If I don’t answer your question today, I am keeping track and will come back to it the next time we do a mailbag. Now, like Karl Malone, let’s deliver some answers.

Basketball Roles

Tim F asks, “Seems like basketball is comprised of finding nine players who can compliment each other well and fill specific roles well. What are the best charts to reflect the nine roles and measure their key proxies?”

There have been lots of terms invented for the various player archetypes that have waxed and waned in popularity over the years. “Combo guards” gained prominence in the 2000s, there there was the “stretch four” boom in the 2010s, and most recently “skilled big” (aka Baby Jokić) is having its moment. Throughout it all “three-and-D” went from an archetype to a requirement for basically every role player.

But Tim asked about the nine, MECE1 roles that we can directly measure. Well thankfully, the great folks at Crafted NBA have done a lot of the heavy data lifting to group players into their roles. They ran a “cluster analysis of NBA playtype data to identify natural groupings in how players are used” which returned eight2 offensive3 roles. They named them:

• Primary Ball Handlers: Lead creators who dominate possessions, orchestrating the offense primarily through pick-and-roll and isolation plays. They are responsible for initiating offense, scoring efficiently, and creating shots for teammates. Think Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

• Secondary Ball Handlers: Players who can initiate offense and create for others but typically operate with lower usage than primary options. They often excel in pick-and-roll situations and contribute significantly to ball movement. Think Tyler Herro.

• Movement Ball Handlers: Players who primarily create offense through movement, often involving handoffs or off-screen actions, while also carrying traditional pick-and-roll and isolation duties. They leverage motion to generate scoring opportunities for themselves and others. Think Jamal Murray.

• Connectors: Players who excel at facilitating offense and moving the ball, often operating within the flow of the offense rather than dominating possessions. They typically exhibit good decision-making and contribute to team cohesion. Think Mikal Bridges.

• Roll Men: Players who primarily operate as screeners and rollers in pick-and-roll actions. They excel at setting effective screens, rolling hard to the basket, and finishing efficiently near the rim, often through lobs or dump-offs. Think Jalen Duren.

• Versatile Bigs: Big men who showcase offensive versatility through multiple scoring avenues. They can operate effectively in the post, as roll men, and in spot-up situations, providing lineup flexibility and diverse offensive threats. Think Nikola Jokić.

• Spot Up Shooters: Players who specialize in spacing the floor and converting catch-and-shoot opportunities. They excel at creating space for others by maintaining efficient shooting from the perimeter. Think Max Strus.

• Movement Shooters: Players who specialize in scoring off movement, primarily through off-screen actions and handoffs. They excel at navigating screens and relocating for catch-and-shoot opportunities, often serving as potent floor spacers. Think Steph Curry.

But is that how General Managers actually assemble their teams? I applied Crafted’s roles to last season’s team rosters4 to figure out how different teams went about finding a unified roster that complimented each other well while filling the specific roles needed to succeed in today’s NBA. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the different teams took very different paths.

Click the headers in the table below to sort by Player Role

Only four teams filled out a Crafted lineup fully, featuring at least one significant role player in each of the eight player roles. Those teams were the Cleveland Cavaliers, Dallas Mavericks, Orlando Magic, and San Antonio Spurs. San Antonio was probably the most balanced of the bunch with three “Movement Shooters” (Julian Champagnie, Devin Vassell, and Keldon Johnson), two “Spot Up Shooters” (Harrison Barnes, and Carter Bryant), and one other player in every other role.

The New York Knicks were also very balanced, only missing a “Movement Shooter”, though they have three guys categorized nearby as “Spot Up Shooters” (OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, and Landry Shamet) and two “Movement Ball Handlers” (Miles McBride and Jordan Clarkson).

The Spurs and Knicks, of course, faced off in last year’s NBA Finals, which may lead you to believe balance is the pathway to success. But it’s not the only one. The Denver Nuggets, who finished just one spot behind the Spurs in the Western Conference standings, had the least balanced roster in the NBA. They only filled four of the eight roles, and did not have either a “Primary or Secondary Ball Handler”.5

A couple other, random observations from me:

• Despite not having their actual primary ball handler in Kyrie Irving, Dallas had four players grouped into the “Primary Ball Handler” cluster (Cooper Flagg, Brandon Williams, Jaden Hardy, Ryan Nembhard), the most in the entire league, as Jason Kidd tried to figure out how to play Point Guard by committee.

• Miami went all in on shooting last season with six “Spot Up Shooters” (Simone Fontecchio, Andrew Wiggins, Pelle Larsson, Kasparas Jakučionis, Dru Smith, and Nikola Jović) plus a “Movement Shooter” (Norman Powell). They are doubling down this offseason, having brought in two more “Movement Shooters” in Tim Hardaway Jr. and Klay Thompson.

What stands out to you seeing rosters like this?

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WNBA-Specific Stats

Ben from Newcastle, England asks, “Are there any measures we take for granted because they have been largely developed with the men’s game as the evidence-base that if you had started with the women’s game you might get a different answer or a different level of impact/importance?”

My whole answer to the previous question about basketball roles focused on the NBA, not because I didn’t want to talk about the WNBA, but because Crafted NBA doesn’t have the same data for the WNBA readily available. Neither does CourtSketch or any of the other clustering analyses I’ve come across.6

This is such an astute question to highlight an important issue in basketball, and more broadly sports, analysis. It’s something I often think about, and feel bad about, whenever I’m doing an analysis on the WNBA. Most, if not all7 of the measures we look at as analysts have been developed for the men’s game, then they’re exported to the women’s game, usually without any refinement. Case in point, Stathead, a treasure trove of sports data, can’t even be bothered to translate Win Shares/48 to Win Shares/40 to match the length of a regulation WNBA game.8

And that’s when the stats have been ported over at all. A lot of the basic advanced9 stats in Stathead are just blank columns for the WNBA.

