Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman turned the first night of WNBA All-Star Weekend into a live StudBudz show, and it moved fast from matching outfits to cameos, dancing and Don Julio. Williams was the loudest voice in the room, joking through a hotel-room mess and telling viewers to call the president when she said someone was trying to charge her 1800.
That moment came as Williams got ready for the Orange Carpet and dropped the stream’s first “call Caitlin” reference, a running joke that kept popping up through the night. The line that followed was pure Williams: “where’s Caitlin Clark fr man call the president bruh ain’t no way they charging me 1800. Call the president and tell her to handle this shit man.”
The stream mattered because it was not just a behind-the-scenes clip. It was the players’ own broadcast, and it played like one. Williams and Hiedeman walked around in Dr. Seuss Stud 1 and Stud 2 shirts, then pulled in page after page of cameo energy as Paige Bueckers appeared behind the Orange Carpet area and got the Budz hype. Williams quickly said, “they already acting gay bruh” about Bueckers and Hiedeman, a line that underscored how loose the stream was willing to get in public.
The hotel-room segment pushed that even further. Azzi Fudd took a double shot of Don Julio in the Budz room, while Napheesa Collier, Rachel Banham, Jessica Shepard and Bridget Carleton reunited with Williams and Hiedeman on camera. Dominque Malonga, Flau’jae Johnson and Marina Mabrey joined by FaceTime, and then Dijonai Carrington and Jackie Young walked in and sat next to each other, turning the room into a rolling reunion that never really settled down long enough to feel planned.
That is what gave the $1800 joke its edge. The stream was built on celebration, but Williams kept coming back to a complaint that sounded real enough to matter inside the chaos. The question underneath the joke is simple: what, exactly, was being billed at $1800, and why did it land in the middle of a weekend that was supposed to look effortless? For now, the answer is only that the StudBudz broadcast is continuing the same live formula Williams and Hiedeman used last year, when they pulled off a 72-hour stream, and this year’s version is already doing what it was built to do — make WNBA All-Star Weekend feel unscripted while everyone else watches.
