The Evolution of Paige Bueckers

Paige Bueckers glances at the legends gracing the imposing navy-blue walls here in the Connecticut women’s basketball film room. There’s Rebecca Lobo. Maya Moore. Sue Bird. The photos show each of them dominating. Winning. Celebrating. Just outside, Diana Taurasi’s national championship portraits adorn the hallway, too. “This is UCONN,” a large sign reads.

Everything Bueckers aspires to become is on these walls, and they remind her of her purpose. “I want to prove that I’m a winner at every level,” she says.

Bueckers leans back in her seat on this summer afternoon in Storrs, Connecticut, thinking of all she has been through to get to this point. She’s a redshirt senior now, returning for a fifth and final season with the Huskies. She could have left UConn for the WNBA this year, but she had been through too much, had come too far—coming back from multiple injuries, including the ACL tear that forced her to miss the entire 2022-23 season—not to return for one last shot at the college national championship that has eluded her.

“If, for whatever reason, we don’t win a national championship this year,” Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma says, “she’ll feel like, ‘I’m the best player to ever play at Connecticut that didn’t win a national championship.’”

Before arriving in Storrs in 2020, Bueckers had won championships at every level, from rec to to high school to USA Basketball, garnering a slew of individual awards along the way. She was heralded early on as a generational talent, building a reputation as a dazzling point guard who could throw stunning no-look passes. Even when Bueckers was a fourth grader, Tara Starks, her AAU coach with the Minnesota Metro Stars, thought: “She’s doing Magic Johnson–type stuff.”

By the time the no. 1 high school prospect chose UConn, she was considered to be the next superstar in line to take over the Connecticut dynasty. But her college career had more twists than anyone could have imagined. After leading the Huskies to the Final Four her freshman year, she missed 19 games due to a knee injury as a sophomore. She eventually returned later that season but suffered a bigger setback when she tore her ACL during a pickup game in August 2022 and missed an entire season. Without her, the Huskies failed to advance out of the Sweet 16 for the first time since the 2004-5 season.

She returned last year to a UConn team that was in an unfamiliar role; the Huskies were underdogs, overshadowed by South Carolina, Iowa, and LSU. But Bueckers, resilient and dominant as ever, had her best season yet, leading the injury-riddled Huskies further than anyone predicted—all the way to the Final Four. At times last season she was unguardable, a double-double savant capable of hitting 3s, dishing spectacular dimes, or swooping in to make blocks, earning her the nickname “Paige Blockers,” even though she’s just 6 feet tall.

She practically willed the Huskies to beat USC and freshman phenom JuJu Watkins 80-73 in the Elite Eight, dropping a monster line of 28 points, 10 rebounds, six assists, three steals, and two blocks. “She was incredible,” says KK Arnold, a UConn sophomore guard. “A lot of people forgot what she was capable of.”

But UConn fell short in the national semifinal against the Caitlin Clark–led Iowa team, 71-69. All summer long, the loss has motivated Bueckers, keeping her in the gym until late at night, shooting jumper after jumper. “I was sick about the last game,” she says, “and sick about how our season ended.” She pauses. “This is my last year to get what I came here for. … The urgency is at an all-time high.”

Auriemma is sitting in his office upstairs at the women’s basketball facility, glancing at the 11 national championship trophies sitting by the window overlooking the practice court. He mentions how players initially come into the program with a sense of urgency, thinking, “I can do this, win a national championship.” By season’s end, they see how difficult it is to win even one title, let alone two or three. Let alone four, the number won by Breanna Stewart, now a two-time WNBA MVP with the New York Liberty.

The pressure to continue the national championship tradition at UConn is enormous. “Some think, ‘I don’t want to be the one that doesn’t get one,’” Auriemma says. “That’s scary for a lot of kids, but it inspires some kids.”

Bueckers is more than inspired. She’s relentlessly driven—almost to the point that it aches. She says she is constantly pushing herself to become better: “It’s watching, playing, preparing myself mentally, physically. It’s all a part of bettering myself.” When Auriemma was asked whether he thought she’d feel incomplete if she didn’t win one this year, he didn’t hesitate: “100 percent.”

Leaving Storrs without a championship is not an outcome Bueckers is willing to accept, so she’s had to search deep within herself this offseason and sit in the discomfort of failure. Every day she sees a Teddy Roosevelt quote that hangs in the office of Andrea Hudy, the director of sports performance for UConn’s women’s team. Hudy picked the sign specifically for Bueckers, who has to pass it on the way to the weight room every day: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

But achieving that glorious triumph will require Bueckers to stretch beyond her comfort zone and be selfish on the court in a way that has never been second nature to her. “Selfish” is the word Auriemma has chosen. Bueckers prefers the word “assertive.”

