{"id":375497,"date":"2026-07-16T14:09:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T14:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/375497\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T14:09:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T14:09:18","slug":"paige-bueckers-was-always-too-unselfish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/375497\/","title":{"rendered":"Paige Bueckers Was Always Too Unselfish"},"content":{"rendered":"

WNBA<\/a>WNBA<\/a>Now she\u2019s finally hunting her own shot\u2014and the rest of the WNBA doesn\u2019t have an answer\"\"Getty Images\/Ringer illustration\"\"<\/a>By Seerat Sohi<\/a>July 16, 12:59 pm UTC \u2022 5 min<\/p>\n

For a long time, isolation was the last thing I associated with Paige Bueckers.<\/p>\n

The famously unselfish it girl of women\u2019s basketball has always seen herself\u2014and her game\u2014in relation to others. You could map the entire league via six degrees of Paige Bueckers\u2019s friendships.<\/p>\n

When Dallas Wings coach Jose Fernandez tells her<\/a> she\u2019s the best player in the world, she looks completely unmoved. I have never seen such a precise scorer be so perfectly in tune with her teammates’ needs. Even in the midst of a sophomore season that\u2019s among the best in WNBA history, she has deflected credit back to her teammates.<\/p>\n

Selflessness has long been considered her greatest strength and the greatest knock against her. She is, as Mirin Fader once put it, a giver<\/a>. Watching Bueckers dominate, you\u2019d ask yourself: Why isn\u2019t the pick-and-roll maestro demanding more picks? Why does the most efficient isolation player in the league isolate so little?<\/p>\n

But this year, those questions have dissipated. Isolation as a philosophy is at odds with who Bueckers is. Isolation as a style of play, however, is something she\u2019s learning to embrace. Per Synergy, she\u2019s going one-on-one on 10.4 percent of her possessions this season, way up from 4 percent in her rookie season. In the past 10 games, that number has jumped even higher, to 14 percent. And while the rest of the league is obsessed with the 3-point revolution, Bueckers ranks no. 2 in midrange<\/a> scoring, a zag that gives her elite maneuverability against opposing defenses.<\/p>\n

Take this play against the Toronto Tempo last Friday, in a game where Bueckers scored 34 points and notched seven points and three assists in the fourth quarter:<\/p>\n

Last season, she likely would have responded to the double-team by immediately looking for an open teammate. But this year, she\u2019s hunting her shot. The Tempo send help to the left in the clip above, cutting off her driving angle, so Bueckers dribbles to the right, steps back, and pump-fakes her defender before hitting a contested midrange shot, from an area of the floor where she\u2019s shooting an extraterrestrial 58 percent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The increased production hasn\u2019t put even the tiniest dent in her accuracy, either, which is still tops in the league. As a whole, she\u2019s shooting above league average this year from nearly everywhere on the court.<\/p>\n

\"\"Shot chart courtesy of CourtSketch<\/p>\n

This is why fans, coaches, and analysts have always clamored for her to shoot more, dating back to her days at UConn. Bueckers\u2019s surgical analysis, midrange mastery, deft touch, and ballhandling sorcery give her one-on-one game limitless scalability that peaks in crunch time. She will begin the game by cutting, screening, passing, and assessing the opponents\u2019 weaknesses. And right when the defense has forgotten about her and shifted its attention to tracking Azzi Fudd\u2019s movements or Jessica Shepard\u2019s drives, Bueckers strikes. She leads the WNBA in fourth-quarter<\/a> scoring, and she\u2019s fifth<\/a> in clutch scoring.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe’s such a competitor and a winner, and she just refuses to lose,\u201d says Fernandez. \u201cCertain guys don’t want the ball in their hands at the end or don’t want to take the big shot, and she never shies away from the big moment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Paige Bueckers\u2019s Production by Quarter\u00a0QuarterPointsFG%AssistsTurnoversFirst4.647.82.00.7Second4.751.81.50.6Third5.046.21.50.3Fourth6.660.61.40.4<\/p>\n

In the fourth quarter, she has become downright relentless about getting open, using her skill as an off-ball mover as a counter. Against the Chicago Sky this week, during the Wings\u2019 sixth<\/a> double-digit comeback victory of the year, she thwarted Natasha Cloud\u2019s ball denial by cutting hard to the rim and then cutting back, before using the threat of running a dribble handoff to spin back and score at the rim:<\/p>\n

Even with her increased isolation dominance, Bueckers hasn\u2019t lost the patience and clock awareness that have always been a hallmark of her greatness.<\/p>\n

More than anyone else I\u2019ve watched, save for maybe Chris Paul, Bueckers plays like she has an internal metronome dictating her pace. She plays fast, but she\u2019s never rushed. Take this play against the Seattle Storm, which ends with Bueckers coming off a handoff and hitting a contested 3. But it starts with her giving up the ball, setting a screen, and passing to another big:<\/p>\n

Or look at her eventual game-tying middy. A lot of young players would have taken the first opportunity Bueckers was presented with: an uncomfortable, heavily contested jumper. Last year, she might have faded into the background of the play after kicking the ball out. But here, she gets it back, drives, fades away, and hits a similar shot from a similar place against the same defender\u2014just with a lot more space and rhythm.<\/p>\n

Simply put, Bueckers is having the opposite of a sophomore slump. In fact, she might be having one of the best second years the WNBA has ever seen, at least on offense. She is eighth in points and fourth in assists of all time at this juncture of a sophomore season. Skylar Diggins is the only other<\/a> player in WNBA history to be in the top 10 in both points and assists 23 games into their second season. This season, Bueckers is also the most efficient shooter among the top 20 scorers and has the best assist-to-turnover ratio of the top 20 passers.<\/p>\n

Bueckers is operating on a unique plane right now, where comfort, skill, and resolve have given rise to experimentation and innovation. Nothing exemplifies that, or the way she\u2019s leveraged her reputation as an unselfish player to create scoring opportunities, more than this moment against Toronto from a few weeks ago.<\/p>\n

As she\u2019s coming off a dribble handoff with Shepard, two opponents are ready to impede Bueckers\u2019s path to the rim. The simple, plus-EV basketball decision, the decision she\u2019s been making her whole life, would be to kick the ball to Shepard. Everyone knows it, and she knows everyone knows it. So she takes the pass fake to an entirely new level, bouncing the ball in Shepard\u2019s direction, but with so much spin that it boomerangs right back into Bueckers\u2019s hands. The defense falls for it, and Bueckers takes the ball to the rim for a layup:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pardon my French, but the English she put on that thing was fucking mind-boggling.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe does things every single day that, you know, now you’re not surprised anymore, right? How many times did she win the half-court shot? Eight or nine times out of whatever,\u201d says Fernandez. \u201cI should just come in every day with $100 for the day of the game and just give it to her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bueckers has always seen basketball as a collective problem\u2014one she is now realizing she often has the best answer to. At 24 years old, she\u2019s just scratching the surface of her potential. Every contested jumper that falls through the hoop is an affirmation that the greatest service Bueckers can do for her teammates is to continue exploring the limits of her own individual ability.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Seerat Sohi<\/p>\n

<\/a>Seerat Sohi covers the NBA, WNBA, and women\u2019s college basketball for The Ringer. Her former stomping grounds include Yahoo Sports, SB Nation, and basements all over Edmonton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WNBAWNBANow she\u2019s finally hunting her own shot\u2014and the rest of the WNBA doesn\u2019t have an answerGetty Images\/Ringer illustrationBy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103],"class_list":["post-375497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}