The fact that Paige Bueckers wasn’t already considered the undisputed gold standard of 21st-century women’s college basketball says more about her competition than it does about her.
Bueckers’ resume is extraordinary: a No 1 overall recruit who joined Connecticut in 2020, immediately averaged 20 points per game and became National Player of the Year as a true freshman, and went on to earn first-team All-American honors three times. She is a household name and will soon be the No 1 pick in the WNBA Draft. She has struck endorsement deals that are estimated to have earned her more than $1m this season alone.
A few things encroached on Bueckers’ rise to superstardom, though. For one, Bueckers got hurt – a lot. She missed much of her sophomore season due to injury, then a torn ACL cost her the entire 2022-23 campaign, disrupting what had looked like an inevitable rise. For another, Caitlin Clark came along, scoring more points than any Division I hooper in history and making herself the face of women’s basketball. Clark arrived at Iowa the same year Bueckers got to UConn, but she stayed healthy and became the player who loomed over all others. And for a third, the program that Bueckers joined continued to sputter in the NCAA Tournament. Geno Auriemma’s war machine had last won a national title in 2016. Bueckers’s teams had reached three Final Fours before this year but couldn’t emerge on top.
Until Sunday, when the Huskies returned to the top with a vengeance. Facing a South Carolina program that had supplanted UConn at the top of the sport, the Huskies thrashed the Gamecocks in the national championship game. The final score was 82-59, and the action on the floor was somehow even more lopsided than that 23-point winning margin suggests. South Carolina looked despondent as UConn ran up the score in the second half, nothing like the world-beating juggernaut they have been the past several years.
As fate would have it, Bueckers was not even that good on Sunday. This has become her program, but on the day, she was an inefficient 5-of-14 from the field for 17 points, with six rebounds and three assists. The women who carried the Huskies were guard Azzi Fudd and forward Sarah Strong, who scored 24 points each. Strong had 15 rebounds and was a total bully in the paint against a South Carolina program unused to being so physically outmatched around the basket.
UConn won the title game because of their depth and a collection of star talent. But conversation about Bueckers and her place in the sport was reaching a fever pitch in the hours before tipoff. Did Bueckers need a national title to go down as a college great? Who would even make that judgment? What would it mean for her legacy if UConn failed to get the job done? These are not especially useful questions to help someone process Bueckers’ tremendous career, but they are inevitable ones, just as they were when Clark was trying, unsuccessfully, to push a lower-level Iowa program to a title last year.
Bueckers has not played ball with the topic, nor has she had much interest in comparing herself to UConn’s all-time greats under Auriemma: Breanna Stewart (who has the best resume of anyone), Maya Moore, Diana Taurasi, or anyone else. “Legacy” has not been her concern, at least not in public.
“I don’t think that’s up to me,” she said before the title game. “I think that’s up to the people who, I guess, get to decide if people’s legacies are cemented or whatever. But I’m not worried about that at all.”
Dawn Staley, as good an authority as any with two titles in the prior three years, made her view clear. “She’s a great player, but just because you’re a great player doesn’t mean you need to win the national championship to legitimize it,” the Gamecocks’ coach told reporters pregame. “Paige is legit. Her career is legendary. She will leave a legacy at UConn whether she wins one or not.”
Staley also made the case that by making the title game about Bueckers’ quest for a title, the media were ignoring her own players’ achievements. South Carolina are the sport’s pre-eminent program now but have not had an individual star reach Bueckers’ level of mainstream fame. Even the legendary Aliyah Boston, of Staley’s 2022 team, did not reach that perch.
“We can raise Paige up because she deserves that and raise our players up because they deserve that,” Staley said. “And that’s not talked about enough. There’s room for it in our game for all of us to be covered.”
Staley is right. It doesn’t serve college basketball to spend so much brainspace on the unknowable legacy implications of one game on one player.
But hoping for discussion of Bueckers that doesn’t center around her long hunt for a title – in a sports media driven by debate shows – feels a bit like asking for fire to stop being hot. Championships are what athletes play for, after all, and to suggest that failing to win one doesn’t affect a legacy is to argue that racking up titles doesn’t, either. Fortunately, Bueckers has now sidestepped that contradiction.