Since she arrived at Connecticut in 2020, Auriemma has been challenging her to be a leader that attacks first, then distributes to others. Score more. It hasn’t been easy, and Auriemma lets her know when she’s not meeting his expectations. “A lot of cussing out Paige,” she says, laughing. “A lot.” But that didn’t deter her. Auriemma’s tough coaching style is one of the reasons she signed up to be a Husky in the first place. “I came here because he doesn’t mince the truth,” Bueckers says. “He says exactly what you don’t want to hear sometimes, and what you need to hear.”

She says it was a transition for both of them, the push to be a more selfish player. “You want a national championship,” Auriemma says, “so at the end of those (Final Four) losses, did you really feel like you did everything humanly possible on your end? Or did you defer too much?”

Defer. It’s a word that she has heard a lot over the last few years. It is perhaps her biggest strength and weakness. It’s part of what makes her so brilliant on the court and so beloved off it—and one of the biggest stars in women’s college basketball. All her life, Bueckers has preferred to pass rather than score, always looking to place her teammates in positions to succeed. “Giving to others, making sure everybody eats, making sure everybody’s happy, and putting my feelings aside,” Bueckers says.

That’s who she’s always been: a giver.

But there is something else she could become: “the killer,” as she calls it.

Photo by G Fiume/Getty Images

In Auriemma’s ideal world, he would like Bueckers to adopt a mentality similar to Taurasi’s. “That little bit of an edginess,” Auriemma says, before putting it more bluntly: “A fuck-you mentality.” Auriemma often tells Bueckers that basketball is like boxing and that he wants her to come out throwing the first punch, instead of waiting to see what happens. Deferring.

He knows, of course, that Bueckers won’t fundamentally change her entire personality—especially in her final season, he says. But she has been steadily evolving, figuring out how to feed the killer without compromising the giver.

“I’ve never met a great player that wasn’t (selfish),” Auriemma says. “I’ve never met a great musician that wasn’t, a great artist that wasn’t, a great businessman who wasn’t. In order to achieve a sense of greatness, there has to be a selfish part of you that wants it for yourself. Now, if your selfishness interferes with the success of the people around you and your team, that’s the negative (connotation) that people talk about. ‘I want this for me. And I really don’t care what happens to you.’”

That isn’t Bueckers, he says. Far from it. “Paige is kind of like, ‘I have what I need. I want you to have what you need,’” he says. “OK, that works great, until you don’t win. And then you go, ‘OK, how do I get what I want while helping you to get what we want?’ And that’s a learned skill.”

For Bueckers, at least. “Dee (Taurasi) had it, and it was inherent. … Sue (Bird). … They had it in them,” Auriemma says. He knows Bueckers has it, too.

Bueckers is more than game. “There’s nobody who puts more pressure on Paige than herself,” says her father, Bob Bueckers. She understands that she must evolve to achieve what she wants—what her team needs from her to finally break through. “You are helping our team by being that alpha dog on the court every time you touch the ball,” Auriemma often tells her. She somehow has to accept not only that giver and killer can coexist but also that both make her a better leader. “I’ve always tried to find the happy medium,” Bueckers says, “but I think for now, and forever, for the rest of my career, I have to put killer first.” She adds: “I want (the killer) to be on all the time.”

Auriemma often uses allegory to get his point across. And on this June afternoon in Storrs, he recounts a scene he recently shared with Bueckers from the 1993 movie A Bronx Tale. Bueckers, born in 2001, is now very familiar with the coming-of-age story about a young Italian American teen and a Mafia boss. It’s a favorite of Auriemma’s.

In the scene, a bunch of bikers come into a bar owned by Sonny, the Mafia boss, and start disrespecting the bartender, getting rowdy, ready for a fight. Sonny locks the door and says: “Now you can’t leave.”

Auriemma smiles, remembering why this movie, which is really about the choices one makes and how they will shape one’s life forever, is one he’s shared with Bueckers. This is her last chance to win, and every choice she makes will have consequences. “You got to live your life now,” he tells her.

Bueckers has grown accustomed to Auriemma’s parables: “He be spitting,” she says, laughing. Then her demeanor grows more serious. She has one season left. “The only way is through,” she says. “Never go into a game, go into a practice, knowing that there’s any room for an excuse or any room for you not to be your best.”

