Paige Bueckers’ Rise Was Interrupted. Now She’s Ascending Again.

Before Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese were the faces of NCAA women's hoops, Bueckers was the nation's best player. Can she be again?

Well before record-breaking Caitlin Clark mania swept the country — before Flau'jae Johnson and Angel Reese were massive social-media superstars — women’s college basketball had another name as its biggest star: UConn’s Paige Bueckers.

As a rising college freshman in the Class of 2020, Bueckers was the top women’s basketball recruit in the country. She ranked No. 1 in a group that also included Reese (No. 2), Cameron Brink (No. 3) and Clark (No. 4). And once she got to Connecticut, Bueckers delivered on her promise right away.

Scoring 20.0 points per game with 5.8 assists, 4.9 rebounds and 2.3 steals per contest, the 19-year-old phenom led a Huskies team with multiple future WNBA players to the Final Four before falling short in an upset against Arizona. She won the National Player of the Year award, becoming the first freshman ever to earn the honor.

Clark had a great debut year in her own right, sharing Freshman of the Year honors with Bueckers. But according to my Consensus Wins Added (CWA) metric, which blends Basketball-Reference’s Win Shares and the PER-based Estimated Wins Added into a single stat, Bueckers was the more valuable performer, adding a national-high 10.1 wins (compared with 9.7 for Clark).

This is all to remind us that, yes, there was a time when Paige Bueckers was the present and future of women’s hoops — a time when the Caitlin Clark hype train had to make room on the track for another to go even faster. Now that both are in the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16 — along with Reese and Brink — Bueckers is reminding us of that time again, and perhaps even reclaiming her place atop the game’s best.

Bueckers’ reign there was interrupted quickly. She underwent surgery to repair an ankle defect not long after the 2020-21 season ended, keeping her off the court for the majority of that offseason. Then she fractured her left tibial plateau and tore a knee ligament in UConn’s sixth game of the 2021-22 campaign, keeping her out from early December to late February. She returned and ramped up her minutes (and production) in time for the NCAA tourney, scoring 27 against NC State to help punch UConn’s ticket back to the Final Four. Though she and her teammates were stifled in the championship game against South Carolina’s near-flawless juggernaut of a team, Bueckers was in good position to build on her late-season success and come back strong in 2022-23.

Except, that never had a chance to happen.

Playing a pick-up game in August 2022, Bueckers tore the ACL in her same knee as before, rendering her out for the entire 2022-23 season. That same year, Clark would take over the sports world with her dazzling distance shooting, leading Iowa to a championship game date with Reese, Johnson and LSU. There, Reese and her teammates got the best of Clark and the Hawkeyes, cementing her as just as huge a star.

Out of sight and out of mind, it was easy for the basketball world to move on and forget how great Bueckers had been in her precocious early seasons.

This year, though, Bueckers is back. She’s bounced back to play all 36 of UConn’s games, and her 14.3 CWA trails only Clark’s tally of 15.9 — well ahead of Reese (9.9), Brink (11.9), Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo (12.2), USC’s JuJu Watkins (10.7), teammate Aaliyah Edwards (10.1) and any other player who was supposed to have ascended to a tier above Bueckers while she recovered.

Though it was interrupted by the injuries, she’s now back on the upward trajectory of the other players that she ranked ahead of as a high-school prospect:

And in fact, she might have climbed past all of them again.

For my college basketball Heat Index story at ESPN a few days ago, I looked at players who had been tearing up the tournament so far according to Game Score, a simple measure that sums up all of a player's various box-score contributions in a single number. While I listed UConn as one of the Sweet 16’s shakiest teams so far — they’ve struggled to dominate opponents that the power ratings suggest they should be rolling all over — that’s not Bueckers’ fault.

In a couple of tourney games so far, Bueckers is currently averaging 30.0 PPG (57% shooting), 10.5 RPG, 6.5 APG, 3.5 SPG and a monster Game Score of 29.7. That’s easily the best of any player with 2 games played in the 2024 NCAA tournament:

UConn’s path isn’t easy from here. In their way is Duke, the most overachieving team of the Sweet 16, and then either Watkins and USC or Baylor — both Top-15 squads in the SRS ratings. Then Clark and Iowa would potentially be waiting for Bueckers and the Huskies, if either squad makes it. Bueckers is going to have to keep playing out of her mind if UConn is going to keep advancing.

But her history says she is capable of it. This year, Bueckers has worked her way back into the top tier of women’s stars — a place she was always supposed to occupy, but got sidetracked from for a while. Now she finally has a chance to go head-to-head with her old rivals and prove she is the very best once again.

---

Filed under: College basketball