NBA Stats also has a ton of data to analyze for the men’s game that is simply not available on WNBA Stats. Some of the metrics are missing because they rely on camera tracking that isn’t available in every WNBA arena (solution: install the cameras), but others I guess just aren’t tracked? I want to know how many potential assists Jordin Canada has! AWS brought its Shot Difficulty and Gravity Stats to the WNBA site this season, but not Leverage for whatever reason. Make it make sense.

So, usually I’m just happy to find basketball data sites that have in-depth information on the WNBA at all. databallr, pbpstats, ESPN’s Net Points, and the nba_api (even though it’s still called the nba_api when you use it for WNBA stats) are all great sources, and Her Hoop Stats deserves a special shoutout for focusing entirely on the women’s game, both college and the WNBA.

That’s my rant, but getting back to the original question, yes we apply these measures to the women’s game a bit blindly, mostly because we assume the difference is small, and the extra refinement doesn’t justify the time and effort it would take to reinvent basketball analytics for the women’s game.

But we can start to take some small steps. Ben specifically mentioned Dean Oliver’s Four Factors as an example measure, and that is actually something I’ve looked at before. What I found explains both why it’s important to use the right evidence-base, and why we still don’t do it.

In Revisiting the Four Factors, I discovered differences in the importance of the factors in the WNBA vs the NBA; specifically the eight10 stats are even more powerful indicators in the WNBA, explaining a full 98.2% of variance in wins during the 2024 season vs 96% in the NBA’s 2024-25 season. Shooting is also more important in the WNBA as effective field goal percent and free throw attempt rate make up 61% of the Four Factor power in the WNBA vs 52% in the NBA, while turnover percent and offensive rebound percent are correspondingly lower.11

It’s a potentially important difference to keep in mind when analyzing the WNBA, but admittedly it’s a pretty small difference. Which is why we lazily fall back on the measures developed for the men’s game.

Australian Summer Development

Ben also had a question about international leagues, specifically “What impact does a year in the Australian WNBL have on the rate of improvement for a player coming from the WNBA?”

Which I interpret as “Does living in Australia make you a better person?” and from experience I can say “Yes, 100% percent”.

However, if we’re talking about basketball performance, I’m not so confident. In his email, Ben specifically highlighted Jackie Young and Veronica Burton as WNBL success stories, rightly so: both Young and Burton won the WNBA’s Most Improved Player (MIP) immediately after an offseason spent playing Down Under.

I’d also highlight Isobel Borlase this season. She’s having an excellent start as a WNBA Rookie, adding value off the bench in Atlanta, after winning MVP in the last WNBL season. I actually saw her play in person when her Bendigo Spirit came to Sydney to play the Flames. She was awesome, which reminded me of both how much basketball talent there is around the world and how good WNBA athletes are.

Still, the plural of anecdote is not data. Of the 27 players who have received at least one vote for the WNBA’s MIP award this decade, only two others had played in the WNBL previously: Brittney Sykes in 2021-22, two years before finishing fourth in MIP, and Alanna Smith, who is Australian12 and has played several seasons in the WNBL.

Of course players still improve without jumping to the top of the award voting leaderboards, so I did a deeper dive into this year’s developmental stories. Helpfully, I wrote an article before the season started mapping out where all of the WNBA talent had spent their winters.13 Using that information, along with this season-to-date’s stats, we can get a sense of the level of improvement coming out of the various offseason options.

On first glance, that analysis does support Ben’s thesis about Australia: those who played in the WNBL last season have improved their on-court stats14 by a whopping 31% on average, twice as much as any other league. Except, that is entirely driven by Jade Melbourne.

There are only two WNBA players to have played 400 minutes in each of the last two WNBA seasons, while playing in the WNBL in-between, Jade Melbourne and Stephanie Talbot. That is obviously way too Australian small a sample size to take seriously.

Athletes Unlimited athletes have had the next biggest jump. The sample is still small at 10, but those 10 players include Sarah Ashlee Barker, NaLyssa Smith, and Kiah Stokes, who have all been breakout stars this season for the first time in their careers.

Interestingly, players who suited up for Unrivaled, the new 3v3 league, have stagnated year-over-year as a group.15 That’s still better than the players who didn’t play any organized basketball though; they declined slightly. Of course, that group skews older, made up of mostly veterans who want to give their bodies a rest after the grueling, ever-extending WNBA schedule. It makes sense to see slight declines as they continue along the downslope of their basketball aging curves.

Average NBAers

“Long time reader, first time mailbag sender” Nick writes in: “My question for you is, who do you think represents the exactly average NBA player from each era? I know you can look to winsharses [sic] and who is around 0 as a sing [sic]16 of the player that didn’t hurt but also didn’t help their team, but do you think that fully captures the picture? I’m curious who you would say are the baseline players from the 90s, 00s, 10s, and current day that everyone uses as the baseline for how good or bad all the other players are.

Thanks for reading along and sending in the question Nick! This is right up my interesting, random alley.

• 1990s: Chris Gatling

• 2000s: Chris Kaman

• 2010s: Chris Andersen

• 2020s: Max Christie

That’s off the top of my head, but you tempted me with winsharses, so I went ahead and did the data dive.

To start, I looked at players with a VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) of exactly zero. For the 1990s, that gave us 125 players. I then further filtered to those that played more than 100 games in the league across five or more seasons to eliminate players that technically played in one era but are really more identified with the one before or after. That left us with nine players, but I immediately eliminated Adonis Jordan because you can’t be average with a name like Adonis Jordan.

