Paige Bueckers just posted more points through two WNBA seasons than anyone who has ever played the sport, and I’d bet actual money most of the country hears about it from a highlight clip days from now instead of tonight.
That’s the record. Bueckers passed Seimone Augustus’s mark of 1,513 points through a player’s first two WNBA seasons, a number that had stood since 2007. Nineteen years is a long time for a scoring record to sit untouched in any league, and it just fell in a game the Dallas Wings won 87-82 over the Phoenix Mercury, on a night that felt like nobody outside the arena was watching.
The box score alone should have been the headline. Bueckers finished with 26 points, five assists, four rebounds and three steals, and she’d already scored 20 of those points by halftime, capping the half with a banked step-back three while getting fouled, with 0.5 seconds left on the clock. ESPN was already calling it a heist by intermission:
https://twitter.com/espnW/status/2101371942754300068
You don’t make that shot by accident with a defender hanging on your arm. Here’s the full first-half damage, in case the highlight wasn’t enough:
https://twitter.com/UnderdogWNBA/status/2101373081826513119
Arike Ogunbowale added 22 points and six assists. Jessica Shepard came off the bench for 10 points, six rebounds and five assists, the kind of line that gets a paragraph on a normal night and a shrug on this one because Bueckers ate the whole news cycle by herself. I play in a rec league on Tuesday nights in Hoboken where I’ve made two threes all season, and I mention that only because watching Bueckers bank one in while drawing a foul makes my Tuesdays look even sadder than they already are.
But that’s not even the most interesting part of tonight. Dallas has already clinched a playoff spot and just set a new single-season franchise wins record at 26, a year removed from a 10-win season that had people writing this franchise off entirely. The win moved them to 26-16 and into sixth place, their sixth straight, and it’s why Dallas has started managing minutes for Bueckers, Ogunbowale and Shepard the rest of the way. Bueckers has also been dealing with soreness in her right knee. That’s not a mystery signal from some front office trying to protect a lost season. It’s a healthy, confirmed playoff team choosing to walk into October instead of limping into it, and a team that lost 10 games a year ago doing that on purpose is worth sitting with for a second.
I’ll admit the counterargument here, because it’s a fair one: resting your best players down the stretch can also mean rust once the playoffs actually start, and Dallas hasn’t proven it can win a playoff series in this era of the franchise. Minutes management is a bet, not a guarantee. But it’s a bet a bad team doesn’t get to make, and Dallas is making it anyway.
Everybody’s going to spend this weekend arguing about college football and whatever the Cowboys did wrong in Week 3. Paige Bueckers broke a record that survived two decades and did it with a knee that isn’t fully right, and by Monday it’ll be a stat line nobody remembers reading.
