Thursday Thorns always delivers the facts, and we rely a lot on sabermetric analysis for our positions on sports. Well, the data continues to come in showing that WNBA rookie Paige Bueckers is a better basketball player than the overrated Caitlin Clark. We demonstrated before that Bueckers was better in college, too, despite getting a sliver of the attention and hype Clark did when coming into women’s pro ball.

Now, it’s clear, too, that Bueckers is having a much better rookie season than Clark did last year in the league. Last night is just an example, as the Dallas Wings first-year star scored a rookie-record 44 points in an 81-80 loss to the Los Angeles Sparks, shooting an incredible 17-for-21 from the floor. After this effort, Bueckers now has 3.7 Win Shares in just 29 games this year—significantly better than Clark did last year. Hard fact!

The math bears this out: Clark posted just 3.0 Win Shares in 40 games last season, and she was the fifth-worst Rookie of the Year winner in league history. Yet people still claimed she belonged on the US Olympic Team, and somehow she made the league’s honor roll in other ways at the end of the season despite a record number of turnovers and a miserable shooting percentage. We still do not understand why this went down.

Meanwhile, just like she did in college, Bueckers has proved herself superior to Clark in most ways and in the most important value-added ways, too. Yet there is no media explosion of attention on her, and we have to wonder why. Perhaps the sports mediots overpromoted Clark for nefarious reasons, and now they can’t double down on Bueckers without blowing their already mediocre professionalism? We have no idea, obvi.

When you break down the sabermetric value per minute played, it gets even worse for Clark in a comparison with Bueckers: the Dallas rookie is putting up .174 WS/40, while the Indiana Fever guard only managed .103 WS/40 last season as a rookie. Again, Clark wasn’t even the most valuable player on her own team last year, and there still were ignorant folks clamoring for her to be an MVP favorite this year anyway.

We don’t know what to tell you: using 1970s statistical analysis to declare Clark a “generational talent” was the dumbest maneuver by the mediots and the WNBA itself, when it’s clear that a modern-day, sabermetric analysis shows Bueckers to be considerably better on the court. Yes, Clark scored a lot of points in college and in the WNBA, but all that requires is that one take a lot of shots. It’s efficiency that matters more.

Bueckers making 17 of 21 shots in a record-setting game for points scored demonstrates this. The Dallas guard is shooting 47.4 percent from the floor this year, while Clark shot considerably worse last year (41.7 percent) as a rookie guard. That’s almost a six-percent gap in conversion rate, and interestingly enough, Clark is known for her three-point shooting: well, she made just 34.4 percent of those shots last year.

This year? Bueckers is hitting 33.7 percent of her three pointers. Not much of an edge there for someone who is allegedly an “assassin” from downtown, eh? If fans would just learn some data analysis, look up the info for themselves, and grasp common sense and/or logic, they’d know a lot more than they do now just listening to the mediots hype some relatively middling player instead of deciding for themselves. Facts!

None of this analysis includes Clark’s injury-riddled 2025 season, either. This is just a rookie-year comparison, and it’s easy to see Clark flailing away when put next to Bueckers. It’s a shame the mediots fed so much misinformation to the world last year about Clark’s abilities—and then decided to stay relatively silent about Bueckers’ talents the following year. That kind of mediot dishonesty is bad for us all, really.