Paige Bueckers Is Having an All-Time “Great Player on a Bad Team” Season
The Dallas Wings stink. Bueckers does not.
If there ever was a distillation of Paige Bueckers’ rookie WNBA season, it came on Wednesday night.
The No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 draft was on fire, scoring 16 in the first half, 15 in the third quarter and 13 more in the fourth to set a new league rookie record with 44 points on 17-for-21 (!) shooting, including 4-of-4 from downtown. And yet, after Bueckers’ Dallas Wings teammate Aziaha James missed a potential game-sealing 3 with 21 seconds to play, L.A. Sparks guard Kelsey Plum weaved into the lane around multiple Wings defenders and hit a runner off the glass, at the buzzer, to win the game.
It was Dallas’ 27th loss in 36 games this season, giving them the league’s third-worst record. They, the Chicago Sky and the once-proud Connecticut Sun are all on pace to lose at least 32 games this season, which would mean three teams are likely to surpass — granted, in more games than ever — the 2024 Sparks’ all-time “record” for most defeats in a single WNBA campaign.
Dallas isn’t quite as historically awful as those other two. The Sky and Sun carry net ratings of -14.2 and -13.9, respectively — which are both tracking to rank among the 10 worst marks in league history1 — while the Wings are merely solidly bad, at -6.4. But they are uniquely bad for a team with a player as productive as Bueckers has been this rookie season.
According to Estimated RAPTOR, Bueckers is tied for the ninth-most wins added of any player this season (5.2), with a rating of +4.4 points above average per 100 possessions on offense and +4.3 per 100 overall. Not only is that extremely impressive for a rookie guard — who, as a rule, tend to take more time to adjust to the pros than forwards or centers — but it’s very difficult to have numbers like that on a team this bad, simply because all of the individual RAPTORs on a roster must “add up” to match the team’s overall quality (or lack thereof).2
Among players who logged at least 66.7 percent of available team minutes, here are the all-time single-season leaders in Estimated RAPTOR while playing for teams with varying levels of terrible net ratings overall:
Tamika Catchings was kind of the queen of putting up huge seasons with teams that were around league-average in quality regardless,3 which makes her somewhat underrated when people talk about the best women’s players ever now. (Despite her being in the Hall of Fame for her WNBA career, plus a college run as part of the fabled “Three Meeks” lineup4 under coach Pat Summit at Tennessee.) Along with the 2004 season listed above — the best on a team with a minus-2 net rating or worse — she shows up as many interesting data points on this plot of team versus individual performance across history:
However, Catchings never played for a team as bad as Bueckers’ Dallas squad is in 2025. Jia Perkins and Seimone Augustus did at times, but not during the seasons when they had RAPTOR ratings as high as Bueckers does now. And while Ruthie Bolton-Holifield did have a remarkable debut WNBA season in 1997 — scoring 19.4 PPG (second only to GOAT Cynthia Cooper leaguewide) with 5.8 RPG, finishing fourth in MVP voting while earning 1st-Team All-WNBA honors, despite the Sacramento Monarchs going 10-18 with a -10.0 net rating — Bueckers has her beat on individual impact, too.
Just about the only comparable “Great Player on a Bad Team” season in WNBA history was Napheesa Collier with the 2023 Minnesota Lynx. Collier, the presumptive MVP favorite this year while playing for the league’s top team (by far), didn’t have things so good just a few years ago. Though the Lynx were superficially close to .500 (at 19-21), they ranked fifth-worst on offense, third-worst on defense and third-worst overall with a -6.1 net rating, despite their star’s +4.1 RAPTOR. (Collier and Kayla McBride, at +0.3, were the only Minnesota players with a positive mark.)
That’s almost an exact replica of the dynamic happening between Bueckers and her Wings squad this season. Dallas ranks fourth-worst on offense, fourth-worst on defense, third-worst overall with a -6.4 net rating — despite their star’s +4.3 RAPTOR — and Bueckers is the only member of the team with more than 82 minutes5 to carry so much as a league-average rating individually.
The good news for Bueckers is that Collier’s Lynx rebounded to a +8.1 net rating in 2024, the following campaign, one of the great year-over-year turnarounds in basketball history. And the year after that, they’re currently the WNBA title favorites. A lot can change in the WNBA in just a short period of time, and Bueckers could find herself on a much more competitive team before very long — particularly if she keeps holding up her end with performances like this one in 2025.
For now, though, Bueckers is stuck carrying a bad team on her back, compiling great personal statistics and crafting an ironclad Rookie of the Year case, but still waiting for Dallas as a team to catch up to her greatness.
Filed under: WNBA
Even if neither will challenge the 1998 Washington Mystics’ unbelievable record-low -19.9 net rating, which is 2.6 points per 100 possessions worse than the next-worst team, the 2020 New York Liberty at -17.3.
Well, basically. The ratings are designed with a team adjustment that forces 4.5 times the minute-weighted average rating on a team to equal the team’s overall net rating. This accounts for the fact that teams aren’t perfectly the sum of their individual parts due to the rubberbanding of scoring margins and various other factors.
She did win a championship with the 2012 Indiana Fever, a season after she won league MVP honors in 2011.
With Chamique Holdsclaw and Semeka Randall.
Little-used Tyasha Harris, who hasn’t played since May due to a knee injury, has a +2.4 RAPTOR in 5 games and 82 minutes.