Paige Bueckers had every reason to rest during All-Star weekend. Instead, she used it to study one of the best scorers the game has ever seen.
Bueckers spent part of her break in Chicago working out with Kevin Durant, and what stuck with her most was not his scoring. It was his footwork.
“It’s really fun to see his footwork and his balance and how low he plays,” Bueckers said. “I think he’s almost seven feet tall and he was getting way lower than me.”
She did not just watch. She asked him about it.
“In asking him questions about it, he’s been working on it for a very long time,” Bueckers said. “I see the work, and I see how much further along he is than me. And just watching the little nuances of his game that have made him one of the best scorers of all time in the NBA.“
The connection traces back to Adam Harrington, a shooting and player development coach who worked with Bueckers through Unrivaled, the 3×3 league co-founded by UConn alums Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart. Durant had already praised the league’s concept last winter after stopping by a Unrivaled practice in March, and that relationship carried over into the Chicago session.
“It was through Unrivaled; we had that connection,” Bueckers said. “That was basically it.”
The timing made the workout even more striking. Bueckers had dropped 21 points in a road win over the Portland Fire on July 23, then caught a red-eye flight to Chicago and was back in a gym before sunrise. Durant noticed.
“You a machine bro, you was just playing last night,” he said in footage shared by Wings Bulletin, later reposting the clip to his own Instagram story with the caption, “Is this allowed?”
He also defended LeBron James’ decision to move to the Philadelphia 76ers.
The Work Behind Paige Bueckers’ Breakout Second Season
Wings general manager Curt Miller was not surprised by any of it.
“I was probably still in bed in Portland while Paige had already taken a red-eye flight after our game, gotten to Chicago, and was already back in the gym,” Miller said.
He pointed to that kind of habit as the foundation for a sophomore leap that has turned Dallas into a playoff team.
“It really started during the offseason with an intentional focus on both her physical and mental development,” Miller said. “She’s a different player in fourth quarters than she was as a rookie, and that’s a credit to the work she put in.”
The numbers back that up. Bueckers leads the Wings at 20.9 points and 6.2 assists per game while shooting 49.2% from the field. Over Dallas’ six-game winning streak in July, she averaged 23.8 points and 7.0 assists on 53% shooting. Even though she faced an injury scare while playing against the New York Liberty, that didn’t stop her from flaunting her skills at the 2026 WNBA All-Star Game. Miller also credited her growing voice in the locker room, calling Dallas “truly her team” as the No. 1 pick from the 2025 draft settles into a leadership role beyond just scoring.
None of that has slowed her curiosity. Bueckers and Durant share a reputation as two of their league’s best mid-range shooters, and video from the session showed the two working through pull-up jumpers and ways to create separation, the exact toolkit Bueckers has leaned on all season. Getting that kind of individual attention from a 16-time NBA All-Star, in the middle of a weekend already packed with league events and her second straight All-Star Game start, says as much about her habits as it does about the workout itself.
Dallas returns to the floor Wednesday against the Atlanta Dream, sitting at 18-9 and fourth in the WNBA standings with a real shot at home-court advantage in the playoffs.
