This season, Paige Bueckers has built a reputation as one of the WNBA’s best closers. If a Dallas Wings game is close entering the fourth quarter, chances are she’ll find a way to take over and lead her team to a win. However, in her own eyes, that’s not something good for her or the team.
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“It’s a bad habit for me and the team. If you watch a lot of our games, we’re trailing at the end of the third, and we’re starting off slow in the second half,” she said on the latest episode of Hoops 360 Yahoo Sports Hoops 360 podcast. “We have to find a will to win in the fourth. And I hate that about us. But obviously, this league, it’s like you got to find ways to win, and it might be ugly.”
The two-time All-Star currently leads the WNBA with 138 fourth-quarter points through 23 games, according to ClutchPoints. But as impressive as those numbers are, she would rather not need those late-game takeovers in the first place.
On Sunday, when the Wings locked horns with the Chicago Sky, Paige Bueckers led her team to a 96-91 win after finishing the night with 22 points and 11 assists. In that game, she scored Dallas’ first six points of the fourth quarter as the Wings erased yet another late deficit.
“I wish, and I hope that we’re going to start not waiting until the fourth to really, really lock in and hone in on the details and show that level of competition,” she added. “We want to embrace that for the entire 40 minutes. But yeah, something about the Wings in the fourth quarter, we just, I don’t know, ultra lock in.”
Her teammates, however, see it a little differently. Because Alysha Clark believes those performances are a sign of something much bigger.
“I was having a conversation with her the other day. I won’t go into specifics, but just kind of talking about that. I’m like, ‘Sometimes I forget this is only your second year,'” Clark said during a conversation with Melissa Triebwasser.
“For her, it’s been really fun to watch, just the way that she’s been able to take over fourth quarters, and just evolving in those fourth quarters… she’s figuring this ish out. It’s going to be dangerous as she continues on this path,” she added.
So far, Paige Bueckers has made it work. The Wings currently sit fourth in the league with a 16-8 record, with the second-year guard leading the team in scoring at 20.7 points per game. While Bueckers would prefer Dallas to put together complete 40-minute performances, her late-game heroics have undoubtedly played a major role in the Wings emerging as one of the WNBA’s biggest surprises this season.
But whether Dallas can continue relying on fourth-quarter comebacks against the league’s best teams remains to be seen.