The only hole to be poked in Paige Bueckers’ game, following a rookie season that saw her grab a second-team All WNBA honors and the WNBA Rookie of the Year award after being selected first overall in the 2025 draft, was her 3-point shooting. She shot just 33.1% from beyond the arc in her rookie season.
After shooting 4-for-5 from deep in the first half of the Dallas Wings’ first preseason game against the Indiana Fever on Thursday, Bueckers looks like a scary prospect for the rest of the league entering
the 2026 season. The Wings rode a monster second quarter at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, where they outscored the Fever 36-17 on Thursday, to a 95-80 win.
Bueckers shot 5-for-5 from the field in that second quarter, including both of her 3-point attempts during a 14-2 Wings’ run early on. She finished with 20 points on 8-of-11 shooting, all in the first half at Indiana.
Fudd made her first shot attempt, a pull-up jumper from 18 feet on the Wings’ second possession of the game to put Dallas ahead 5-1 early on. She missed her next four shot attempts in the first WNBA action of her young career. She played just eight minutes in the first half, though
Fudd got beat on a couple of backdoor cuts by Kelsey Mitchell in the third. Getting defensive assignments against Mitchell and Caitlin Clark in her first game on a WNBA roster is certainly a baptism by fire for the Wings’ second straight No. 1 overall draft pick.
Fudd found her second bucket of the game with 6:45 left in the third quarter on a nice cut down the lane in the face of Sophie Cunningham to keep the Wings in front. 67-52. She drove and dished to a waiting Grace Berger for a 3-pointer from the right corner with 4:10 left in the frame for her first assist. She flashed a little playmaking ability at times but shot 2-for-6 from the field and mainly used her 16 minutes on the floor to get used to the speed of the WNBA game.
The Fever mounted a 13-0 run late in the third to cut the Dallas lead, which had grown to as many as 23 points, to 76-66, after a driving score and a 1-for-2 trip to the free-throw line on back-to-back possessions for Shatori Walker-Kimbrough in the final 1:10 of the quarter. The Wings did not score in the last three minutes of the third with their second unit on the floor, until Maddie Siegrist corralled a bad pass from Li Yueru and scored a run-busting bucket with 10 seconds left to give Dallas a 78-66 lead heading to the fourth.
Siegrist finished with 18 points on 7-of-13 shooting from the field and 11 rebounds in the win. Backup guard Aziaha James came in and scored 17 points to go along with five rebounds and three steals for Dallas. Bueckers, Fudd and Clark on the other end all sat in the fourth quarter as both teams got a look at the depth in their rosters in the game’s late moments.
