Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd Are Finally Talking About Their Relationship on Their Own Terms

Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd opened up about their relationship in a new UConn documentary. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

By no fault of their own, Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd were the talk of the WNBA when the Wings selected Fudd, rumored to be Bueckers’s girlfriend at the time, with the No. 1 pick at this year’s draft in April.

Drama ensued. Fudd was asked if she was still dating Bueckers during the team’s introductory press conference, causing a Wings PR spokesperson to butt in and provide the following statement: “I understand why you have to ask that question, but we’re going to respectfully decline from comments on our players’ personal lives.”

Months after Dallas weathered a firestorm of online discourse over whether the organization did the right thing for Fudd, the Wings duo is finally talking about their relationship—this time, on their own terms.

Bueckers and Fudd sat down for interviews in Apple TV’s three-part docuseries, The Dynasty: UConn Huskies which premieres on Friday, Aug. 21, and they gave fans a rare glimpse of their personal lives.

“Azzi ended up joining the team my sophomore year,” Bueckers said of her then-Huskies teammate, via PEOPLE. “It kinda just meshed as soon as we met. She’s sweet, she’s genuine, she has a huge, caring heart.”

“We kind of felt a spark a little bit different than what would just be considered a normal friendship,” added Bueckers.

Later in the series, Fudd opened up about how she wanted her relationship with Bueckers to remain “private.”

“Paige and I are a couple, and everyone close to us that was important knew, but it was kind of one of those things,” Fudd said in the docuseries. “... It’s just, it’s private. Not a secret, but it’s private.

“We had conversations about, like, everything that was going on. When things weren’t going right, it was usually all Paige’s fault. She said to me, ‘I came back for my fifth year because I thought we were gonna have things figured out and it was gonna be fun.’”

A timeline of Paige Bueckers and Azzi’s Fudd’s relationship from UConn to the Wings

Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd have been romantically linked dating back to their UConn playing days. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Bueckers and Fudd met on the UConn women’s basketball team, and it’s safe to say their lives haven’t been the same since. The duo won their first title together in Bueckers’s final year with the Huskies in 2025, rolling over South Carolina in a dominant 82-59 victory. Bueckers dropped 17 points, while Fudd tallied a game-high 24 and was named the Most Outstanding Player.

A few months later in July ‘25, Bueckers, who went first overall to Dallas in the draft, appeared to confirm she was in a relationship with Fudd during the WNBA All-Star Game.

"How well do you know your D1 girlfriend?" a content creator who ran the TikTok account, @wagtalk, asked Bueckers on the orange carpet. "Are you ready?"

"Alright," Bueckers replied with a smile.

There had been a plethora of rumors online speculating that Bueckers and Fudd were dating at that point, but this was notably the first time Bueckers publicly addressed it. Even then, she didn’t bring up the topic on her own, didn’t directly say anything about her relationship to Fudd and may have been caught off guard by the candid interview.

Fast forward to the 2026 WNBA draft, when the Wings held the No. 1 pick for the second straight year and chose Fudd to pair with Bueckers as the franchise’s star coupling for the future. Almost immediately after, WNBA discourse started to run off the rails as Bueckers and Fudd’s personal relationship drew more and more scrutiny.

Dallas Morning News columnist Kevin Sherrington’s controversial question to Fudd about whether she was Bueckers’s girlfriend was, in fairness, phrased in the context of basketball, prodding their “dynamic” as pro teammates. Yet hordes of fans and analysts alike still sparred on social media over what was the right thing to do in that situation: let Fudd speak for herself, or shield players from questions about their personal life to keep the main thing the main thing?

Bueckers finally put an end to the squabble with a guarded statement to the press a few weeks later:

“There is something that I wanted to address, and I only plan on addressing it once. If we continue to get asked about it, we will refer to this moment in time, or we will use the time to deflect and talk about our teammates,” Bueckers said. “Quite frankly, I believe me and Azzi’s personal relationship is nobody’s business but our own. And what we choose to share is completely up to us.”

Bueckers also took the opportunity to clap back against those who believed the Wings drafted Fudd over then-standout TCU guard Olivia Miles for non-basketball reasons:

“To add on to that, Azzi Fudd was the No. 1 draft pick because she earned it, and it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with who she is as a human being, who she is as a basketball player. Her resilience, her strength, and her career-best year at UConn. Azzi is her great individual person, her own great individual person, and she should be celebrated as such,” said Bueckers.

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