One of the WNBA’s most compelling narratives is also one of the most sensitive: Paige Bueckers was reunited with former UConn teammate and rumored girlfriend Azzi Fudd after the Wings drafted Fudd with the No. 1 pick earlier this month.
Bueckers confirmed she was dating Fudd a year ago, but the status of their relationship at the moment is unknown. A Wings reporter tried to find that out in Fudd’s introductory press conference by asking a question about Fudd and Bueckers’s relationship framed around their team dynamic and chemistry, but Dallas’ PR personnel shut him down.
The viral discourse surrounding Fudd and Bueckers has since seeped into other teams, with a WNBA reporter recently asking Mercury veteran DeWanna Bonner about the Wings’ pair during her media availability on Monday.
Rather than weigh in on something that very clearly was not her business, Bonner responded by focusing on her personal relationship to her fiancée and teammate, Alyssa Thomas. The two-time WNBA champ didn’t shut down the reporter’s question, which likely would have caused the same hullabaloo as what the Wings’ PR team did. Instead, she plainly stated her own experience dating someone on her team and left it at that.
“I feel my personal relationship is my personal relationship. AT [Alyssa Thomas] and I have been doing this for a long time. I feel like we know how to handle things. We handle business when it’s business, and we have our relationship,” Bonner told reporter Eliav Gabay. “Obviously it works, we’ve been playing together for eight, nine years now. I just feel like it’s personal preference and whatever that people feel like they need to do in their relationship to keep it going, that’s what they do, and we do what we do.”
DeWanna Bonner told @eliavgabay if she has any advice navigating a teammate relationship after the news with Azzi Fudd and Paige Bueckers.
— Hayden Cilley (@HaydenCilley) April 20, 2026
“I feel my personal relationship is my personal relationship. AT (Alyssa Thomas) and I have been doing this for a long time. I feel like we… pic.twitter.com/oflJRBFP4v
Bonner and Thomas began dating after spending time together in the WNBA bubble during the 2020 COVID lockdown and have been together ever since. They got engaged in 2023 and were recently reunited, as Bonner joined Thomas on the Mercury midway through the 2025 season following a drama-filled fallout with the Fever.
The WNBA has seen its fair share of highly publicized off-court relationships between players, but the discourse is at an all-time high with the media and fans’ ongoing speculation around Fudd and Bueckers. Among all the WNBA think pieces out there, Dallas Hoops Journal’s Grant Afseth perhaps said it best with his thoughtful column on Fudd’s viral presser.
Here’s a short excerpt:
DiJonai Carrington and NaLyssa Smith played for the Wings in 2025 as a couple. However, last season the Dallas Morning News did not send a columnist to demand that the organization justify that pairing. There was no 900-word column framing their relationship as an unresolved culture risk that the front office owed the public an explanation for.
... Then a high-profile name arrives, and the same arrangement becomes a crisis that demands a podium confession. If the principle were genuine, it would have applied last year, but it didn’t. What changed is the traffic ceiling.
Maybe the Wings shouldn’t have handled Fudd’s press conference the way they did, and maybe there was a better time and place for the Wings reporter to ask that question. In any case, this saga appears far from over. One can only hope the rest of the W’s players take a page out of Bonner’s playbook and refuse to add more fuel to the rampant rumors over a sensitive subject that has little to nothing to do with their respective seasons.
More WNBA from Sports Illustrated
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- Who Is Team USA Playing in 2026 FIBA World Cup? Full Draw Announced
- Sophie Cunningham Clarifies She Wanted to Stay in Indiana for Her Teammates and Her Donkey
- Caitlin Clark Shares the Biggest Lesson She Learned While Out With Injury
This article was originally published on www.si.com as WNBA Vet Perfectly Handled Reporter’s Nosy Question About Azzi Fudd, Paige Bueckers.