This didn’t feel quite right though. For starters, what are the odds your VORP nets out to exactly 0? And looking at these eight players’ stats, I noticed that exceptional performances in one area cancelled out exceptionally bad numbers in another. Take Rex Walters for instance; he averaged a 20% assist percentage over the 90s which puts him in the top quintile of passers in the decade, just behind B.J. Armstrong and ahead of Joe Dumars. Meanwhile, his ability to rebound was among the worst in the league. Being above average at one thing and below average at another is technically average, but also not at all.

So, I pivoted approaches. Instead, I found the players who were closest to their decade’s median across a number of different facets of the game.17 Basically, this ensures that our average player is close to average in everything.

Now our answer for the 90s is . . . Fred Roberts.

Perfect.18

Using that same methodology, here is the most average player from each era of the NBA:19

Have a question you want me to make a chart about? Send me a message and I’ll include it in the next mailbag!

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Thank you to everyone who has submitted a mailbag question already! As a reminder, if you have any questions about the NBA, WNBA, or anything else you’d like to see me make a chart about, send them my way. I’ll be starting to dig into them this week and hope to have some answers soon!

You can DM me on here or on Instagram or email me at chrisgunther.writes@gmail.com

I’ve been happy with the players I’ve chosen to highlight in this recurring segment; they have continued to prove me right since I hit publish:

• Veronica Burton went on to win Most Improved Player last season, and has led the Golden State Valkyries to the second best record in the W, and the best start ever by an expansion team.

• Natisha Hiedeman is having a career year with her increased opportunity in Seattle, averaging career highs in points, rebounds, and assists. Plus, she started a highly successful run club.

• Jordin Canada is still playing great, and is now starting to get some more national media attention in the weeks since I highlighted her critical role in the Dream’s operation.

But I seem to have settled into a type. Unintentionally, all three players I’ve written about for this “Pay Her What You Owe Her” segment have been undersized, underrated Guards. So this time around, I’m branching out and featuring a frontcourt player . . . who also happens to be undersized.

Emily Engstler is a 6’1” Forward for the expansion Portland Fire. Yes, a 6’1” Forward. There are only seven of them who have played at least 600 minutes this season; Engstler leads them all in rebounds and blocks, and is second (to Gabby Williams) in points and assists.1

The Fire are Engstler’s fourth team in the five years since she joined the WNBA, as the fourth overall selection in the 2022 WNBA draft.2 She’s put together quality seasons early in her career - nothing particularly outstanding, but enough to hang around the league and enough for the Fire to take a flyer on her in their expansion draft, with a one-year, minimum contract. She has already outplayed that $277,500.

That chart above shows the amount of on-court, basketball value produced per dollar of contract value, using Neil Paine’s LAKER player ratings. We see some familiar faces here (hi, Veronica Burton and Jordin Canada) as well as players who have been getting lots of shine for high-profile teams (wave, Makayla Timpson, Nia Coffey, and Natasha Howard). But Engstler tops them all.

That’s a lot of “pers”, but essentially Engstler provides the best bang for the buck. Per3 Neil’s calculations, Engstler has contributed 2.7 wins so far this season, 37th most in the league, despite getting paid less than every player4 ahead of her as well as the next 100+ players below her.

Looking at it the other way, of all the players earning the $277,500 minimum salary for those with 1-3 years of service, Emily Engstler and Rae Burrell are the only ones to have notched at least 600 minutes this season (which translates to 20 minutes per game across 30 games, what a decent rotation player would get). She earns those minutes primarily with her defense.

“Defense has always been what got me here. It’s something I’ve always taken pride in . . . If I’m not scoring, I can still defend. I can rebound. I can communicate. I can make winning plays. That’s what versatility means to me.” - Emily Engstler to WSLAM Magazine

Among players to have cleared that same minutes threshold, Engstler has the 10th highest LAKER rating on defense. Neil has a smart way to calculate his ratings, and what’s notable in Emily’s case is the importance he5 places on steals and blocks (per 100 possessions). Well, per 100 possessions, Emily Engstler is fifth in the W in steals and fourth in blocks. She’s averaging 1.4 of each per game this season, one of just four players to hit those marks in both categories. The other three are A’ja Wilson (reigning co6-Defensive Player of the Year), Natasha Howard (a former DPOY), and Leïla Lecan,7 all of whom average at least four more minutes per game than Engstler.

As I explained in my last “Pay Her What You Owe Her” post on Jordin Canada, Neil and other smart basketball people rate steals (especially “live ball” steals) so highly because they ensure the opponent gets zero points on their possession, and they make it harder for the team that turned it over to get back and set up their defense, leading to fast-break opportunities.8 Blocks, when they are recovered by the blocker or one of her teammates, have the same impact.

So, I watched all 53 of Emily Engstler’s blocks from the season-to-date, and can say that the Fire recovered about half (24) of her blocked shots. That is lower than some of the other elite shot blockers, but still, even if you removed all of her unrecovered swats, Engstler would still rank in the top 10% of the league.

And the types of shots she is blocking are the ones you want to make sure the other team doesn’t get up. Only one of her 53 blocks was to thwart a mid-range jumper.9 She’s blocked 8 three-point attempts and 44 would-be layups, high quality shots that would have almost certainly meant points for the other team if not for Engstler’s presence.

