DALLAS — Napheesa Collier texted Paige Bueckers on Friday morning. From one UConn champion to another, Collier wished the rookie well. “Good luck tonight!” Collier wrote. “Don’t do too much against us, wait till your next game.”
Waiting isn’t in Bueckers’ DNA. As someone who has suffered through major injuries and been forced to sit out a full season of her college career, she never takes a single game for granted. And the ultimate respect she could give a fellow Huskies alumna was competing her hardest and trying to bring the best out of Collier.
Collier, in her seventh season, brought her A-game. Bueckers, in her first WNBA contest, still has room to grow to reach that level, finishing with 10 points on 3-of-10 shooting. But the rookie was happy to finally get an important milestone out of the way in Dallas’ 99-84 opening night defeat.
“Being able to have a starting point and then continue to build off that, and then there’s no more questions about what it’s going to be like for your first WNBA game,” Bueckers said. “Now we can move on past that. But there’s a long season, a lot of games, and to get the first one under means that we got a lot more left to go.”
The buildup for this game veered away from basketball more than Bueckers would have…
