DALLAS — After winning the NCAA championship with UConn, Paige Bueckers says she placed a giant Wingstop order with DoorDash: $540 for 400 wings and fries, the receipt showed.
“It’s probably my most-used app on my phone,” Bueckers said from the orange carpet the night of the WNBA draft, when the Dallas Wings selected her with the first pick. “No. 1 fan. I love you, DoorDash.”
Social media users suggested she partner with DoorDash, and the company took note, naming Bueckers its first athlete creative director just before she made her pro debut.
With just six professional games on her resume, Bueckers recently picked up another honor. The rookie was named to Ad Week’s 2025 Most Powerful Women in Sports list.
The Wings have certainly felt her impact.
As of May, the organization had sold merchandise in all 50 states and 23 different countries since drafting Bueckers in April, Wings CEO and managing partner Greg Bibb told The Dallas Morning News. The Wings had earned more revenue from individual ticket sales in the month leading up to her pro debut than the organization did all of last season, which was a record year for Dallas.
DoorDash is one of the latest sponsors in the portfolio Bueckers started building in college. When her UConn career culminated in April, her NIL Valuation — a measure sports media site On3 uses to estimate an athlete’s value and marketability — was $1.5 million.
The three-time unanimous first-team All-American has both driven and benefited from the women’s basketball boom, which corresponded with the dawn of NIL. It’s largely because of that new appetite, and the opportunity to capitalize on her star power, that Bueckers began her professional career having earned seven figures.
“[Without NIL] you don’t get to start building your wealth, building your networking, the relationships that you have. It would start at a later date,” Bueckers told The News after a recent practice in Arlington.
Getting that head start has set up Bueckers for success in the WNBA, whose players must market themselves aggressively to make up for low pay, unlike in other leagues where seven-figure salaries are the standard. Deals don’t come as easily for WNBA players who have contended with limited media coverage and typically pull in less viewership than other major leagues, including the NCAA. While some of the sport’s biggest stars have inked lucrative deals as pros, those opportunities aren’t always available to everyone.
“The NIL landscape has reinforced certain beauty standards that endorse ‘blonde-ballers’ and created an inequitable market for those who do not meet those standards,” according to the 2025 Politics in Sports Media report from UT-Austin’s Center for Sports Communication and Media.
In a time when the WNBA is cracking down on online hate, Bueckers has been outspoken about the attention she receives as a white athlete, compared to her Black peers.
“There’s not ever equal coverage,” Bueckers said in a recent interview with Time. “I feel like I’ve worked extremely hard, blessed by God. But I do think there’s more opportunities for me. I feel like even just marketability, people tend to favor white people, white males, white women.”
Building the Bueckers brand
Bueckers reportedly will make about $348,000 on her four-year rookie contract and about $79,000 in her first season with the Wings, but she also leans on a robust sponsorship portfolio that includes Gatorade and Bose, to name two of her brand deals.
The WNBA league minimum is about $65,000 and the player super-maximum hovers around $250,000. Those figures have led some of the sport’s superstars to remain in college, where they can make more money from NIL deals than a pro salary.
Sponsorship opportunities exist for professional women’s basketball players, but they need to cultivate a presence off the court.
Wings All-Star guard Arike Ogunbowale, a pre-NIL era athlete who signed to Nike after going pro in 2019, recently started a YouTube channel.
“I think before that, people didn’t really know me too much. I mean, they might not know me still,” Ogunbowale told The News. “But I think they have a little bit more glimpse of my personality and just my lifestyle.”
DiJonai Carrington, one of the Wings’ new guards and the WNBA’s Most Improved Player in 2024, has cultivated a unique online persona that has led to work with brands such as EOS, Savage Fenty and Reebok.
“With endorsements, it’s completely supplemented my lifestyle and being able to not go overseas and with the current CBA, being able to still sustain for the other six months when we’re not receiving a check,” Carrington told The News. “It’s really important to build your brand as a person.”
Wings forward Maddy Siegrist, who is signed to Puma and credits her agent for much of her sponsorship success, inked NIL deals when she starred at Villanova from 2018-23 and has also landed partnerships since the Wings drafted her in 2020.
“You get a lot of opportunities as a professional,” she told The News. “I think you have a little more freedom in your offseasons to do more things as well, but obviously everyone’s journey is different.”
Creating opportunities
Earlier this year, Bueckers landed a GQ cover and the Chicago Sky’s Angel Reese was featured on Vogue. The Sky’s Hailey Van Lith and the Los Angeles Sparks’ Cameron Brink appeared in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition. Caitlin Clark, Time’s Athlete of the Year in 2024, signed a $28 million Nike deal shortly after turning pro.
Their lives don’t represent the reality of most athletes in the WNBA.
“There’s not necessarily equal opportunity in marketing and branding depending on your following and your global image,” Bueckers, who has 2.6 million Instagram followers, told The News.
Already one of the biggest draws in the WNBA, Bueckers said she wants to use her opportunities to help others who don’t have the same visibility.
Bueckers also took this approach at UConn, where she included her teammates in NIL deals and used her influence to create pathways for minority content creators and advertisers.
As conversations about pay equity continue and Bueckers lifts the Wings to new heights, expect the superstar to uplift her teammates in Dallas, too.
“When I met with the agency, I told them my values. I talked about giving back, using the partnerships to do something bigger than myself. It’s really important for me to involve as many teammates as I can,” Bueckers told The News.
“It’s not just something that’s transactional to where [sponsors are] just getting something out of me and I’m getting something out of them, but how can we get something out of trying to make this world a better place within our partnership?”
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