But we can argue about the value of her blocked shots all day. Instead, let’s just admire them.10

Did you catch A’ja Wilson in that highlight reel? She was in it twice. What about Breanna Stewart, featured three times! If Engstler is willing to go toe-to-toe with Wilson and Stewart, the two best players of their generation, that’s proof enough for me that she doesn’t back down from anyone.

Emily grew up in New York City, and honed her game in the city’s parks. In a recent WSLAM Magazine interview she recounted “one of my funniest memories . . . getting my shot blocked off the backboard and everyone laughing because these were people I’d grown up with. They were basically saying, ‘We’re not taking it easy on you anymore’. My response was, ‘Alright, then I’m not taking it easy on you either.’”

She has not taken it easy on A’ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, Angel Reese, Aliyah Boston, or anyone else since.

“I love the “Block Captain” idea because it really fits the mentality I have every time I step on the floor.”

Also, as a reminder, she’s doing this at 6’1” tall.

Neil’s LAKER metrics also make a team-level adjustment11 to account for the quality of teammates around a given player. In this case, that refinement helps suss out Engstler’s defensive impact even more.

The Portland Fire currently have the second worst defensive rating in the league, giving up 114 points per 100 possessions. Engstler’s personal defensive rating is just 108, closer to the Aces’ defense which ranks fifth in the W. None of her Fire teammates have a rating lower than 113. In fact, according to multiple advanced stats sites (Neil’s LAKER ratings, ESPN’s dWAR, databallr’s VPM, HoopJunkie's D-JUNKIE,12 etc.) Bridget Carleton is the only other WNBA player in Portland with a positive impact on the defensive end.13

So Engstler is putting up elite defensive numbers without much help around her. Or as she frames it, “When people compliment my defense, I honestly think it’s a compliment to my teammates, too. My job is only possible because everyone else is doing theirs.” Maybe . . . if their job is getting blown by so you can have more opportunity for blocks from the help-side.

I’ve told you enough about how good Engstler is at prohibiting the other team from even taking a shot in the first place, but when her opponent does happen to actually fling the ball toward the basket, Engstler still manages to make her mark, finding other ways to alter shots and end possessions. Namely, she ranks in the 83rd percentile in opponent effective field goal percentage and in the 80th percentile in defensive rebounding.

I’ve focused on defense so far, because that’s really where Engstler’s “Pay Her What You Owe Her” case is built. That said, she has become a much more well-rounded offensive threat as well this season.

Starting with the raw numbers, Engstler is averaging nearly 10 points per game, a significant increase over her previous career high average in a season (6). That translates into 20 points per 100 possessions (cracking the top 50 in the league), on average efficiency (55.5% effective field goal percentage).

Engstler has always been able to knock down shots, and she even led the entire WNBA in three-point percentage just two seasons ago. The difference this year is the balance of her shots, and especially getting more comfortable in the short midrange. Overall, she has a well-mixed shot diet - 30% at the rim, 30% from the short midrange, 40% from three - but unlike in past years when she was mostly limited to camping out at the three-point line, this season her best shots are those short midrange floaters.

She takes more shots from 5-10 feet than all but 10% of players, and makes nearly half of her attempts, a higher rate than all but 20% of players. Playing alongside one of the best young, emerging Point Guards in Carla Leite, Engstler’s ability to cut, receive the pass, and finish over her defenders has been a successful offensive action for Alex Sarama’s Fire this season.

Emily Engstler’s stats don’t jump off the page, and even the deeper dive into her best strengths leave more to be desired. She has important areas of improvement still to develop that I selectively ignored (e.g., defending without fouling, drawing fouls, offensive rebounding, passing). But keep in mind, she is currently earning the minimum amount possible in the WNBA. I’m not saying to pay her like A’ja Wilson, or even Shakira Austin, Natasha Howard, or Kiah Stokes. But pay “The Block Captain” what you owe “The Block Captain”.14

Mailbag Time!

I told myself that once I hit a critical mass of 500 subscribers I’d open my mailbag for questions from you. Well we actually passed 500 two months ago . . . but I was a little busy getting married! Now the time has come.

Please send in any questions you have about the NBA, WNBA, or anything else you’d like to see me make a chart about! They can be serious, they can be silly, they can be anything you’ve noticed or thought about basketball.

You can DM me on here or on Instagram (@chartinghoops) or email me at chrisgunther.writes@gmail.com. Looking forward to seeing what you’re curious about!

When A’ja Wilson woke up the morning of August 22, 2023 in her hotel suite in Atlanta, she was already one of the best players in the WNBA. She had already won two MVPs. She had already won a championship. Her team was in first place, having won nearly 90% of their games in the season to date.

Apparently that wasn’t enough for A’ja Wilson because when she woke up that morning, she decided she would play that afternoon’s game to prove she was not just one of the best players currently in the WNBA, but the greatest of all time.

The Las Vegas Aces were in Atlanta for a 4PM matchup against the Dream in Gateway Center. Kelsey Plum actually opened the scoring for the Aces with three flagrant free throws, but then A’ja took over. Here’s every basket the Aces scored until A’ja took her first rest:

• 9:02 remaining: A’ja Wilson layup

• 8:36 remaining: A’ja Wilson layup

• 7:35 remaining: A’ja Wilson layup

• 6:59 remaining: A’ja Wilson corner three

• 6:36 remaining: Chelsey Gray jump shot

• 6:14 remaining: A’ja Wilson free throw

• 6:14 remaining: A’ja Wilson free throw

• 5:46 remaining: Chelsey Gray jump shot

• 3:59 remaining: Jackie Young layup

• 3:22 remaining: A’ja Wilson layup

• 2:50 remaining: A’ja Wilson layup

• 2:50 remaining: A’ja Wilson free throw

That’s 16 points in less than seven minutes!!

