With the first pick of the 2026 WNBA Draft, the Dallas Wings selected UConn guard Azzi Fudd, reuniting her with her former UConn teammate, Paige Bueckers. Together, the two star guards led UConn to the 2025 national championship.

“I’m excited to play again with Paige,” Fudd told Holly Rowe on ESPN after hearing her name called. “She’s an incredible person, an incredible player. It’s going to be fun.”

While there hadn’t been consensus top pick in this class from the jump, all signs were pointing towards the Dallas Wings selecting Fudd over other talents like UCLA’s Lauren Betts, TCU’s Olivia Miles and Spain’s Awa Fam. Over the weekend, the Wings spent a lot of money shoring up their front court in free agency, which sent the smoke signals away from post players like Betts and Fam. And on social media, the Wings regularly hinted at the Fudd pick in their graphics (35 is Fudd’s number).

The Wings also had the No. 1 overall pick last year, but the top player in that draft class was much clearer: Paige Bueckers, end of discussion. And this is where things get interesting: Fudd and Bueckers are not simply former college teammates; the duo have a long history together, and last year Bueckers announced that Fudd was her girlfriend.

This makes this draft pick a little different than the norm, and it is understandable that people have questions about the dynamics. So, we thought we would address them head on.

Did the Dallas Wings choose Fudd just because of Bueckers?

This is the subtext of almost every conversation about Fudd going No. 1 overall.

First off, as mentioned above there was no clear-cut No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft. However, Fudd was absolutely one of the players in the conversation for the top spot in this class for years, well before the Wings won the lottery. Is it possible — perhaps even likely — that the Wings consulted Bueckers about this pick, and that they took the relationship between Bueckers and Fudd into consideration? Absolutely. In fact, it could be considered malpractice not to include the face of your franchise in the conversation about a decision this big. The Wings need to make Bueckers happy. There are plenty of examples in other sports, particularly the NBA, of general managers signing particular players to cater to their star’s wants. 

But it is not as if the Wings made a reach selecting Fudd with the first pick. As our Jack Maloney put it, Fudd “is one of the best 3-point shooting prospects ever and won a national championship at UConn alongside Paige Bueckers.” Plus, she is already 23 years old and can help the Wings immediately, unlike a more raw prospect like Fam. Fudd ranked third on our WNBA Draft Big Board in February, but there are plenty of basketball-only justifications for this pick.

2026 WNBA Mock Draft: Full three-round projection as Azzi Fudd goes No. 1 to Wings

Jack Maloney

How long have Fudd and Bueckers been in a relationship?

That we don’t know. But what we do know is that Fudd and Bueckers have been friends for almost a decade. Fudd and Bueckers met in 2017, when they were both in high school and trying out for Team USA. According to Daniel Connolly at The UConn Blog, Fudd wasn’t that impressed with “this skinny little white girl” during try-outs.

“I watched her play and I was like, ‘Oh, I have nothing to worry about this girl,'” Fudd remembered thinking. “Like, ‘I have a better chance of making it than her.'”

But, of course, they both made the team and Fudd quickly realized how wrong she was. The two remained close after that camp, with Bueckers joining Fudd in her hometown of Washington D.C. for workouts, and both went on to be the top-ranked recruits in their respective classes.

Bueckers, who is a year older than Fudd, committed to UConn in April 2019. Soon after, she started a #GetAzziToUconn campaign on Twitter.

It worked: Fudd committed to UConn and the two got to play together in college. In 2021, they shared the cover of SLAM Magazine.

“She’s my ride or die. I’d do anything for her, she’d do anything for me. It’s just, like, you go through a lot of hard times that the cameras don’t see, that the people outside don’t see, and I’ve always confided in her,” Bueckers told SLAM.

As has been well documented, Fudd and Bueckers’ time at UConn was anything but a smooth ride. Fudd was in and out of the lineup her freshman and sophomore years with injuries. Bueckers missed Fudd’s sophomore season entirely when she tore her ACL, and then Fudd missed Bueckers’ junior season because she tore her ACL in practice.

