It was not so long ago that Paige Bueckers represented the future of women’s basketball. In 2020, she was the top recruit in a class that included Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink, and Kamilla Cardoso. As a true freshman, at the University of Connecticut, she showed preternatural poise and projected a sense of inevitability. She could slip her willowy frame through traffic, and finish at the rim. She had exceptional skill in the midrange, and shot over forty per cent from beyond the three-point arc. She was an adept passer and an above-average defender, and had an instinct for clutch moments. In a 63–59 overtime win over the No. 1 University of South Carolina, she had thirty-one points, six steals, and five assists—and scored her team’s final thirteen points, a stretch in which she missed only one shot, when she was fouled. (She sank the free throws.) She was the undisputed national player of the year that season, and led UConn to the Final Four, crushing Clark’s University of Iowa team along the way.
Bueckers’s appeal was easy to see, on and off the court—the smoothness of her game, and the loveliness of her personality, an attractive blend of confidence and guilelessness. She seemed to be the latest in a long lineage of great players out of UConn, the next step in the game’s evolution, and the one who would take the sport to the level that many believed it could reach. She had the potential to break through into popular culture. New “name, imagine, and likeness” rules for N.C.A.A. athletes meant that she stood to capitalize financially in a way that no female basketball player had yet been able to. In 2021, she signed with one of the biggest sports agencies, became the first college athlete to ink a deal with Gatorade, and filed a trademark for her nickname, Paige Buckets. It was reported at the time that she could make a million dollars in endorsements.
It was not lost on her that she benefitted from being white, and white in a way that appealed to advertisers—a loose, lanky frame, long blond hair, and alabaster skin. But she accepted the premise, which you often hear from those around the W.N.B.A., that to be a woman in basketball was to be an activist for social justice, and she talked about redirecting the spotlight and using her platform to raise the profile of all the Black women in basketball who had long been overlooked. “They don’t get the media coverage that they deserve,” she said at the ESPY Awards in 2021, in her acceptance speech for Best College Athlete in Women’s Sports. “They’ve given so much to this sport and the community and society as a whole, and their value is undeniable.” Six months later, she fractured her knee and tore her meniscus, and, after getting surgery to repair the injuries, was sidelined for two months. UConn tumbled out of the Top Ten for the first time since 2005. Then, before the 2022-23 season, she tore her A.C.L. The spotlight shifted abruptly away from Bueckers, away from the team, and the narrative around the ascendence of women’s basketball changed with the stunning spontaneity of one of Caitlin Clark’s half-court shots.
How much does a single player matter to the future of a team sport? That question loomed over the W.N.B.A. All-Star Game earlier this month. On the one hand, the event showcased the league’s growth, or “hypergrowth,” as the commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, put it. Joe and Clara Tsai, who had reportedly bought the New York Liberty for something like ten million dollars a few years ago, had recently sold a stake in the team at a valuation of four hundred and fifty million. Fees for expansion teams are set at two hundred and fifty million, and the league can’t keep pace with the number of investors eager to establish new franchises. A television deal worth $2.2 billion is about to go into effect. The All-Star Game averaged 2.2 million viewers, a hundred-and-fifty-eight-per-cent increase over 2023, the second-largest audience ever for the event. On the other hand, that number was more than a million less than the game’s viewership last season, when Clark had been on the floor. This time around, Clark was captaining her team from the sidelines, and critics of the league seemed eager to point out the precipitous drop in ratings. It might not have just been the critics, either. In his Substack, the sportswriter Ethan Strauss pointed out that publications with deep N.B.A. sources have been running stories about how audiences shrink when Clark sits.
The context for all this is the ongoing negotiations over the league’s collective-bargaining agreement, which expires at the end of October. Before the All-Star Game, all the players, including Clark, walked onto the court wearing T-shirts that read “Pay Us What You Owe Us.” Clark makes $78,066 in salary from the Indiana Fever this season. Everyone agrees that she is worth more—many millions more—to the W.N.B.A. than that, but just how much the players collectively deserve is harder to determine. Less than ten per cent of the W.N.B.A.’s annual revenue goes to player salaries. In the N.B.A., by contrast, around half the league’s revenues go to its players. “We’re not asking for the same salaries as the men,” Minnesota’s Napheesa Collier, the reigning All-Star M.V.P., said in an interview in March. “We’re asking for the same revenue shares. And that’s where the big difference is. . . . We’re asking for the same cut of the pie.” But the W.N.B.A. has a unique ownership structure, in which the N.B.A. has a forty-two-per-cent stake, and it’s not always clear what the revenues actually are, or how N.B.A. teams that also own W.N.B.A. teams apportion resources. Leagues often obfuscate finances during labor negotiations, but, in the case of the W.N.B.A., the numbers are particularly difficult to understand. That $2.2-billion media-rights deal, for instance, is hardly a clean figure: the two leagues’ media rights were bundled together, and N.B.A. owners decided how much of their seventy-seven-billion-dollar media-rights deal should flow to the W. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin, who had been tasked by the Women’s National Basketball Players Association to analyze the league’s finances for salary negotiations, recently wrote a Times opinion piece titled “How Underpaid Are W.N.B.A. Players? It’s Embarrassing.” It is not in the league’s interest to agree, of course.
During All-Star Weekend, Clark, for her part, seemed to be having a fabulous time. She was on social media, ribbing other players. She was caught sneaking her teammate Lexie Hull a drink during the three-point contest. She appeared, several times, on the unhinged, hilarious seventy-two-hour Twitch live stream of the so-called Stud Budz, hosted by two Minnesota Lynx players, Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman, who came to the All-Star Game with matching pink cropped hair and immaculate, chaotic energy. “I was streaming [Stud Budz] all last night,” Clark told them, gushing like a groupie.
The irony is that Clark’s injury offered a chance to see what the league might look like with her in the mix instead of at its center. An agent once told me about how she spent an evening during a W.N.B.A. All-Star Weekend years ago at sparsely attended cocktail parties, before heading to a hotel room and listening to some of the greatest players of all time trade war stories about the indignities of being a woman in professional sports, because there was nothing else to do. This time around, Diplo performed at an exclusive sponsor-funded party, and the players shut down the clubs. Stud Budz went viral. And some of the chatter was about Bueckers hard-launching her relationship with her former UConn teammate Azzi Fudd.
It was not at all surprising that Bueckers was the No. 1 pick in the W.N.B.A. draft this year. She’d been touted as one since she was in high school. But she didn’t take the path that anyone had expected. It had been an arduous climb from her second major knee surgery back to the court, and from there to the national championship this season, during which the ruthlessly efficient UConn team dismantled South Carolina to win the school’s twelfth title. Drafted onto a dismal Dallas Wings team, and despite missing several games with a concussion, Bueckers immediately emerged as a leader, and on Tuesday tied Clark for reaching three hundred points and a hundred assists in the fewest number of games. I thought of something she’d said before her final season in Connecticut, when she was asked about replacing Clark as the main attraction of women’s college basketball. “I honestly hope next year I’m not the focal point and the only person that gets attention,” she replied. “I hope as media, as players, we can spread the love a little bit more.” The players did their part during All-Star Weekend, and not only because they stood together but because they seemed to have fun doing it. ♦
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