Souhan: Paige Bueckers, home to play the Lynx, also can study a model for her career in Lindsay Whalen

An old saying holds that you should never meet your heroes.

Paige Bueckers has already met them, and now wants to beat them.

Tuesday afternoon, Bueckers, the former Hopkins and UConn star who was selected with the first pick in the 2025 draft by the Dallas Wings, took shots at Target Center with her new team.

Wednesday, she’ll play against the Minnesota Lynx, the team of her childhood dreams.

As a child, Bueckers idolized Lindsay Whalen, Rebekkah Brunson and their Lynx teammates. Wednesday, Bueckers will make her first appearance as a professional basketball player in Minneapolis, facing the Lynx, with Whalen and Brunson serving as assistant coaches to another of Bueckers’ idols, Chery Reeve.

Bueckers had a poster of Whalen on her bedroom wall, and Whalen’s career could be an ideal road map for Bueckers as she tries to conquer a new level of basketball.

“I just remember them winning all the time, the dynasty that they created, the core group of players they had,” Bueckers said. “I was a huge Maya [Moore], Seimone [Augustus], Rebekkah, Sylvia [Fowles] fan, and of everybody in between.”

Bueckers said she hasn’t spoken to Whalen lately but that “I know I can always reach out. Not during competition, of course, but throughout the offseason and stuff like that, and they’ll always be accommodating to talk to me and give me words of advice.”

For Bueckers to emulate Whalen and win titles in the WNBA, she’ll need some luck. Just as Whalen did.

Whalen was a great college player who had immediate success in the WNBA, helping the Connecticut Sun to consecutive playoff berths while finishing in the top five in MVP voting twice.

She didn’t become a Hall of Fame candidate until the Lynx traded for her and surrounded her with greatness, and she might not have entered the Hall of Fame if not for the Thibault family.

Whalen wasn’t the phenom Bueckers was. Whalen was largely unrecruited out of high school and was the fourth pick in the WNBA draft. Bueckers was the top recruit in the country and became the first overall pick in the 2025 draft.

Whalen became a legend in part because of Reeve’s demanding coaching, in part because the Lynx knew how to build a championship team, and in part because she had friends in high places.

Whalen joined a Lynx franchise that had former No. 1 pick Seimone Augustus, who had dealt with serious injuries. A close loss at the end of the 2010 season gave the Lynx the No. 1 pick in 2011. They chose Maya Moore and suddenly had three future Hall of Famers, along with Brunson, who has Hall of Fame credentials.

Whalen was surrounded by greatness, and she knew how to lead it.

The trade that brought Whalen to Minnesota was engineered by Reeve and Sun coach Mike Thibault. Whalen was close friends with the Thibaults, particularly Carly, and stayed with the family when playing for the Sun.

Carly would become Whalen’s assistant at the University of Minnesota and is now a rising star as the coach of Fairfield. Mike won a WNBA championship with Washington and is now retired, and has a chance to make it into the Hall of Fame himself. His son, Eric, replaced him as the Mystics head coach and is now Reeve’s associate head coach. Brunson and Whalen are the other two assistants.

If Thibault hadn’t done Whalen the personal favor of trading her to the team in her home state, who knows what would have become of her career?

Bueckers has impressed in her first two games for Dallas, including the season opener against the Lynx. She’s averaging 14.5 points, five assists, six rebounds and one block per game. Those aren’t superstar stats, but remember that Caitlin Clark took months to acclimate to the WNBA before she began playing like a star.

Because championships are what she craves, the real questions regarding Buckers’ career are these:

Will she have the benefit of luck, as Whalen did? Will she eventually be surrounded by stars, or be repeatedly asked to buoy a losing franchise?

It’s up to the Dallas Wings to give her players who know what to do with a no-look pass.

Or, maybe Bueckers winds up in Minnesota later in her career. Reeve has been known to trade for a Minnesota-born point guard.