For 3 a long time we’ve lined many wonderful basketball characters, however some stand above the remainder—not solely due to their on-court abilities (although these are all the time related), however due to how they influenced and proceed to affect basketball tradition, and thus influenced SLAM. In the meantime, SLAM has additionally modified these gamers’ lives in varied methods, as we’ve documented their careers with traditional covers, legendary images, wonderful tales, compelling movies and extra.
We compiled a bunch of people (programming observe: 30 entries, not 30 folks whole) who imply one thing particular to SLAM and to our viewers. Learn the full listing right here and order your copy of SLAM 248, the place this listing was initially revealed, right here.
Paige Bueckers’ identify is synonymous with greatness.
Gatorade Participant of the Yr, AP Participant of the Yr, USBWA Participant of the Yr, Naismith Trophy winner, Wood Award winner, Finest Feminine Faculty Athlete ESPY Award winner—the listing may fill this complete web page.
Her identify is one which the world has change into effectively accustomed to listening to, from her ninth grade phenom days throughout to the Insanity of March.
SLAM has been part of Bueckers’ journey for the reason that summer time earlier than her senior 12 months, when SLAM highschool videographers and photographers would pull as much as her AAU tournaments and be amazed by what they have been witnessing. It continued within the fall of her senior 12 months, when the Minnesota phenom received her first characteristic in our iconic pages.
Not lengthy after that, we received to see who Paige was not solely as a hooper however as an individual, by WSLAM’s first season of “All Eyes On Us”—a digital video sequence that follows a highschool staff by a full season—the place Bueckers and the Hopkins Royals have been on a mission to carry house this system’s first-ever nationwide title. By way of that sequence, the world received to see what our workers noticed each time we sat to talk together with her for an interview: a famous person.
She was a hooper with no worry of going for powerful buckets who had ruthless handles that dropped defenders nearly each sport and a passing fashion so clean that her coaches in contrast her to Magic Johnson.
But in addition, an individual with an aura so particular that she lifted up everybody round her, each on and off the courtroom. We have been together with her when she copped a pair of Jordan XI Breds (a “should have” for sneakerheads, as she put it), and we have been there when she jokingly messed together with her teammates on the bus to away video games.
Then the pandemic shut the world down simply as Paige and her teammates have been within the locker room getting ready for his or her state championship sport, and we witnessed the heartbreak of a possible historic season minimize brief. Within the “All Eyes On Us” season 1 finale, Bueckers was uncooked and emotional about what that season meant to her and her teammates.
As Paige made historical past in Minnesota that season, she made historical past for SLAM, too, turning into the primary highschool woman to be featured on our cowl (SLAM 226). It seems like I used to be in that health club simply yesterday, watching the long run famous person step onto the set carrying “Pinnacle” Air Jordan VIs. That day, everybody knew they have been within the presence of greatness.
Her freshman 12 months at UConn put the world on discover as soon as once more, when she received nearly each award potential in NCAA ladies’s hoops, all whereas making an attempt to recruit her greatest good friend and the highest prospect within the class of 2021, Azzi Fudd. As soon as Azzi locked in her dedication, we linked up with the backcourt duo and shot one other historic cowl, for SLAM 235, the “New World Situation,” a themed problem about the best way the hoops world was altering in actual time.
Whereas Bueckers has cemented herself in historical past with all she’s achieved on the NCAA stage, her story is simply starting. Paige is a competitor at coronary heart, and in what could possibly be her last season in Storrs, she has her sights set on bringing house a nationwide championship. Bueckers can be eligible for the WNBA draft this spring, and whether or not she decides to go this 12 months or use her final 12 months of faculty eligibility, she’ll in the end change into the way forward for the W.
Paige has meant a lot to SLAM due to what we’ve constructed collectively over time. From iconic covers to months of capturing her last season in highschool, Paige is a legend within the SLAM halls—and I imply that fairly actually. Her cowl photograph takes up a full wall inside SLAM HQ. She was the beginning of SLAM’s enlargement into ladies grassroots basketball, and we’ve gotten to witness her journey from the beginning. Whether or not this 12 months or subsequent, Paige will hear her identify known as on the WNBA Draft, and as she walks throughout that stage, you higher imagine we’ll already be cooking up an thrilling technique to doc the subsequent chapter of her journey.
Photograph by Johnnie Izquierdo.