No matter how much status a player earns in college, it’s all out the window when she arrives in the WNBA. Nobody knows that better than the Sky’s Angel Reese, a national champion who has endured a rough year-plus as her team tries to rebuild, and she had some savvy advice for the league’s newest star, Wings point guard Paige Bueckers.
Bueckers arrived as the No. 1 overall pick with similar credentials to Reese’s, and after the Sky took down the Wings 97-92 at Wintrust Arena on Thursday, her team sat near the bottom of the league at 1-5. Bueckers already has taken more losses than she did as a senior at Connecticut and likely is in for a long season.
“Give yourself grace,” Reese said. “She was a great player in college, [but] you get a fresh start coming into the league. Nobody cares what you did in college.
“When you come to the league, it’s grownups. You’re fighting for your job, you’re fighting for a spot every night. Everybody’s going to come after you, especially for a big name like herself.”
Bueckers is learning that on a daily basis in Dallas, where the Sky and Wings will face each other again Saturday. While her collegiate body of work was tremendous, this is a step up.
Reese’s point about giving herself grace to adjust is prescient, and it took Bueckers awhile to find her groove Thursday with just eight points on 3-for-6 shooting at halftime before putting together a solid game of 15 points, eight assists, three steals and three blocked shots as she and Arike Ogunbowale pushed the Sky to the final minute.
The Sky desperately need a better answer for Ogunbowale, who torched them for the league’s season-high 37 points on 14-for-25 shooting and had seven assists.
Bueckers will only get better from here, and the Wings hope she becomes the type of game-changer that teams with other young stars, like the Sky with Reese and the Fever with Caitlin Clark, need to lift them into contention.
“She was great her whole college career and she’s going to be a great pro,” Sky coach Tyler Marsh said. “She’s poised, she has control of her offense, she makes shots, she gets to the paint and facilitates, she rebounds at her size. She does a little bit of everything.”
While Bueckers and Reese play different positions and very different styles, they’ve been intertwined since high school, when Reese was a standout in Baltimore and Bueckers dazzled in the Minneapolis suburbs. They were ESPN’s top two high school prospects, respectively, as seniors in 2020 and have skyrocketed since.
Reese won a title at LSU, branched far beyond her sport as a celebrity and was the No. 7 overall pick last year. Bueckers was a three-time All-American, won a championship as a senior and was the slam-dunk top pick this year.
It’s still a challenge acclimating to the WNBA, but both were reasonably prepared for it after playing for high-profile college programs.
“UConn has a huge following and is in the spotlight a lot,” Bueckers said. “You don’t grow accustomed to it, but you get familiar with it.”
When Wings coach Chris Koclanes was asked about helping Bueckers navigate life as a pro, he credited the steadiness she already had.
“She does a lot of that on her own, if we’re being completely honest,” Koclanes said. “She’s special in how intentional she is not to get caught up in the wave and keep the main thing the main thing.”
Reese and Bueckers both entered the league with poise they developed as college stars, but neither had endured the trials of a rebuild. Reese called the Sky’s stumbles on their way to a 13-27 record last season “humbling.”
And at the pro level, rebuilds are competitive. It’s a zero-sum game in which any team’s climb out of the basement will require it to step over others on the way up. The Fever’s rise since drafting Clark makes it more crowded at the top, and that’s going to displace a team that thought it was a contender.
It almost certainly won’t be this season, but the Wings think Bueckers will vault them the same way.
That would have a direct effect on Reese and the Sky. They’re trying to keep up with the Fever’s rebuild and stay ahead of what the Wings are doing.
