In 2013 AAU coach Gary Knox posted a photograph of a smiling lady, arms clutching her backpack straps, orange headband completely coordinated together with her orange T-shirt. “Bear in mind the identify,” he wrote on X. “Paige Bueckers. sixth grade, suppose Diana Taurasi. Greatest sixth grade G I’ve ever seen.”
Knox wasn’t fallacious. Bueckers arrived on the ladies’s faculty basketball scene in 2020 because the 12 months’s prime recruit, when she – like Taurasi years earlier than her – joined the College of Connecticut and instantly made an influence. Everybody needed a chunk of Bueckers, though she was simply comfortable to lastly have arrived on the college, even with the Covid-19 pandemic raging.
Enjoying at UConn for Geno Auriemma was a lifelong dream come true, she informed the Hartford Courant on the time, and she or he entered her freshman 12 months on the college after having gained nearly each single basketball-related award a excessive schooler can seize: Gatorade Feminine Excessive Faculty Athlete of the Yr, Gatorade Nationwide Ladies Basketball Participant of the Yr, Naismith Prep Participant of the Yr, Morgan Wootten Nationwide Participant of the Yr … the checklist went on.
Her couldn’t be accused of a insecurity: she informed the Courant that successful 4 championships in 4 years was possible as a result of “it’s simply by no means a plan for me to lose.” Her mentors – Taurasi, Breanna Stewart, Sue Hen, Napheesa Collier, and Katie Lou Samuelson – had been all former UConn greats who went on to star within the WNBA. Bueckers duly dominated her freshman 12 months and racked up awards, notoriety, and statistics. All the things was lining up precisely the way in which it was meant to.
Till it didn’t. In December of her sophomore 12 months, Bueckers fractured her tibial plateau and suffered a lateral meniscus tear within the remaining minute of a sport. She returned in February 2022 and completed out the season, solely to tear her ACL throughout a pick-up sport that August. The harm resulted in Bueckers lacking your complete 2022-23 season, simply when the Huskies’ level guard was busy changing into a family identify.
Bueckers and Caitlin Clark had been recruited on the identical time. Clark followers could also be shocked to study she was solely the No 4 recruit in her class – preceded by Bueckers, Angel Reese and Cameron Brink – and UConn, the varsity she additionally aspired to attend, by no means even referred to as Clark, partly as a result of that they had already dedicated to Bueckers. And although Clark was getting buckets all through her freshman 12 months (when she scored greater than 26 factors per sport), Bueckers was hogging the awards and a spotlight. After they met on the Candy Sixteen of the NCAA match in 2021, Bueckers and UConn beat the Hawkeyes by 20, even with Clark’s 21 factors.
It’s tempting to attract comparisons between Bueckers and Clark primarily based purely on what’s simple to determine: they’re each white, they’re each girls, they usually’re each ridiculously gifted. Clark got here again to high school in 2022 on a mission, and whereas Bueckers was sidelined your complete 2023-24 faculty season, Clark was busy smashing information (she led the nation in factors per sport with a mean of 27.8, led in assists per sport with 8.0, and broke the report for many factors and three-pointers in an NCAA match).
Clark, not like Bueckers, turned a nationwide determine on the 2023 NCAA match when she and Reese battled through the championship sport and Reese gestured towards her ring finger to point who was about to take house the trophy – and who was not. Although the pair each performed down the perceived drama (Clark instantly took reporters to activity for specializing in a “fabricated” rivalry between the pair relatively the sport), the influence was big. Abruptly Clark and Reese’s names had been in all places, and in a whole lot of methods the rivalry was instantly liable for Clark’s meteoric media rise. The 2 met once more the next 12 months when the Hawkeyes despatched the Tigers house through the Elite Eight, and Reese joined Clark on stage at April’s WNBA draft, the place she was chosen within the first spherical by the Chicago Sky.
Not like Clark, Bueckers doesn’t have a perceived “enemy” on the courtroom; proper now, there are a whole lot of gamers who can match her depth and expertise, however none of them have been pitted towards Bueckers the way in which Reese was towards Clark. It’s not clear if there will likely be a media flashpoint that catapults Bueckers previous the basketball stratosphere into a kind of fame solely skilled by a handful of athletes, and it’s unlikely Bueckers desires that to occur, anyway. She has lengthy advocated for the eye she receives to be extra evenly dispersed throughout girls’s basketball, one thing she reiterated in her 2024 ESPYs speech (that is one thing Clark has been extra vocal about as properly, most not too long ago in her current Time Athlete of the Yr profile).
The 2 girls even have completely different personalities and relationships with the media. Clark hasn’t at all times had the smoothest reactions to the extraordinary media consideration she has obtained (an comprehensible response for somebody who clearly simply desires to play basketball), whereas Bueckers (together with teammate Azzi Fudd, UConn’s ridiculously gifted guard who has additionally skilled a whole lot of accidents) has a way more pure relationship with social media.
Sadly, it nonetheless appears tough for most individuals (together with many sports activities journalists and analysts) to exist in a world the place a number of girls could be good on the identical factor on the identical time in numerous and in related methods. We noticed this with the Clark-Reese drama, and we’re seeing this time and again all through protection of ladies’s sports activities. The Clark fanbase is liable for this as properly, to a level, nevertheless it’s onerous to fault followers for feverishly supporting their favourite participant (although you possibly can fault them for being racist whereas doing so), and Bueckers definitely has her personal fanbase who would run by means of a brick wall if she requested them to.
In a dream world, followers of NCAA girls’s basketball would have been in a position to stay in a world by which we acquired to see Bueckers and Clark go head-to-head 4 years in a row. The 2024 draft ought to have been a race between Clark and Bueckers for the No 1 total spot. If something, the net discourse and arguments in bars throughout the US ought to have been extra intense, and we should always have been in a position to bask within the pleasure surrounding the simultaneous draft of two of probably the most promising girls’s basketball prospects in years.
As an alternative, we acquired to take pleasure in one thing probably higher: two back-to-back drafts with a lot vitality round them that it has catapulted a whole league to the subsequent stage. NCAA and WNBA viewership information have been shattered. The WNBA is the fastest-growing model in your complete US in response to Morning Seek the advice of. Groups are promoting out males’s NBA arenas, time and again.
When UConn took on the College of Louisville on the Barclays Middle on Saturday, the groups got here out to thunderous applause and an enthusiasm so intense it was palpable – all issues that had been unimaginable for followers of ladies’s faculty basketball only some years in the past. Regardless of scoring solely eight factors within the sport, Bueckers was pulling the strings for the Huskies from the backcourt. When Fudd went down after a success to the knee, Bueckers referred to as a timeout on her personal. When performs wanted to be referred to as, half the time Bueckers referred to as them concurrently with Auriemma, performing as a coach on the ground. Seeing the sport in individual supplied one more distinction with Clark, who is commonly on the courtroom targeted on outscoring opponents. In NBA phrases, Bueckers and Clark is identical because the distinction between the vocal LeBron James and the extra subdued Kevin Durant.
Paige Bueckers isn’t the subsequent Caitlin Clark, simply as Caitlin Clark wasn’t the subsequent Taurasi or Sue Hen. As an alternative, she is the primary Paige Bueckers, and that’s as a lot as any of us have to know.