She would only make one field goal in the second quarter, plus four free throws, to head back to the locker room with 22 points. She scored 13 more in the third, then a ridiculous 18 in the fourth to tie the WNBA’s all-time scoring record with 53 points. It was, and still is, the greatest performance1 in the career of arguably the greatest player in history.

But it wasn’t unexpected.

Three years ago, The Pudding (who I’ve written about before as one of my favorite sites on the Internet) and Russell Samora put out a video using “Game Score and statistics to find the biggest single-game outliers” in NBA history, the so-called “Greatest Unexpected NBA Performances”. I’ve always loved that video for using numbers to answer an interesting question about basketball history, and I thought it was about time to apply the same treatment to the women’s game.

Wilson’s game three years ago was one of the greatest ever, but as mentioned, Wilson had been putting up monster statistical performances for years. While it does stand out on the chart of all Game Scores in her career, it’s not that far out there. Just 11 days prior Wilson recorded a stat line of 40 points, 12 rebounds, an assist, plus 2 steals and a block. Less than a month later, she’d score 38, pull down 16 rebounds, force 3 steals, and reject 4 shots. A’ja Wilson is great, but it’s a greatness we’ve come to expect.

We can measure “unexpectedness” with a math concept known as z-score, which tells us how many standard deviations a specific data point is away from the average of a data set. In A’ja Wilson’s case, her best Game Score (44.6) was about four standard deviations above her then average Game Score (16.3).2

That is certainly an outlier (99.7% of all games should have a z-score under 3), but when ranked amongst every player-game in WNBA history, it doesn’t even crack the top 100 most unexpected games.3

Marina Mabrey’s record-tying 53-point night from earlier this season gets closer, but she has also had a solid WNBA career that doesn’t make her outburst so outlandish. That game had a z-score of 4.4, which ranks 40th, still well below the most unexpected outbursts.

The all-time, most unexpectedly great performance in WNBA history belongs to ***drumroll please*** Amanda Zahui B.

On June 15, 2019 the Liberty’s starting Center couldn’t miss. She made 7 of her 8 three-point attempts,4 13 of 16 overall, and she went a perfect 4 for 4 from the free throw line. That all added up to 37 points, nearly seven times her career average and nearly twice her prior game high. Add in seven rebounds, an assist, a steal, and three blocks and her Game Score was 34.9, six standard deviations above her average.

But then she did it again. The next season, she posted a Game Score of 25.8 (22 points, 12 rebounds, 3 assists, 3 steals, 3 blocks). That’s not quite as strong a showing, but it’s in the ballpark of unexpectedly great, and doing something unexpected more than once makes it feel, well, less unexpected. The difference between the z-scores for her top two games is 2.0.

If we rank everyone by the margin between their top two z-scores, Amanda Zahui B. drops down to third. The true outlier then, belongs to Linda Burgess.

The 6’1” Forward played in the first four seasons of the WNBA, from 1997-2000. She averaged just under six points and four rebounds per game, with a Game Score just under four. Her highest Game Score ever recorded was 17.6, less than an average game from A’ja Wilson. Oh, except for that one time in August 1998 when she went berserk and recorded a 33-point triple double with four steals. That Game Score of 33 was over eight times her average and nearly twice her second highest. It was the most unexpected outing in WNBA history.

Caitlin Clark also sneaks onto that list of elite players with the biggest gaps between their most and second most unexpected games. Of course, Clark isn’t a one-hit wonder. Instead, her appearance here has more to do with her volatility.

She certainly can hit all-time highs. Clark has only appeared in 83 WNBA games in her young, injury riddled professional career, and she already has nine elite games, those that rank in the top one percent of Game Scores all-time.

But she also has her share of lowly games. Among the 180 players who have recorded at least one elite game in their career, Caitlin Clark ranks second (only behind Brandy Reed) in volatility.5 Her average Game Score is a very good 14.4, but a third of the time she’s either below a 7 or above a 21. You don’t really know what you are going to get.

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Before we go, I had to look at the most unexpectedly awful performance in WNBA history. The lowest z-scores on Game Scores ever recorded. It would have to be someone great (to set the high average), who just had a very, very off night.

Sheryl Swoopes averaged 15 points, 5 rebounds, and 3 assists in her storied career, but on a hot summer’s day in June 1998 she just wasn’t feeling it. She missed all 10 of her shots and finished with more turnovers (three) than combined points (zero), rebounds (one), and assists (one). Her Houston Rockets beat Lisa Leslie’s Sparks by 16. Even when she was unexpectedly bad, her team was still expectedly dominant.

Thank you again to The Pudding and Russell Samora for the original idea for this article!

Quigley is from just outside of Chicago, and played her college ball at DePaul so she was certainly excited about the prospect of returning home to play in front of friends and family. She was also excited to get to play with the Sky’s Point Guard, Courtney Vandersloot.

For a shooter, getting on-target passes from one of the best young Point Guards in the league3 was a blessing in and of itself, but that’s not the only reason Quigley was excited to join teams with Vandersloot. The pair had met on the 10-hour flight from Slovakia, where they were both playing in the offseason, to Chicago and hit it off immediately. They agreed to keep their relationship platonic during the season, but shortly after the games wrapped the Sky backcourt announced they were dating.

That, of course, led to the creation of one of the best WNBA nicknames ever, VanderQuigs, and leads me into creating a new advanced stat for measuring teammate chemistry: VANDERQUIGS.