The landscape of women’s college hoops is dramatically different this season. Iowa no longer has Clark. LSU no longer has Angel Reese. Both are in the WNBA. Bueckers, the projected no. 1 overall pick in the 2025 WNBA draft, will be leading a younger UConn team that’s had to replace two starters who are now playing professionally.

With Clark and Reese gone, she knows the spotlight will inevitably shine brighter on her. Even at the 2024 Final Four, after UConn lost to Iowa, reporters asked her how she felt about replacing Clark next season as the “star” of women’s basketball. “I honestly hope next year I’m not the focal point and the only person that gets attention,” she said. “I hope as media, as players, we can spread the love a little bit more.”

But the attention will be impossible to escape, even if this is one arena where she would rather defer. “I don’t think I should be on a pedestal, and I don’t think I should be looked at differently just because I can put a ball in a basket better than some others can,” Bueckers says. “I’m just a normal human being that loves to play basketball. That’s how my parents raised me, to always just be humble, be gracious.”

Bueckers wants to share the spotlight with her peers, saying that there are many other great players to celebrate—like USC’s Watkins, an electrifying guard who scored 51 points in a game against fourth-ranked Stanford last season. “Shining light on other people doesn’t diminish your own,” Bueckers says.

Since she was a young girl, she has been placed on a pedestal and given gargantuan expectations. She made varsity as an eighth grader, leading her team to the state final. The media said she had the potential to transform the game of women’s basketball as a player who would bring creativity, court vision, flair, swagger—and a new generation of fans with her. ESPN called her “the real deal—the next in the long list of greats.”

Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

“Everybody saw her as this icon,” Starks, her AAU coach, says. She’s among only a handful of high school athletes who’ve graced the cover of SLAM in its 30-year history; the story declared her “one of one.”

But Starks and Bob Bueckers would keep her grounded, especially as the college offers flooded in, even before her freshman year of high school. “They’re not giving you an offer because you’re ready to play college basketball right now,” Bob would tell her. “You have a lot of proving to do.” She knew that and spent hours at her local gym, living by the mantra “Work in silence. Let your game speak for you.”

Bueckers’s fame continued to rise at Hopkins; a frenzy would nearly always break out after her games, fans clamoring for a selfie with the young star. “Everyone wanted to get a piece of Paige everywhere we went,” says Nunu Agara, Bueckers’s former Hopkins teammate who’s now at Stanford. And when SLAM reached out to do a YouTube series on Bueckers, she wanted to showcase her entire team . SLAM obliged, and the series was aptly titled All Eyes on Us.

Bueckers more than lived up to the hype her freshman year at UConn, averaging 20 points and 5.8 assists a game, leading the Huskies to the Final Four, and becoming the first freshman in women’s college basketball history to win prestigious individual awards including the Naismith, Associated Press, and John R. Wooden Player of the Year honors. The media attention was relentless. At times, it didn’t sit right with her. “I was the media darling. Everything was Paige, Paige, Paige,” she says. “It just does such a disservice to all the other great athletes in women’s basketball and the WNBA.”

She says she had noticed for years how the basketball media highlighted white players like her far more than her Black peers. And so when she won the Best Female College Athlete award at the 2021 ESPYs, she felt compelled to speak out against these disparities. Her speech went viral. “I thought it was important for me to speak on it because I felt like I had a lot of the media’s attention at that point,” she says now.

It was an important speech at that time, just a year after the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum in the summer of 2020—Bueckers marched and protested in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd—and it still resonates today.

Bueckers, who’s been influenced by a number of Black women in her life, including her stepmother, Farmoe Roberts, and Starks, her AAU coach and mentor, has spent years coming to understand her privilege as a white athlete in a predominantly Black sport. It wasn’t enough for her to be a great basketball player; she needed to use her voice, too, to find a way to uplift others without centering herself. To speak out without taking up space. “That’s the way I want to live my life,” she says, “and never be afraid to stick up for what I believe in and say what I believe in.”

