Dallas Wings rookie guard Paige Bueckers has been incredible in her first WNBA season, but Wednesday night will go down as the high point of her rookie campaign.
While the Wings dropped their third consecutive game in Wednesday's 81-80 loss to the Sparks, you can't blame Bueckers for it, as she had 44 points on 17-for-21 shooting along with four rebounds, three assists and one steal. Bueckers was a +12 when on the floor, yet somehow the Wings lost by a point because the offense collapsed in the four minutes that Bueckers sat. That's how impactful she was on Wednesday, and how much the team took a step back when it had to have anyone else run the offense. (Credit, though, to Grace Berger, who had seven assists, four of which went to Bueckers.)
Bueckers wasn't just good on Wednesday night, though. She was historically good. Like, did things that no woman has ever done in professional basketball.
Paige Bueckers just played one of the best games of all time
Bueckers set — or tied, depending on whether you consider every player from the WNBA's debut season to be a rookie, since Cynthia Cooper scored 44 points during the inaugural campaign — the rookie scoring record on Wednesday night, plus became the first player in WNBA history to score 40-plus points while shooting over 80 percent from the field.
She also became the first woman, and just the third person overall, to score 40-plus points in an NCAA Tournament game and an NBA or WNBA game in the same calendar year, joining Oscar Robertson and Elvin Hayes. The most recent of those was Hayes, which happened all the way back in 1968. It's been 57 years since anyone did what Bueckers has done.
We're watching greatness right now. There's been some discussion that Sonia Citron belongs in the Rookie of the Year conversation because of her strong play, and I don't want to denigrate what Citron has done this year — any other season and she'd likely be the clear frontrunner. Bueckers, though, is playing at a legendary level. She's doing things that feel unheard of, and she's doing it while playing on a roster that barely has any other offensive threats.
Shooting 80 percent on 21 field goal attempts is absurd, but it feels even more absurd when you realize that the other starters on the team all shot 33.3 percent or less. Bueckers had to pick up the slack for all of her teammates and somehow managed to do so in a historically strong way.