For ease of calculation,4 we’ll measure “value” with points, “efficiency” with effective field goal percentage (eFG%), and “remaining after” will be defined as the amount a given player’s stats increase when they play on the same team as their significant other.5

So what is the VanderQuigs’ VANDERQUIGS? Let’s start with Allie. As mentioned, before finding her home with the Sky she hadn’t had much of an impact in the WNBA. She had averaged just 2 points per game on 44% eFG% to date. After joining Sloot in Chicago those numbers ballooned to 12.1 points on 53% eFG% shooting, increases of 6.1x and 1.2x respectively or an average of 3.7x.

Vandersloot, meanwhile, had a stronger start in her first couple of years in the league, averaging 7.7 points per game with Allie’s same efficiency (44% eFG%). But her numbers also improved once Quigley moved in, up to an average of 10.8 points on 51% shooting in the decade the two played together in Chicago. Running the numbers6 that gives her a VANDERQUIGS of 1.3x. Both Vander and Quigs helped one another become their best selves (on and off the court), but Quigley got the bigger boost (on the court, at least).

That finding is reinforced by VANDERQUIGS +/-.7 According to databallr’s WOWY (With Or Without You8) metric, when Quigley and Sloot shared the court the duo posted a +4.1 net rating (meaning they outscored their opponents by 4.1 points per 100 possessions) over 4,826 minutes together.9 But when Quigley played without Sloot, the Sky posted a -6.6 net rating, a drop-off (or VANDERQUIGS +/-) of -10.7. Sloot’s net rating actually increased to +5.2 when Quigley rested, giving her a VANDERQUIGS +/- of +1.1.

Let’s look at another iconic WNBA couple, Penny Taylor and Diana Taurasi.10 T&T both joined the Phoenix Mercury in 2004, Taylor as the number one pick in the Cleveland Rockers dispersal draft11 and Taurasi as the number one pick in the college draft. They would ultimately play 10 seasons together in Phoenix, and boost each other every step of the way.

Taylor’s scoring (value and efficiency) both increased in Phoenix from her days in Cleveland, while Taurasi’s stats were higher with her wife on the team, relative to what they would drop off to once Taylor retired after the 2016 season.12 Both end up with VANDERQUIGS numbers of 1.2x.

Quigley and Taurasi both retired a few seasons ago, so today’s Point Guard - Shooting Guard portmanteau of note is, of course, Pazzi.13 The Wings used their back-to-back number one picks in the last two drafts on Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd, reuniting the UConn teammates in Dallas.

Paige was a no-brainer selection in 2025, but the decision to take Fudd was, and continues to be, heavily scrutinized. Not because Fudd didn’t have the talent or resumé to deserve the top billing (she did), but because the draft also happened to include one Olivia Miles, who was taken second by the Minnesota Lynx and has proceeded to have one of the best Rookie seasons in WNBA history.

Many have assumed that the built-in chemistry with Bueckers, their franchise star, factored into the Wings decision. They can debate whether it should have, but it’s been undeniable that the two are more effective together than they are apart.

When Paige and Azzi are on the court together the Dallas Wings outscore their opponents by 6.8 points per possession,14 but when either sits that advantage drops significantly. Fudd without Bueckers is just +2.9 (VANDERQUIGS +/- of -3.9) and Bueckers without Fudd is actually outscored by 1.6 points per 100 possessions (VANDERQUIGS +/- of -8.4). They truly make each other better.

Allie and Courtney, Diana and Penny, and Paige and Azzi have all only played together in the WNBA, never against one another.

Well . . . technically Allie Quigley and Courtney Vandersloot did face off in the 2019 All-Star game, which gave us a glimpse into how competitive married professional athletes can be with one another.

“[Courtney] was talking a lot of mess the last week about how she was gonna lock me up, I wasn’t gonna score, so I just had to prove who’s boss in the house.”

So what happens when partners face off in real WNBA games? They come to play.

The French duo of Gabby Williams and Marine Johannes have played each other nine times in their careers. In the two matchups this season, Williams, the Defensive Player of the Year frontrunner, has locked down her Johannes.15 But across all of the matchups, both improve, scoring more points, securing more rebounds, and connecting on a higher percentage of their three pointers relative to their career averages when they play against each other.

Izzy Harrison and Natasha Cloud are the same way in their 16 career matchups; they post very similar averages across stat categories, in their careers overall as well as in their head-to-head battles.

However, not every couple is so evenly matched. Stepping back from basketball, in most successful partnerships each member of the couple has their own strengths and their own weaknesses, and in that way they can balance each other out. Even among professional basketball players, it’s often the case that one of them is way better at basketball than the other.

Marta Xargay Casademont was a solid role player for two seasons in Phoenix. Her wife is Breanna Stewart, a seven-time All-WNBA selection, three-time champion, and two-time league MVP. Stewie has averaged 21 points, 9 rebounds, 3 assists, and 3 stocks in her career; Marta averaged 5, 2, 3, and 1.

But Marta had one opportunity to play against her wife in a WNBA game, and she took full advantage. In mid-September 2016, Marta’s Mercury played Stewie’s Storm, and beat them by a whopping 24 points. Stewart mustered just 14 in 29 minutes while Xargay16 nearly doubled up on her career marks in points, rebounds, assists, and steals. By Basketball Reference’s Game Score, it was the sixth best game of her entire career.

Marta makes a strong case, but in the end I have to go back to the originals. Vanderloot and Quigley are my VANDERQUIGS All-Stars;17 how could it be any other way?