Whether she’s chosen to be or not, the reality is that Bueckers is now one of the biggest stars in women’s college basketball, at a time when interest in the sport has exploded. The women’s NCAA tournament shattered viewership records last spring, and the WNBA’s popularity has exploded in the months since. Viewership is at an all-time high, and historic investments have been made in the WNBA, from chartered flights for the first time in league history to sweeping $2.2 billion multiyear TV contracts. But increased toxicity has come with the increased attention. Racist discourse has become rampant, and Clark has been deified as the savior of the sport in a league that is overwhelmingly Black. Right-wing media outlets have used Clark to push talking points that come at the expense of Black players, who are often erroneously and dangerously depicted as trying to injure her—such as when DiJonai Carrington poked her in the eye, a basketball play that Clark acknowledged was unintentional, during the Fever’s recent first-round playoff exit.

“As a women’s basketball community, I feel like we go through a lot together, and we’re still just battling for respect, battling for coverage, battling for the right discourse around the game,” Bueckers says. “We’re all competitors on the court. We want to rip each other’s heads off. We want to go at each other and beat each other on the court. But at the end of the day, we’re a family, we’re a community, and we just support each other.”

Bueckers’s popularity has soared beyond the sport; she now has nearly 3 million followers on TikTok, where she posts basketball content but also gets to show off her swagger, fashion sense, and the silly side of her personality fans don’t always see on the court. Articles are written with titles like “Why the Internet is Loving Her Right Now.” She often goes viral, especially for her dances. “Some people come for my rhythm,” she says, laughing. “But I’ve gotten better.” Content of Paige being Paige garners millions of views. She became an instant meme at the 2024 WNBA draft, cheering on her teammates Aaliyah Edwards and Nika Mühl, holding up her phone to take photos of them, and giving “proud mom” vibes. It was peak Paige.

She insists she is the same “small-town kid with big dreams,” as she said in her 2021 ESPYS speech, who loves reading murder mystery books and building Legos. She tries not to get too far ahead of herself, remembering what her father has always told her: “You’re where your feet are.”

But it isn’t easy being in the public eye as a famous young woman. Far from it. The attention can be overwhelming. “I think the hardest part,” Starks says, “is not being able to just be you. … She just wants to be a normal basketball player, a normal person, but this is what comes along with who you are.”

There are also far more terrifying things that come with her fame. Last month, a 40-year-old man from Oregon was arrested and charged with multiple crimes related to stalking and harassing Bueckers. Bueckers did not comment about the situation for this story. Safety feels elusive for many young women online and off, especially as their fame continues to rise.

Other difficult experiences continue to shape Bueckers—and strengthen her resolve—as she looks forward to her final season at UConn. Coming back from her ACL injury changed her for the better, she says, even if it was difficult to recognize at the time.

The injury forced her to slow down and focus on being more deliberate in how she prepares, recovers, and treats her body. “In high school I wasn’t huge on the little detail of things. I always got by on my talent,” she says. “I worked extremely hard, yes, but I feel like there was minute details of the game of life that I would sometimes not have to be the best at because I could get away with it.”

Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Since returning from the ACL injury, she’s focused on sleep and nutrition. She started doing Pilates. She works on stabilizing the muscles in her knees, ankles, and hips to help mitigate future injury risk when she moves on to the WNBA. Hudy, the director of sports performance, helped her understand that this wasn’t just a yearlong rehab process. “Rehab is never over,” Hudy says. “It’s constant, and it’s going to be constant for her, and it needs to be a part of her life.”

She knows that she can’t afford to think, “National championship or bust” each day. It almost sets her up for failure. What she can focus on, she has realized, is not the big-picture outcome, but tiny daily decisions that she can make toward her goal. Auriemma wants her to focus on answering questions like, How hard am I driving myself? Am I happy? Do I push myself enough so that I can look back and go, I got nothing left, no excuses?

She is the undisputed leader now, after Edwards and Mühl have gone on to the WNBA. Bueckers says that she feels older by the day, especially on a team full of underclassmen: “I feel like the OG.” That comes with more responsibility, which she is grateful for: “Everything falls on her shoulders,” UConn guard Azzi Fudd says. “Things are going well, things aren’t going well, it’s Paige’s fault whether it actually is or it’s not. And so I think that’s just a lot of pressure added to her because she has really high standards for herself.

“For some people it’s a burden,” Fudd continues, “She wears that with pride, having that responsibility.”

But then there is Auriemma’s voice. She needs to be more assertive. More selfish. More killer.

“I see a little bit more of it,” Auriemma says. He can hear her being more vocal in pickup games, screaming: “Make this cut! … We got to rotate over there!”

He wants more.

She wants more.

The Bronx bar has turned into a basketball court in Storrs. The door is locked. They’re both eyeing the next move. She has to live life now.