ESPN's top 50 WNBA players list came out with three UConn products inside the top 10: Paige Bueckers, Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart. One college program, three names in the game's highest tier, drawn from draft classes nearly a decade apart. That's not a coincidence. That's a pipeline.
Start with the spread of it. Stewart came out of Storrs in 2016 as the No. 1 overall pick to Seattle, won titles there in 2018 and 2020, took MVP hardware in 2018 and 2023, then went to New York and won a championship with the Liberty in 2024. Collier arrived in Minnesota in 2019 and has been the Lynx's spine ever since, a Defensive Player of the Year and one of the two founders, with Stewart, of Unrivaled. Bueckers is the newest of the three, the No. 1 pick in 2025 out of a UConn team that finally got Geno Auriemma his twelfth national title. Ten years separate the oldest and youngest of that trio. All three landed in the same top 10.
I don't have the full ordering in front of me, and honestly the ordering is the part everyone will fight about for a week and then forget. The durable fact is the sourcing. Three of the ten best players in this league learned the same offense, in the same gym, under the same voice yelling at them about closeouts.
checked the almanac: in the 2016 draft, the first three picks were all Huskies, Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck, off a team that had just won its fourth straight national title. one program, the entire top of the board. that still reads like a typo, and it isn't.
What comes next is the fun part. Stewart and the Liberty host Chicago on Saturday afternoon, which means one third of this UConn top-10 bloc is on the floor at 1:00 PM ET with a title defense's worth of scrutiny attached. Bueckers is the one I'll be watching longest, because the jump from No. 1 pick to top-10 player usually takes years and she is already being written in ink.
What I'm watching next: whether any of the three moves into the top five conversation before the postseason bracket sorts itself out.