The Nobel specifically cited Kahneman’s formulation of prospect theory, describing how individuals assess losses and gains in reality, as opposed to how “homo economicus” assesses them in the textbooks I had to read in Introductory Mircoeconomics.2

Prospect theory opens up the study of decision making to include concepts like loss aversion (the pain of losing something hurts more than the joy of making the same gain), reference points (judging gains and losses based on their current baseline rather than the final total), framing effect (the way a choice is presented changes the decision), and probability weighting (humans are bad at probabilistic thinking). These concepts are stacked on top of other cognitive fallacies like anchoring, herd behavior, the peak-end rule, the endowment effect, and the hot hand, as well as a whole host of human biases that favor the present, the recent past, consistency, familiarity, the status quo, and more.

Which is all to say, it’s hard for humans to make sound decisions.

The Denver Nuggets have a decision to make.

Their top three players will make a combined $141 million in salary in the 2026-27 season,3 about 85% of the salary cap. Add in the rest of their roster as it currently stands, and they break the threshold into the second apron.4 That’s a scary thing (I’m told. It’s very confusing5), but they do have a way out of it. It’s a very real, very consequential version of the popular social media game Start, Bench, Cut. The players in question are

Most of the internet seems to be leaning toward starting Johnson, keeping Watson on the bench, and letting Christian Braun go to another team willing to pay him $125 million over the next five years. Sam Vecenie and Bryce Simon leaned this way on their Game Theory podcast on the topic. Mike Shearer recently posted a great overview of the situation in Denver, and when I pressed him to play GM he concluded “if you’re honest about maximizing title chances, you probably need to swallow hard and attach whatever needs to be attached to Braun’s contract, move him, and keep Johnson and Watson.” I asked the biggest Nuggets fan in my life, and he started Peyton Watson without “a moment of hesitation” and brought Cam Johnson off the bench.

These are completely justified, completely defendable takes by smart basketball people. Still they may be falling into a cognitive bias or two. I would go a different direction, with the fallacies I fancy.

Recency Bias

Christian Braun disappointed in the 2025-26 season. That much is undeniable. After a breakout 2024-25 season,6 his third year in the NBA, he’s regressed. Scoring is down. Rebounding down. Assists, actually up . . . by 0.1 per game. Steals down. Blocks down. Two point percentage down. Three point percentage fell off a cliff, from 40% down to 30%, the lowest mark of his career by a wide margin.

Smart basketball analysts will look at his Basketball Reference page and come away disappointed and ready to move on. But watching his games (and as a Nuggets fan I’ve watched almost all of them) it’s clear that the reason for the statistical decline was simply a lack of confidence, stemming from an ankle injury he sustained last November. He missed 23 games, tried to come back in January, his body said “Absolutely not!” and he sat out another 12.

“The rehab process is not something I’ve been through,” Braun said. “I’ve never been a part of the injured bunch. I’ve been a part on the other end, where you’re on the court trying to keep things afloat. But it’s tough. I don’t think any of the injuries were preventable things. It was just tough breaks.”

A lot of Braun’s game, on both offense and defense, relies on his explosiveness. He scored 403 fast break points in 2024-25, 70 more than anyone else that year, and he finished a lot of those breaks with dunks over would-be chase-down defenders. Last season, it was clear he didn’t trust his ankle’s ability to support the takeoff required, so in the same transition situations he often settled for softer lay-ups or just dribbling it out to set up a half-court offense.7

The good news for Nuggets fans is that Braun recently indicated that he believes by the start of training camp he’ll be 100% healed and at that point, “everything else will get back to where it’s supposed to be.” The optimist in me chooses to believe him, but the recency bias is pessimistic.

Especially when Cameron Johnson finished the season extremely strong (he had a slow start to the year shooting the ball, but in March and April he averaged 45% from three) and Peyton Watson had a breakout season of his own.

Peak-End Rule

While Braun’s most recent season was a disappointment, Watson’s was a gratification. Despite joining the Nuggets from the same draft class (2022),8 Watson is a year younger, so both had their breakouts in their age-23 seasons. Braun’s was actually better on almost every dimension.

But Watson had the higher peak.

The peak-end rule tells us that people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than on the average of every moment of the experience.9 While Watson’s end-of-season numbers may not have matched Braun’s, his peak far surpassed them.

Nikola Jokić hyperextended his left knee four days after Christmas, and would end up missing almost all of January. As a team, the Nuggets were up to the challenge of playing without their superstar, going 9-5 without Jokić, but nobody stepped up more than Peyton Watson. In those 16 games, Watson averaged 22 points, 6 rebounds, 3 assists, a steal, and a block-and-a-half.

And the thing is, that fits neatly into the narrative10 with Watson; he is an extremely athletic, exciting, high-upside player. It makes sense that he would rise to the occasion, when given the space and usage to show what he can do on a basketball court.

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But the fact remains that it was a small sample. The disappointment in Braun’s season wasn’t just the on-court regression, but the fact that it happened after the Nuggets committed to paying him $125 million. That contract was awarded based on one season of success; if the Nuggets pay Watson what he wants (reportedly around what Braun is making), they’d be making the same mistake based on an even smaller sample of performance.

The sample is small, because Watson got hurt.

Gambler’s Fallacy & Probability Weighting

Humans are not good at understanding randomness or measuring probabilities. Sports injuries are random events that hit certain players with a certain probability. That’s an overly complicated way of saying, no one knows which of Braun, Watson, or Johnson will be healthiest next year or over the rest of their careers.

All three dealt with serious injuries last season (Braun appeared in just 44 games, Watson and Johnson in 54), and they will likely deal with more in the future. Johnson is the oldest of the group (at 30 he’s at the end of his athletic prime, while Braun and Watson are just entering their’s) and has only played over 60 games once in his seven-year NBA career. Watson is the youngest, but as a high-flying aggressive player he flirts with injury often. He’ll rotate hard to go after blocked shots and tries for the highlight reel dunks whenever he can - he actually strained his hamstring shortly after one of those dunks.

