Bueckers called them simultaneously with Auriemma, acting as a coach on the floor. Seeing the game in person offered yet another contrast with Clark, who is often on the court focused on outscoring opponents. In NBA terms, Bueckers and Clark is the same as the difference between the vocal LeBron James and the more subdued Kevin Durant.
Paige Bueckers isn’t the next Caitlin Clark, just as Caitlin Clark wasn’t the next Taurasi or Sue Bird. Instead, she is the first Paige Bueckers, and that’s as much as any of us need to know.
