Paige Bueckers Says She Would Not Pay $10 for Her Own Jersey After Record Auction Sale
Paige Bueckers is the face of the WNBA’s rookie class. She is also the only person in the building who thinks her jersey is overpriced.
The Dallas Wings star just learned that the jersey she wore in her WNBA debut last season was auctioned off for a record-breaking $64,720, according to Melissa Triebwasser of The IX Sports. Asked about the number, Bueckers responded the way she responds to almost everything. With a shrug and a joke.
“That’s insane to me, just thinking about it,” Bueckers said. “That much money is insane to me. I’m just feeling very grateful and feeling blessed that people are that invested in women’s sports. You can see the rise in popularity, the growth in respect. I wouldn’t even pay $10 for my own jersey.”
Self-deprecation is a Bueckers signature, but the $64,720 is not a joke. That is the largest sum ever paid for a regular-season WNBA jersey at auction, blowing past previous records by a wide margin. It is the kind of number that used to be reserved for NBA Hall of Famers and Yankees championship rings, not 23-year-old guards in their first pro season.
Bueckers earned the price tag. The Wings made her the first overall pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft after her decorated UConn career and she rewarded the franchise with one of the best rookie seasons in league history. She averaged 19.2 points on 47.7 percent shooting, 5.4 assists and 3.9 rebounds across 36 games. She won Rookie of the Year. She made Dallas relevant for the first time in years.
Her actual debut, the game the auctioned jersey came from, was not a masterpiece. The Wings lost 99-84 to the Minnesota Lynx and Bueckers scored just 10 points on 3-of-10 shooting with 7 rebounds and 2 assists in 30 minutes. But that is the magic of memorabilia. People do not buy debut jerseys for the box score. They buy them for the story.
And Bueckers’ story is the story of where women’s basketball is right now. The WNBA is in the middle of a popularity surge unlike anything it has experienced in two and a half decades of existence. Bueckers, Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and the next wave of rookies have turned the league into appointment television. National TV ratings are up. Attendance is up. Merchandise sales are up. Salaries are about to get up too, with a new collective bargaining agreement being negotiated for the 2027 season.
Bueckers’ jersey selling for $64,720 is not just about Bueckers. It is a data point about how much fans are willing to spend on the women’s game when the league actually invests in marketing it. Eight years ago, that jersey would have moved for $400 and made local news. Now it sells for the price of a luxury sedan and the player who wore it is honestly surprised, in the best way.
The good news for Bueckers is that there are plenty more jerseys where that one came from. The bad news for everyone else is that the next one is probably going to sell for even more. Welcome to the new economy of women’s sports. Paige Bueckers is its biggest beneficiary, even if she would not pay $10 for the souvenir.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
