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.
Related: Why hasn’t middle America given Paige Bueckers the Caitlin Clark treatment?
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 ...
