What can’t Paige Bueckers do? What problems can’t she solve? Where does her bag end? Does it? For 39 minutes and 59 seconds of Wednesday night’s Wings-Sparks game, answers were hard to come by.
The learning curve has looked awfully flat for the first overall pick in her rookie season. Varied and efficient, Bueckers’s game has an almost soothing quality to it. Her cool sense of pace means that she sometimes looks superimposed onto a court, like the other players filmed themselves as background and someone added her in post. At no point in last night's 44-point performance did she seem harried or anxious to tie the WNBA rookie scoring record, which she did. In spirit, really, she set it: Cynthia Cooper’s record came in the league’s inaugural season, when Cooper was 34, and every player in the WNBA was technically a rookie. With the first 40-ball of the season, Bueckers also became the first WNBA player to unlock a confusing promotional discount from a food delivery company. Treats for all.
Some numbers before we get to the letters: Bueckers scored those 44 points on a sparkling 17-of-21 from the field—that’s 81 percent. She hit all four threes she attempted and all six free throws, two of which came on techs—that’s 93 percent true shooting. Oh, one picture before we get to the letters:
But the box score doesn’t even flatter her enough. It says how many—so many!—but not how, which was the best part. She caught and shot; she hit midrange pull-ups over opponents' arms; she spun defenders around with her handles to get right to the rim; and when she couldn’t get where she wanted by craft, she could still do it with sheer strength, backing down much bigger Sparks players in the post. The box score also doesn’t account for the incredible range of her defense, like when she locked up a 6-foot-6 Azurá Stevens or stayed in front of a speedy Kelsey Plum. A very good WNBA guard would be happy to develop all these skills over the course of a long career. Bueckers cycled through them in the third quarter.
What can’t Paige Bueckers do? When the answer finally came, it was supplied by Plum, who dribbled her way into a wide-open lane and hit a game-winning floater at the buzzer. Bueckers cannot quite overcome the deficiencies of this year’s Wings roster. Dallas lost, 81-80, and fell to 9-27 on the season. Last night also officially eliminated the team from playoff contention, but that was more of a formality.
If there’s any real variety or mystery in Wings games these days, it mostly has to do with the flavor of heartbreak. Non-Bueckers Wings combined for one point and three turnovers in the fourth quarter of the Sparks game. Before the season began, Dallas’s ceiling was capped by its frontcourt players, and they have only lost more talent to injury and trades this year. That Bueckers is the best scorer, passer, off-ball mover, rebounder, and defender on her team says, yes, pretty dire things about the state of her team.
When you spend your college years in a model system, you can end up a little too trusting. With the Wings up 80-79 and 22 seconds left in the game, Bueckers kicked the ball out to fellow rookie Aziaha James, who missed an ill-advised three early in the shot clock to give the Sparks the last possession of the game. “That last play of the game, everyone’s probably like ‘You need to shoot that ball,’” Wings head coach Chris Koclanes said after the game. “She’s going to pass that ball 10 times out of 10, because it’s the right play.” That may be so, but a shot Paige Bueckers takes is rarely the wrong one.