The two finally played a full season together in Bueckers’ last year with the Huskies, and it was a success. They won a national championship in 2025, and Fudd was named the NCAA Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. 

Wait, so have they actually confirmed they are together?

Fudd attended the draft last year with Bueckers, and sat at her table when the Wings picked Bueckers No. 1 overall. After Bueckers went pro, the two began to be a bit more public about the nature of their personal relationship. Last summer, ahead of WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis, Bueckers confirmed that Fudd was her girlfriend in a TikTok video.

Both have been pretty low-key and private about their relationship since then, as they have every right to be. But Bueckers spoke glowingly about Fudd at the USA Basketball training camp in Phoenix ahead of the Final Four.

“I think the best word I can use for her is resilience and the ability to just be so locked in in her work ethic and her leadership and who she is every single day,” Bueckers said, when asked about Fudd’s legacy at UConn.

When asked about how she would feel if the Wings selected Fudd with the No. 1 pick, Bueckers played coy.

“That would be exciting,” she said. “Again. I don’t know all what I can say or what the future holds, but obviously we’ve had a lot of games together under our belt and we won a national championship together, so I think there’s great success in that. But I guess time will tell.”

Has this ever happened in the WNBA?

Now the contours of this situation are unique, with Bueckers being the Wings’ franchise player and the Wings having the No. 1 overall pick in a draft where Fudd is one of four players being considered for the top pick. 

But we have seen many couples play with and against one another in the WNBA’s history, and in recent years, more of the players have been public about their relationships. 

In 2018, long-time Chicago Sky teammates Allie Quigley and Courtney Vandersloot got married. In 2021, they helped lead the Sky to a WNBA championship. Diana Taurasi and Penny Taylor didn’t go public with their relationship until after Taylor retired, but they were Mercury teammates for many years, winning championships together in 2007, 2009 and 2014. They wed in 2017, one year after Taylor’s retirement, after eight years together.

DeWanna Bonner and Alyssa Thomas began dating in 2020 when Bonner joined the Connecticut Sun. They got engaged in 2023 and are now teammates on the Phoenix Mercury. How do they make it work?

“We’re both professionals. We both came in here with our own careers, so I think at the end of the day, we put our careers first,” Thomas told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We don’t let basketball carry over into the relationship and, you know, just kind of keep them all separate.”

Of course, relationships don’t always have a fairytale ending. Bonner was also previously married to seven-time All-Star Candice Dupree. The two were teammates on the Mercury, even winning a championship together in 2014, before getting married in 2016. In 2017, Bonner gave birth to the couple’s twins. They played against each other multiple times after their split, as Dupree didn’t retire until after the 2021 season.

Just last season, Natasha Cloud and Isabelle Harrison were public about their relationship, as were DiJonai Carrington and NaLyssa Smith. Smith and Carrington have since seemingly broken up, and the status of Cloud and Harrison is unclear and, frankly, not our business unless they decide to share it publicly. The point is: It is not uncommon for WNBA players to date one another, and people in the league are familiar with navigating the dynamics.

Could the Fudd and Bueckers partnership end in contentious fashion? It would be naive not to consider the possibility. There is always a possibility of a No. 1 draft pick flaming out or causing friction with a franchise, especially in a draft when the No. 1 pick isn’t a consensus, and this situation is obviously more complicated than the norm. 

But while Fudd and Bueckers are young and it’s unclear when they began dating, they have been navigating the dynamics of being teammates with a close bond under a microscope for years, and have had plenty of success doing so. They have surely considered the worst-case-scenario possibilities of being teammates in the pros and take their basketball careers very seriously. 

It’s also worth noting that Curt Miller, the general manager of the Wings, has dealt with situations like this before. He was the head coach in Connecticut until 2022, meaning he was there at the beginning of Bonner and Thomas’s relationship. Miller is also widely believed to be the first openly gay male head coach in Division I college basketball or the professional ranks.  

If their personal relationship does break down in the future, Fudd and Bueckers have the support systems in place to navigate it professionally.