She’s got next: Paige Bueckers is ready to step into the WNBA spotlight

ARLINGTON, TEXAS – In the spring of 2014, just weeks before training camp was set to begin, Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve was at the Life Time gym in St. Louis Park, lifting weights. She was finishing up a set when she looked out onto the basketball court and saw a 12-year-old girl working on her game.

Paige Bueckers.

Is this where the Bueckers legend got started? Well, maybe. People knew Bueckers would be very good very early. But on that day in April, watching Bueckers shoot, dribble, work, Reeve was impressed.

So she walked over, introduced herself. Hey, she asked, can I put you through a couple of drills?

Yes.

Friday night in Dallas, the Lynx will open the 2025 season against the Dallas Wings. The Lynx will be looking to go a step further than last season, which ended with a Game 5 loss to New York in the WNBA Finals.

Bueckers, the latest, greatest thing to enter the league, the No. 1 overall draft pick, the former Hopkins High School star fresh off a national title at UConn, will make her first WNBA start for the Wings.

What about this isn’t perfect?

“It’s full circle,” Bueckers said after Wings practice ended Thursday. “Growing up, being a fan of the Lynx, having their poster and shoes in my room. Now, being on the opposite side, where you want to compete, win, beat them? Just full circle.”

Bueckers is starting her career against the team she grew up watching — she was at Williams Arena when the Lynx won their fourth title in 2017. It’s a team Reeve still coaches with a staff that includes Lindsay Whalen, whose signed shoes — old Nike Hyperdunks, Bueckers recalls — used to reside in Bueckers’ room. As training camp was getting started this year, Reeve said Bueckers was the best women’s basketball player the state has produced since Whalen a generation ago.

But this is more than just Bueckers starting her career against her hometown team. There are ties here. Back to the Life Time gym. Or to 2019, when Bueckers and Lynx star Napheesa Collier played together on a Team USA 3x3 team in Qatar. Roommates. “She was like my big sister, taking care of her little sister,” Bueckers said. “So much fun. She’s incredible. She has no flaws.”

Or to Whalen, a fellow point guard, who recruited Bueckers hard upon getting hired to coach the Gophers.

“Obviously I’m proud of her,” said Bueckers’ dad, Bob, who will be at Friday’s game. “But, even more, I’m happy for her. She’s living her childhood dream.”

Which brings us back to that childhood memory. As Reeve started working with Bueckers, her dad went upstairs, ostensibly to work out. But he couldn’t help peeking, watching the two work.

It’s something he will never forget. Neither will his daughter, a kid shooting in the gym, getting her own rebounds.

“I saw her,” Bueckers said. “I was freaking out. She approached me, spent a good amount of time giving me her knowledge and wisdom of the game. Just taking time for a little girl at the gym playing basketball. That inspired me a lot.”

But don’t think for a minute these ties to her first WNBA opponent, or any of this attention, will fluster Bueckers, who has grown up in the spotlight. Wings coach Chris Koclanes was talking Thursday about how composed and intentional she is.

You get that way when you grow up a star for perennial high school power Hopkins — the city of Hopkins made Friday Paige Bueckers Day — and then at heavyweight Connecticut.

Collier could see that back in 2019. Also a UConn product, she had just finished her Rookie of the Year season with the Lynx when she went to Qatar to play in that tournament. Bueckers was still at Hopkins. But Collier said she was the best player on the team.

(Bueckers, by the way, disagreed.)

“I’m a huge fan,” Collier said. “She’s a great basketball player, but she’s a great person. I love her, I love her family. Just good people.”

For all the skills, this is what sets Bueckers apart. Good friends, Reeve and UConn coach Geno Auriemma have often talked about the similarities of coaching Collier and Bueckers. Both are about the team, sometimes to a fault. Just as Reeve has had to exhort Collier to, essentially, be more selfish, Auriemma sometimes had to push Bueckers that direction.

Whalen, the point guard for four WNBA champions and two teams that won Olympic gold, sees some similarities between her and Bueckers. But Bueckers, Whalen said, is longer, bigger, able to get to different spots. She’s a better shooter, Whalen said.

“She has poise,” Whalen said. “She plays with a lot of intentionality. To me, that’s a big strength.”

Poise doesn’t just happen. Whalen remembers hearing about this kid from Hopkins coming onto the scene, when she and her Lynx teammates were in the midst of their championship runs. Watched her on TV in a couple of state tournaments. Once she got the Gophers coaching job in 2018, she spent hours watching Bueckers play.

One day in Whalen’s office at the U, Whalen made her pitch, knowing that wooing Bueckers away from the Huskies was a tall order. I carried the torch in Minnesota for a while, Whalen said. Now it’s your turn.

“It was like, ‘You have the torch now of women’s basketball in this state,’ ” Whalen said. “I wasn’t the best player on those Lynx teams, but I was from here. Even after she committed to Connecticut she said, basically, I got you. I’m going to continue to lead in that way.”

It was, to Bueckers, a “gracious moment.”

“What she means to Minnesota basketball? Just basketball in general?” Bueckers said. “She represented it so well and so proudly. Loved to say she was from Minnesota. I’m trying to do the same, inspire the next generation. People say Minnesota is a hockey state. But I think it’s a basketball state as well.”

But Bueckers will be nearly 1,000 miles away, in Texas, for an athletic, talented Wings team, and she will be its leader. Reeve likened Whalen and Bueckers as players in the sense they were both point guards who were about teammates and the team first.

“She works to figure things out for other people,” Whalen said. “That will go a long way in this league.”

Now Bueckers begins her WNBA career in this full-circle moment, and another will come next week, when Dallas plays at Target Center.

“I know she uses this term a lot, but it’s surreal,” Bob Bueckers said. “Surreal is the only word I can use to talk about her last few weeks. This game will mean something special.”

His daughter agreed.

“Life is great,” Paige Bueckers said. “God makes no mistakes. Everything happens for a reason. I’m glad it worked out this way.”