Paige Bueckers is the best basketball star in North Texas. Pay her like it | Opinion
When Dallas Wings basketball superstar Paige Bueckers did the predictable, if not inevitable, and won the WNBA Rookie of the Year award, the league celebrated by publishing an hour-long highlight reel. I encourage you to watch her cook, so you can see for yourself that at no point over the 60-minute length do Bueckers’ dribble drives, needle-thread passes and deep shots fail to entertain.
Bueckers is exceptional in the exact way basketball is singular among other team sports for its capacity for aesthetic self-expression. As a fan of the sport, you can appreciate the players not only for who performs the best (usually her!) but also for how the best perform, and she is already one of the best at clowning her opponents with improvisational circus acts.
She’s a star right now, a one-woman show. She’ll be a winner soon. The only thing in her life that doesn’t loudly communicate her value is her five-figure paycheck.
That’s right, Bueckers, like fellow junior superstars Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, is capped at the WNBA’s rookie pay scale, which leaves her at $78,831.
Like Bueckers, I just finished my first year at the Star-Telegram. I’m proud of my box score. Did you know Davis averaged 3.5 cringy puns per post — tops in the McClatchy League? While I had a strong rookie season, I was stunned upon learning that as Fort Worth’s second-best columnist, I took home more from my day job than the best hooper in North Texas. (Before you raise your hand: Luka’s gone, Kyrie’s hurt, Anthony Davis needs to prove he’s healthy, and Cooper Flagg hasn’t proven anything.)
Bueckers pulls enough from the Wings to rent a nice studio near the American Airlines Center. Maybe a one-bedroom, but only if I agreed to co-sign the lease. Anything for the less fortunate.
I’m embellishing more than a tad.
First, lest I negotiate against myself, journalists, like all working people, deserve good pay and fair contracts. Second, Bueckers’ legendary run at UConn opened her up to lucrative NIL deals well before she turned pro. She can still count on outside endorsements like her recent Lamborghini ad. (Meanwhile, I am rich in Delta SkyMiles and nothing more.) But Bueckers’ other checks are functional side hustles. Worthy rewards for her talent, but a degree removed from the work itself.
According to Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx, this is exactly the problem. Collier, a WNBA union leader (and underpaid superstar), accused league Commissioner Cathy Engleberg of failing to see Bueckers and other young stars as equal partners in their booming business.
“I also asked how she planned to fix the fact that players like [Bueckers, Clark and Reese], who are clearly driving massive revenue for the league and are making so little for their first four years,” Collier said of a closed-door conversation with the W’s top executive. According to Collier, Englebert told her that Clark (and by proxy Bueckers) should be “grateful” for the league because “[Clark] makes $16 million off the court” and “without the platform that the WNBA gives her, she wouldn’t make anything.”
Englebert initially said she was “disheartened by how Napheesa characterized our conversations,” before she eventually issued a partial denial ahead of the WNBA Finals.
If Collier was correctly quoting or summarizing Englebert’s argument about player pay, the commissioner’s answer borders on outright deceit. Bueckers, Reese and Clark didn’t need the WNBA to be rich — each of them had already amassed massive fanbases and millions in NIL contracts before they graced pro ball with their presence. Playing for the best league in their sport undeniably gives them a new platform, but it’s far from their first.
Meanwhile, WNBA players aren’t asking for LeBron money ($52.6 million). They’re not even asking for Flagg money (about $14 million for the first overall pick). The NBA had a 50-year head start and is way more lucrative because of it. They just want a fairer share of the value they know they bring. Currently, W players earn less than 10% of their league’s revenue, while NBA players earn about half of their league’s basketball-related income.
While the public doesn’t have precise data on the W’s revenues — according to WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike, even the union doesn’t have exact numbers — a Sportico analysis found that the estimated value of franchises increased by an average of 180% over the past year to a record-high $269 million.
The expansion Golden State Valkyries sold out every one of their 22 home games and are worth roughly $500 million. Were the economics of the WNBA as troubled as the league sometimes claims, it’s not showing in the explosive ticket sales and fervent outside interest in owning a piece of the pie.
I’m often drawn to sports because its intertwining dramas reflect our lives beyond the boxscore. In a country where women, on average, earn 85 cents for every dollar earned by men, I suspect many ambitious women can recall a manager or colleague who told them they should be grateful they have their job at all. The Texas Women’s Foundation found that Texas women in particular stand to earn about $750,000 less than their male counterparts during their lifetime.
Gratefulness is a virtue, but it comes at a cost. Millions of American women, whether they’ve mastered a crossover like Bueckers or got kicked off their JV squad, will do what they must to make up the gap.
Should it be any wonder that multi-level marketing — Mary Kay, Cutco, and the like — is a multi-billion dollar global industry despite very few of its direct sellers coming out ahead? And, that MLMs are, according to their proponents, powered by women chasing the top of the pyramid?
Which brings me back to my fellow North Texas rookie. Like so many of us, Bueckers earns her real money by aggressively marketing herself outside her day job. I’m glad Lamborghini, DoorDash, and Gatorade understand what her main employer evidently doesn’t. But I hope that sometime soon, hustling off the court will be strictly optional instead of a means to survival. For Bueckers and the good of her sport and for the rest of us still practicing our free throws.
This story was originally published October 12, 2025 at 4:23 AM with the headline "Paige Bueckers is the best basketball star in North Texas. Pay her like it | Opinion."
