{"id":610492,"date":"2026-04-16T10:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T10:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/610492\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T10:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T10:28:08","slug":"gossip-around-azzi-fudd-and-paige-bueckerss-relationship-misreads-the-wnba-wnba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/610492\/","title":{"rendered":"Gossip around Azzi Fudd and Paige Bueckers\u2019s relationship misreads the WNBA | WNBA"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the first time in a while, there was no consensus on who would go No 1 overall in the WNBA draft this year. When the Dallas Wings did make their pick, they chose Azzi Fudd<\/a>, who had distinguished herself under Geno Auriemma at UConn, including a national championship in 2025.<\/p>\n

The moment she was picked was pure: a delighted and seemingly nervous Fudd joined WNBA<\/a> commissioner Cathy Engelbert onstage. She took photos with her jersey, made it through the ESPN interview that immediately followed, and beamed at her family and teammates in the audience. Paige Bueckers, who played alongside the 23-year-old at UConn and was the No 1 pick for the Wings in 2025, was there also to celebrate a well-deserved honor for Fudd.<\/p>\n

Fudd was considered one of the best shooters in the college game, was named All-American by the Associated Press, and was a member of the All-Big East first team \u2013 and that\u2019s just in her final season.<\/p>\n

But rather than looking at the impact Fudd will have in the professional game, it was her relationship with Bueckers that dominated the draft night discourse. The pair confirmed they were dating last year but have offered few public details about their relationship since, and it\u2019s possible they\u2019re no longer together at all. It\u2019s their right to leave fans in the dark if they wish. It\u2019s also how players in the league have always moved.<\/p>\n

The WNBA is entering its 30th season. Like any workplace, the league has been home to romantic relationships as long as it has existed. Women dating women isn\u2019t anything new in the W, but a fixation on the love lives of grown women who are the best at the game in the world is.<\/p>\n

Frankie de la Cretaz, author of the Out of Your League newsletter<\/a>, notes that while the league\u2019s foundational audience was largely queer, the \u201cdominant culture\u201d is now imposing its own narratives on a league where a quarter of players are out.<\/p>\n

As a result, says De la Cretaz, \u201cthe cultural context and history is erased. The WNBA and its locker rooms are culturally lesbian spaces, and those spaces come with different social norms than straight ones do.\u201d<\/p>\n

While large portions of WNBA newcomers may obsess over players\u2019 relationships, for the athletes themselves it\u2019s business as usual. Some of those norms include \u201cthe fact that members of the sapphic community regularly socialize with their girlfriends, their exes, and\/or their exes\u2019 new girlfriends,\u201d De la Cretaz adds. \u201cWNBA players have been dating each other for a long time, and for every couple that we know about, there are dozens that we never will. There are hookups, situationships, and breakups on WNBA teams all the time. These insular, overlapping social dynamics are not just common in women\u2019s sports locker rooms \u2013 they\u2019re a core aspect of how lesbian communities operate, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

To a large degree, the surge of interest in the love lives of WNBA players is fueled by social media. It\u2019s never been so easy to hop on your phone, type in an athlete\u2019s name, and find no shortage of posts speculating about their social life. Parasocial relationships are simpler than ever to form; Instagram and TikTok, which are popular with WNBA players, make such attachments even easier.<\/p>\n

Azzi Fudd and Paige Bueckers during their time at UConn. Photograph: Daniel Passapera\/NCAA Photos\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s also something else at work, says Dr Alicia Smith-Tran, an associate professor of sociology and comparative American studies at Oberlin College. \u201cObviously, the status of women\u2019s sports is elevating,\u201d says Smith-Tran, who played on Oberlin\u2019s basketball team as an undergraduate. But despite the surge in popularity of leagues such as the WNBA, she says \u201cwomen who are professional athletes continue to be seen as lesser than their male counterparts\u201d.<\/p>\n

The focus on the romantic lives of players \u201cis kind of a manifestation of how women athletes continue to be marginalized, and the focus is taken off their skills and contributions in the workplace,\u201d Smith-Tran adds. In short, it\u2019s \u201canother way that women athletes are being painted as less worthy, or less talented, when compared to men\u201d. They become the object of gossip columns rather than sports columns.<\/p>\n

The public\u2019s resistance to seeing women as athletes in the same way we view their male counterparts is due to the fact that culturally, \u201cwe tend to see athleticism as a masculine trait,\u201d says Smith-Tran.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s especially true for basketball, which requires attributes \u2013 such as height and strength \u2013 that don\u2019t neatly square with how most of us frame femininity. NBA stars like LeBron James and Steph Curry also have romantic relationships \u2013 notably, not same-sex ones \u2013 \u201cbut that\u2019s kind of just a nice side fact that we know about them, compared to seeing [what happens] with women in the WNBA, where the focus [may be] on their relationship first \u2013 and then we watch and see if they prove themselves as athletes who are worthy in the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another problem with the conversations around romance in the WNBA: they contribute to the fetishization of queer couples and relationships. Whether Fudd and Bueckers are still in a relationship is a side point; what\u2019s more relevant is the exoticization of the idea that they may be.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the idea of two superstars of a sports league potentially being in a relationship with each other plays into so many tropes from people\u2019s favorite romance novels, and it can be easy to get carried away in the fantasy,\u201d says De la Cretaz.<\/p>\n

This was highlighted during the frenzy around the gay ice hockey drama Heated Rivalry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll too often, queer relationships are fetishized and dehumanized, becoming fodder for people to project their own desires on to,\u201d says De la Cretaz. \u201cThe problem, however, is that Paige and Azzi are not characters in a novel; they are real people and these are their actual lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time in a while, there was no consensus on who would go No 1 overall…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-610492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}