Paige Bueckers is already leading the entire WNBA in 1 statistic

Sipping the basketball fan Kool-Aid starts with casually watching a playoff game in a group setting years ago, and leads to diving into a player’s shooting by zone statistics at 11 pm on a Monday. It’s hard not to, when Her Hoop Stats has so many fun stats to explore, with a fun tool that easily allows you to see how a player ranks among the league in every single category.

Curious about Paige Bueckers’s stats and wanting to truly know where she sat in the Rookie of the Year race, I opened her stats page. I quickly realized Bueckers is not only in the Rookie of the Year conversation, but she should be leading it.

In eight games, having missed a few with a concussion, Bueckers is averaging 17.4 points per game, but that only cracks the surface. Her 6.1 assists per game as a rookie are also impressive, but a scroll into the really nerdy stuff will show off how well Paige is performing as a rookie.

You see, Paige sits in the 100th percentile in one very specific league-wide stat — field goals attempted and made in the 12-15 foot range, as she has 31 attempts and 17 makes in that category. Not just for rookies; for the entire WNBA. She also sits in the 99th percentile in midrange field goal attempts and makes, attempting 49 this season and making 22 of them.

Not every player has a green light to take the midrange shot like that, given the level of difficulty. Tall players operate in the post, and the perimeter is easier to manage when you have space, but the midrange can be crowded and make efficiency at this distance hard. The fact that a rookie like Bueckers can not only operate in the midrange but also do so against players in the WNBA who are bigger, stronger, and more experienced than her shows off how good the young star really is.

Rookie of the Year voters may not take a tiny statistic like that into account when filling out their ballot, but Bueckers has a lot more to bring to the table. She sits in the 95th percentile league-wide for her assist-to-turnover ratio with 2.72 in that category, which divides a player’s number of assists with their number of turnovers, which attempts to put their ball-handling and playmaking into context.

The other two big names in current Rookie of the Year conversations are Kiki Iriafen and Sonia Citron, who both play on the Washington Mystics. While the Mystics currently have four wins to Dallas’ one this season, wins are not usually a huge factor in this specific award, given the best rookies are usually drafted to the teams who aren’t going to win much anyway. Iriafen is currently averaging nearly a double-double with 13.8 points and 9.3 rebounds per game, while Citron is scoring 13.4 points for the Mystics. Iriafen won the May Rookie of the Month award after adapting to the WNBA’s physical post-play seamlessly as a rookie.

While Paige fell a little bit out of the conversation during the time she was out with her concussion and then an illness, she has played exceptionally since returning. She had her first 35-point game against the Phoenix Mercury, and while her team still fell, 93-80, she also scored nearly half of their points.

Regardless, if you’re a fan of Bueckers and also a real big stats nerd, these small categories are interesting to track. Bueckers has always been a player beyond her years when it comes to having a holistic and advanced game, often making her mark all over the court. Niche statistical categories like this prove it.