CSA Forecasts a Standout Rookie Season for Paige Bueckers

Following her selection as the No. 1 overall pick by the Dallas Wings in the 2025 WNBA Draft, Paige Bueckers enters the league carrying both immense expectations and a legacy of elite collegiate play. Given these high expectations, CSA applied its award-winning prediction technology, Relevance-Based Prediction (RBP), to offer a preview of Bueckers’ potential rookie season performance.

RBP forms a prediction as a weighted average of observed outcomes of prior college players in which the weights are based on a statistic called relevance. Relevance considers the similarity of prior players to the player for whom a prediction is being formed alongside the statistical informativeness of prior players. Additionally, it reveals the conviction one should assign to each prediction, and it identifies the prior players and predictive variables that are most important to each prediction.

Unsurprisingly, RBP predicts a banner year for Bueckers’ rookie season. As a scoring prospect, RBP rates Bueckers as the best in this upcoming draft class, and as the 2nd best in the past three seasons, trailing only Caitlin Clark. RBP found that former number one overall picks Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, and Brittney Griner were some of the most statistically relevant players (see below) in forecasting Bueckers' scoring based off her senior year profile. Despite the years-long comparison of the two, Clark does not inform Bueckers’ prediction as much as expected, ranking just 42nd out of all WNBA rookies since 2012. While both are among the most hyped prospects in recent memory, their scoring profiles are not as close as one might think. In her final season of college, Clark had a much higher usage rate in the heliocentric Iowa offense than Bueckers did. Moreover, Clark shot a far higher volume of three-pointers (and shots overall). A key factor in Bueckers’ projection is the strength of the UConn program. Historically, prospects from elite programs like UConn have translated their collegiate success into strong professional careers. Bueckers’ prolific scoring output further solidifies her projection, ranking among the most significant variables contributing to her anticipated success.

Beyond scoring, Bueckers also ranks in the top 10 of her draft class in CSA’s assist projections. While Bueckers is a great playmaker, she doesn’t have the raw college assist numbers that other point guards in this class like Georgia Amoore do. Part of this can be explained by the style of offense UConn runs, where emphasis is on moving the ball and creating opportunities for many players to get assists. Including Bueckers, three UConn players have an assist percentage over 20%, while Amoore is the only one on her Kentucky team with an assist rate over 18%. With a larger playmaking responsibility, Bueckers would surely have higher assist totals, and this uncertainty is evidenced by a slightly lower conviction for her playmaking projection (91st percentile conviction) when compared to her points projections (99.9th percentile conviction). These details about the formation and reliability of predictions are only possible with RBP.

With its unparalleled ability to evaluate prospects and contextualize predictions, RBP forecasts a standout rookie season for Bueckers.

Cambridge Sports Analytics congratulates Paige Bueckers on being selected first overall and looks forward to following her journey with the Wings.