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Paige Bueckers has expanded the scope of what it means to be a college athlete. She has played in a Final Four and become an equity partner in Unrivaled, designed her own player-edition sneaker for Nike, and appeared at various sporting events.
In the new name, image, and likeness age of college athletics, Bueckers has exerted unprecedented agency in her career and in building a brand for herself. However, she still can’t control what comes next. Last month, the WNBA Draft lottery all but ensured that Bueckers’ next basketball stop will be with the Dallas Wings after they won the No. 1 pick.
For better or worse, that is the nature of the draft. Players have limited influence on their destination. They can choose to meet with or work out with certain teams and potentially withhold their medical records, but ultimately, teams hold the bulk of the power.
Bueckers, however, is in a rare situation where she wields more leverage due to her marketability, NIL portfolio, and college eligibility. She can return for a sixth season at UConn because of COVID-19 eligibility rules. If she decides against playing for the Wings – and the buzz around the league is that Dallas was not her preferred destination – she could exert whatever levers she can to get where she wants as soon as possible.
Bueckers has indicated that she is treating this season as her senior year, but she can return to UConn if she doesn’t want to enter the WNBA in 2025. Whether that is because she is chasing a national championship, prefers a different draft destination, or wants to delay her pro career until the institution of a new WNBA collective bargaining agreement, there are incentives to play one more season with the Huskies. Even if Bueckers elects to go pro, she could simply demand a trade.
There’s just a lot of noise – way more noise in terms of rumors, in terms of all those things around women’s basketball, now more than ever… I don’t know if the rumors are true, but this is the first time I’ve heard it to this degree.
Bueckers likely would be a star at any WNBA franchise, but Dallas doesn’t provide the most opportunities for a player with a massive built-in fan base and marketing allure. The Wings have been notoriously unstable since moving to Dallas in 2016, with a history of cycling through coaches and a lack of stability. Stars haven’t exactly flocked to the Wings in free agency, and some of their highest-profile players have publicly bashed the organization; Skylar Diggins-Smith called out the lack of support she felt she received during her pregnancy in 2018-19. A constant drain of talent has gone in the other direction, with Diggins-Smith, Liz Cambage, Allisha Gray, and Marina Mabrey asking out via trades in the 2023 offseason.
In fairness to Dallas, the other lottery options also had their flaws. Teams are at the bottom of the league for a reason. Even if Bueckers would rather have gone to Los Angeles or Washington, the Sparks don’t have a practice facility and are in a four-year playoff drought, and the Mystics don’t have a head coach or general manager and play in a 4,200-seat arena.
Given the state of the lottery teams, Bueckers could return to college by foregoing her draft eligibility at the end of the NCAA season and putting off the WNBA until 2026. That still leaves her at the mercy of the lottery, but perhaps the threat of playing another season for UConn would motivate the Wings to take her trade demands seriously.
Furthermore, it might behoove her financially to postpone the start of her WNBA career. By entering this season’s draft, she would lock herself into a four-year rookie-scale contract that averages $87,000 annually. However, the WNBA will enact a new collective bargaining agreement before the 2026 season, one that figures to increase player compensation.
If Bueckers elects to leave UConn after this season, her primary tool at her disposal is demanding a trade from Dallas. The Golden State Warriors seem like an ideal destination in terms of market size and organizational strength, plus the Vagabonds are motivated to get a star quickly, though Bueckers is best suited to provide a list of suitors to encourage negotiations.
Player empowerment is on the rise in professional sports, but that hasn’t been the case for the draft itself in recent years. In the WNBA, Kelsey Plum accepted her fate in San Antonio in 2017. Aliyah Boston willingly went to Indiana, then a five-win team displaced for three summers due to arena renovations. Before NIL, no other recourse for women’s basketball players existed, as players such as Satou Sabally (who was picked by the Wings) felt compelled to enter the draft to start earning a salary. Even Boston didn’t have the star power to shake the system. Analysts who spoke with The Athletic said they couldn’t recall WNBA prospects trying to angle their way to a different destination in the draft.
The NWSL eliminated drafts. In men’s sports, salaries are so lucrative that there’s a willingness to sacrifice individual autonomy, but the finances aren’t there on the women’s side. A five-figure salary isn’t enough to oblige a star to play in a city that isn’t of her choosing, for an organization that hasn’t had a winning culture.
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