The hype prepare for Paige Bueckers is rising daily, and it has even reached the NBA. Miami Warmth assistant coach Caron Butler was seen carrying Buecker’s UConn jersey at follow for the Warmth.
Paige Bueckers’ Affect within the World of Basketball
Bueckers has had the basketball world in a chokehold. In her freshman season at UConn, she was the primary participant at UConn to earn main postseason awards as a freshman, equivalent to AP Participant of the Yr and Naismith Faculty Participant of the Yr, in 2021.
Bueckers has been on an absolute tear this season for the Huskies, averaging simply over 20 factors and almost 5 assists a recreation. Bueckers is anticipated to be the No. 1 draft choose within the 2025 WNBA Draft, which belongs to the Dallas Wings.
Bueckers has additionally been one of many gamers to assist improve viewership all through the common season for NCAA girls’s basketball lately. Final season, viewership for the ladies’s March Insanity event was greater than viewership for the boys’s event.
The top coach for the UConn Huskies girls’s workforce, Geno Auriemma, is thought for producing loads of the highest expertise all through the WNBA. Some gamers which have performed for Auriemma embrace Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart, Diana Taurasi, and Sue Fowl, they usually have gone on to win championships within the WNBA.
READ MORE: Each UConn Alumnus Who Dominated the WNBA and Received a Championship
A few of these gamers have been famous as a few of the biggest girls’s basketball gamers of all time. Bueckers has confronted loads of adversity all through her collegiate profession. An harm sidelined Bueckers for a part of her sophomore season, and a torn ACL pressured Bueckers to sit down out for her whole junior yr. Nonetheless, she fought to make a return to the court docket, and now she is acting at a degree greater than she ever has.
You may catch Bueckers in motion when UConn faces UCLA within the girls’s March Insanity event on Friday, April 4, at 9 p.m. ET.
Who Is Caron Butler?
Butler is a former NBA participant who performed for a number of groups all through his skilled profession. Earlier than the NBA, he was a star participant for the UConn Huskies from 2000 to 2002. He averaged 15.3 factors and seven.6 rebounds a recreation throughout his freshman yr, and in his sophomore yr, he averaged 20.3 factors and seven.5 rebounds a recreation.
He led UConn to an Elite Eight look his sophomore yr, however they misplaced to Maryland, who gained the March Insanity event that yr. Shortly after, he declared for the NBA Draft and was chosen within the first spherical.
