After years of sharing the spotlight, Paige Bueckers officially stands alone as women's basketball's biggest superstar.
Bueckers officially stands alone at the mountaintop, accomplishing the final task that most say a true superstar must have in order to be dubbed an all-time great. Caitlin Clark will go down as one of the all-time greats to never win a National Championship. JuJu Watkins still has time to truly become an all-time great, but most think he is already there. Bueckers has fulfilled that promise of what she would be in women's college basketball.
In her start at UConn, Bueckers was the one to be; she was the No. 1 overall recruit, she was committing to the best women's basketball school in the country, and had plans of adding to those 11 national titles the Huskies already had. However, Bucker's dealt with something like what Watkins is dealing with now and that is setbacks.
Paige Buckers overcame numerous setbacks to claim the biggest honor in college basketball
Bueckers was able to play her freshman season, even though it was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, averaging 20 points per game, 4.9 rebounds, and 5.7 assists, along with 2.3 blocks. The Minnesota native was going to be what brought women's basketball to the forefront of sports, but things changed in her sophomore season.
In her sophomore season, when the expectations were through the rook for the young player, injuries only allowed her to play in 17 games, and at the end of her freshman season, she had to have ankle surgery, for which she was cleared in October to play again. However, her luck did not change as in December, she suffered a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear, resulting in her having to be carried off the court by her teammates. Bueckers returned in the Elite Eight later that season, but another star had already emerged, and her name was Caitlin Clark.
Clark had burst onto the scene, and suddenly Bueckers was not the best player in women's college basketball, even though she helped lead her team to a National Championship that season, falling to South Carolina. The following season, Bueckers ended up redshirting because she had torn her ACL and would miss the entire 2022-2023 season.
At that point, Clark was becoming the change in women's basketball that everyone thought Bueckers would be. In what was her redshirt senior season, Buckers was back on the court in full force showing everyone why she was thought to be the superstar of women's basketball at the start of her career. She announced later that season that she would take another year at UConn, one where she would be standing alone in the spotlight, or so she thought.
In the 2023-2024 season, another name jumped into the spotlight: a young freshman named JuJu Watkins. Now, battling Clark and Watkins, Bueckers was just focusing on her game and on the one thing she wanted to do at UConn: win a championship. After falling to Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in the Final Four in 2024, Bueckers had one thing in mind: finished the job.
Even though Watkins won National Player of the Year and UConn was slighted as being a 2-seed in the NCAA Tournament, Bueckers fulfilled her promise to UConn fans and brought the hardware back to Storrs, Connecticut, where it belongs. Bueckers did something Clark was never able to do and what Watkins still had yet to do and that is win a National Championship.
Now Buckers is expected to be the No. 1 overall pick to the Dallas Wings in just a few weeks at the WNBA Draft, and her resume is just a little longer than that of Clark and a little shinier if you know what I mean.