RandBall: Paige Bueckers has been destined for greatness since sixth grade

You see the social post resurface often, particularly around the NCAA women’s basketball tournament and particularly this season.

In it, a seemingly impossibly small and young Paige Bueckers — about a month shy of her 12th birthday — is posing for a picture wearing the jersey of her youth team in St. Louis Park.

Gary Knox, who was in the gym to watch his older daughter play and was also running a girls’ basketball recruiting web site at the time, snapped the photo and wrote the now legendary (and prescient) text to go with it before posting it on Twitter/X:

“Remember the name: Paige Bueckers. 6th grade, think Diana Taurasi. Best 6th grade G I’ve ever seen. St. Louis Park.”

That’s a lot to put on such a young player. History is filled with countless suggestions that a rising star is the “next” someone else, only for any number of factors to interrupt the narrative.

But in this case? It seems to be absolutely spot on.

“I guess it was kind of crazy for me to compare her to Diana Taurasi,” Knox said in a recent interview with CT Insider. “But I think if you would have walked in the gym back then it wasn’t hard to see.”

Bueckers of course went on to star at Hopkins High School and UConn, perhaps saving her best for last in college with a dominant 2025 NCAA tournament that culminated in her first national championship.

That was followed quickly by Bueckers being chosen No. 1 overall by the Dallas Wings in the WNBA Draft.

And oh by the way, that means Bueckers gets to make her WNBA debut Friday in Dallas against her hometown Minnesota Lynx, the team she grew up watching.

If Knox saw Bueckers’ greatness early, Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wasn’t far behind. She spotted Bueckers working out at the Life Time gym in St. Louis Park when Bueckers was 12, as the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Kent Youngblood recalled during Thursday’s Daily Delivery podcast and in his excellent Bueckers profile.

“I saw her,” Bueckers said of the long-ago meeting with Reeve. “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.”

They’ll be on opposite sides Friday as Bueckers continues on her path of greatness that some people could see half of Bueckers’ lifetime ago.

“She had swagger, but it wasn’t an intentional swagger. She was just really smooth, and she had a rhythm to her game. It was just different,” Knox said. “She always had the ball in her hands.”

And still does to this day.