Paige Bueckers Took a Second-Year Leap That Should Terrify the Rest of the WNBA
Paige Bueckers put together a phenomenal rookie season. She averaged 19.2 points, 3.9 rebounds, 5.4 assists, and 1.6 steals per game, won Rookie of the Year, and was named to the All-WNBA Second Team. But no college player who makes the jump from the NCAA to the WNBA is a finished product in year one.
Bueckers has been even better this season. Most notably, her 3-point percentage improved from 33.1% to 38.1% despite a 1.3 increase in attempts per game. She is also shooting 51.6% from the field and 86.7% from the free-throw line, flirting with a 50-40-90 season.
Only six players take at least as many 3-pointers per game as Bueckers and shoot a higher percentage this season: Jonquel Jones, Chelsea Gray, Janelle Salaün, Kelsey Mitchell, Kelsey Plum, and Marina Mabrey. Plum is the only one in that group who can also match Bueckers’s field-goal percentage.
If that jump in 3-point efficiency is sustainable, Bueckers will be even more difficult to deal with than already expected for the remainder of her WNBA career—and it likely is, considering that Bueckers was a good 3-point shooter at UConn. She’s already excellent in the mid-range and also makes 78% of her shots in the restricted area and 53.6% in the paint. Adding a very efficient 3-point shot to that arsenal poses one question for opposing teams: How do you guard someone who can score from all three levels and averages over six assists per game?
Game planning for Bueckers was never easy, but it’s all the more difficult if she’s also one of the most efficient 3-point shooters in the W.
Having a better team around her helps
The fact that she has a better team around her probably has a ton to do with Bueckers’s rise in 3-point efficiency.
Last season, Bueckers played most of the year with Arike Ogwunbowale, who was not healthy, Maddy Siegrist, Haley Jones, Luisa Geiselsöder, Grace Berger, Myisha Hines-Allen, and Li Yueru as the leaders in minutes per game (not counting DiJonai Carrington and NaLyssa Smith, who were traded after a few games). This year, the top minute getters alongside Bueckers are Jessica Shepard, Azzi Fudd, a healthy Ogunbowale, Awak Kuier, and Odyssey Sims. That’s a massive improvement and eliminates many of the difficult shots Bueckers had to take to try to create offense out of nothing last season. Moreover, she had a full offseason instead of coming to the W straight from a long college season.
Bueckers is still the best player on the team—although Shepard is playing incredibly well, and Fudd is off to a great start to her WNBA career—and she has also been one of the best players in the WNBA.
Bueckers ranks fifth in points per game and seventh in assists. The only other players who rank top-five in both categories are Kelsey Plum, Caitlin Clark, and Olivia Miles. Plum is the only one in that group who can top Bueckers’s averages in both categories, but she has only played 12 games compared to the Wings star’s 23.
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Elaine Blum covers women’s basketball for On SI from Europe. She has been writing about women's hoops since 2023 and holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism and a master’s degree in American Studies with a focus on women’s and gender studies. She started playing basketball when she was 10 years old and won several league and state championships at the youth and senior level.