In 2013, AAU coach Gary Knox posted a photo of a smiling girl, with her hands gripping the straps of her backpack and an orange headband perfectly coordinated with her orange t-shirt. “Remember the name,” he wrote on X. “Paige Bueckers. Sixth grade, thinks Diana Taurasi. “Best 6th grade G I’ve ever seen.”
Knox was not wrong. Bueckers arrived on the women’s college basketball scene in 2020 as the year’s top recruit, when she, like Taurasi years before, joined the University of Connecticut and immediately made an impact. Everyone wanted a piece of Bueckers, although she was happy to finally make it to school, even with the Covid-19 pandemic.
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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 entered her freshman year at the school having won just about every basketball-related award a high school student can earn: Gatorade High School Female Athlete of the Year, National Girls’ Basketball Player of the Year from Gatorade, Naismith High School. Player of the Year, National Player of the Year Morgan Wootten… the list went on.
She can’t be accused of lacking confidence: She told the Courant that winning four championships in four years was doable because “it was 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 his first year and racked up awards, notoriety and statistics. Everything was lining up exactly as it should.
Until it wasn’t. In December of his sophomore year, Bueckers fractured his tibial plateau and suffered a torn lateral meniscus in the final minute of a game. He returned in February 2022 and finished the season, only to tear his ACL during a pickup game in August. The injury caused Bueckers to miss the entire 2022-23 season, just as the Huskies guard was busy becoming a household name.
Bueckers and Caitlin Clark were drafted at the same time. Clark fans may be surprised to learn that she was only the No. 4 recruit in her class. preceded by Bueckers, Angel Reese and Cameron Brink, and UConn, the school he also aspired to attend, didn’t even call Clark, in part because They had already committed to Bueckers. And while Clark was getting buckets during his freshman year (when he scored more than 26 points per game), Bueckers stole the awards and attention. When they met in the NCAA Sweet Sixteen tournament in 2021, Bueckers and UConn beat the Hawkeyes by 20, even with Clark’s 21 points.
It’s tempting to make comparisons between Bueckers and Clark based solely on what’s easy to identify: both are white, both women, and both are ridiculously talented. Clark returned to school in 2022 with a mission, and while Bueckers was sidelined for the entire 2023-24 college season, Clark was busy breaking records (she led the country in points per game with a 27.8 average, 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 in the 2023 NCAA tournament when she and Reese fought during the championship game and Reese gestured toward her ring finger to indicate who was about to take the trophy. home and who doesn’t. Although they both downplayed the perceived drama (Clark immediately he scolded the journalists by focusing on a “manufactured” rivalry between the couple instead of the game), the impact was enormous. Suddenly, Clark and Reese’s names were everywhere, and in many 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 does not perceive an “enemy” on the court; Right now, there are plenty of players who can match his intensity and skills, but none of them have taken on Bueckers like Reese did against Clark. It’s unclear whether there will be a media flashpoint that catapults Bueckers beyond basketball’s stratosphere into the kind of fame only a handful of athletes experience, and it’s unlikely Bueckers wants that to happen, anyway. She has long advocated for the attention she receives to be distributed more equitably throughout women’s basketball, something she reiterated. in his 2024 ESPYs speech (This is something Clark has also talked more about, most recently in his 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 he’s received (an understandable response for someone who clearly just wants to play basketball), while Bueckers (along with teammate Azzi Fudd, the ridiculously talented guard from UConn who has also experienced many 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 multiple women can be good at the same thing at the same time in different and similar ways. We saw this with the Clark-Reese drama and we see it again and again throughout the coverage of women’s sports. Clark’s fan base is also responsible for this, to some extent, but it’s hard to blame the fans for feverishly rooting for their favorite player (although you can blame them). for being racist by doing so), and Bueckers certainly has her own fan base that would walk through a brick wall if she asked them to.
In a dream world, NCAA women’s basketball fans could have lived in a world where we could see Bueckers and Clark face off four years in a row. The 2024 draft should have been a race between Clark and Bueckers for the number one overall spot. If anything, the online discourse and discussions in bars across America should have been more intense, and we should have been able to enjoy the excitement surrounding the simultaneous draft of two of women’s basketball’s most promising prospects in years.
Instead, we got to enjoy something arguably better: two straight 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 destroyed. The WNBA is the fastest growing brand throughout the United States according to Morning Consult. Teams are selling out NBA men’s arenas, time and time again.
When UConn faced the University of Louisville at Barclays Center on Saturday, the teams came out to thunderous applause and enthusiasm so intense it was palpable, all of which was unimaginable to fans of women’s college basketball just a few years ago. Despite scoring just 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 herself. When plays needed to be called, half the time Bueckers called them simultaneously with Auriemmaacting as a coach on the court. Watching the game in person offered another contrast to Clark, who is often on the court focused on outplaying his opponents. In NBA terms, Bueckers and Clark is the same difference between the vocal LeBron James and the more subdued Kevin Durant.
Paige Bueckers is not the next Caitlin Clark, just as Caitlin Clark was not the next Taurasi or Sue Bird. Instead, she’s the first Paige Bueckers, and that’s all any of us need to know.