Braun, meanwhile, is generally solid. He obviously took a long time to come back from the torn ligaments in his ankle, both physically and psychologically, but if I were a gambler,11 I’d bet Braun misses the fewest games over the next few years among this trio.

Endowment Effect

Studies have found that people are more likely to retain an object they own than they are to acquire that same object when they do not own it. If you give me a mug then offer to buy it back from me, I may charge you $20 for it; if you offer to sell me the same mug for $10 I’d turn my nose up at your audacity.12

So what could the Nuggets get back for these three guys?

• Cameron Johnson is in the last season of his deal before becoming an unrestricted free agent. He’s owed $23m, but is still a very capable NBA starter that teams (Memphis has been thrown around) should be willing to take a flyer on in return for another slightly lower salary, slightly lower quality player going back to Denver.

• The most commonly discussed transaction for Peyton Watson is a sign-and-trade. The Bucks and Clippers have expressed interest, apparently, but they know the salary crunch position Denver is in, limiting what they might offer back. The Nuggets could probably get a few players and picks - the Game Theory podcast I cited above threw out AJ Green and picks from Milwaukee or Derrick Jones Jr. and Kris Dunn and a pick from LA.

• Christian Braun would be the hardest to move because of his last season of underperformance against that $125m salary. The Nuggets would likely have to attach picks (which they do not have a lot of anymore), to essentially salary dump him.

Moreover, as the endowment effect tells us, the Nuggets value Braun more than another team who might want him. But in this case, I think they should.

As mentioned earlier, Braun is a menace on the break. His 403 fast break points are the most any player has scored in transition this decade! Of course, that’s not just Braun’s doing; he’s catching passes from one of the best outlet valves in NBA history, Nikola Jokić. Jokić led the league in rebounds AND assists last season, the first player ever to top both categories in the same season, and he LOVES any opportunity to win on the margins, including and especially looking ahead for fast break outlets. It’s a match made in heaven.13

(As a side note, Jokić and Braun - “big buddy, little buddy” - seem to really like each other, so if keeping Braun in Denver keeps Jokić happy, that’s all the more reason to do it.)

The Basketball Fit

Cameron Johnson is the best shooter of the three, no doubt,14 and that’s what the Nuggets wanted when they got him in the Michael Porter Jr. trade last offseason. Shooting is always helpful in the modern NBA,15 but it’s not the biggest need in Denver right now.

The rest of the Nuggets, excluding Cam Johnson, connected on 39.3% of their threes last season, which would have ranked first in the NBA. Jamal Murray, Spencer Jones, Aaron Gordon, Julian Strawther, Jalen Pickett, Bruce Brown, and Nikola Jokić are all above average NBA three-point shooters. More to the point, Peyton Watson made 41% of his attempts last season (and 44% - higher than Johnson’s average - during his peak) while Braun had a two-season sample of 39% shooting from beyond the arc before last year’s slump.

What the Denver Nuggets need is defense. The team had the best offense in the league, but just the 21st best defense, a profile that has never won the NBA Finals.16 By most of the advanced metrics, Braun is still the best defender among the three, even in his down year on a bum ankle.

He is the one that takes the matchup with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Brunson, Stephon Castle, Anthony Edwards, or whoever the other team’s best Guard happens to be that night. If the Nuggets let Braun walk, who do they put on Shai? Not Jamal Murray, his offensive load being what it is. Aaron Gordon and Spencer Jones are tough defenders, but don’t have the lateral speed for that assignment. Peyton Watson is long and quick, but he’s not the guy to stop Shai. Cam Johnson would foul out in mere minutes. Julian Strather? Bruce Brown? 6’0” Tyus Jones??

The Nuggets also need back-up ball-handlers, which all of these guys are about the same level of “sure, I guess” on, and Power Forwards off the bench given Aaron Gordon’s injury history the last few Aprils, which leans us toward keeping Watson as a back-up.17

All that said, cutting Braun would be the same type of overreaction that caused them to sign him to too big of a deal last summer. Overpaying Watson is the same exact overreaction.

Braun’s stock couldn’t be lower. Watson’s is pretty high, but for a good reason, and I’d take a flyer on his upside just to see where he can go. Which leaves us at: Start Braun, Bench Watson, Cut Johnson.

But wait! Keep scrolling down the “Behavioral Economics” Wikipedia page and you’ll find:

Familiarity Bias - the tendency of people to return to what they know and are comfortable with.

Christian Braun and Peyton Watson are home-grown stars. As a Nuggets fan, I’ve watched them play a lot of basketball, and I like watching them play basketball for my team. Christian is so exciting on the run, as is Peyton in the air. I’m fully succumbing to familiarity, and I’m ok with that.

An Important World Cup Metric

The biggest event in sports last month was, of course, the World Cup. International fans did their typical soccer fan things - from drinking Boston dry to rowing through Times Square - but what was more unusual was how much the US, as a host country, collectively bought into the hype. I saw way more coverage of the 2026 matches than I did in 2022 or 2018, with lots of interesting analyses that got me more invested.1 That also meant more charts, with the star being the in-game momentum bars.

The problem is no one really understood what they meant. Other than more momentum = good that is. if you’re curious, this explanation from The Athletic is a helpful one, but in it Jon Mackenzie also explains why it’s actually not super useful in predicting outcomes.

Instead I preferred this calculation, which perfectly predicted the winner of every match in the round of 16.

Congratulations to Spain for winning the World Cup, but potentially bigger congratulations to F_EDITS for even thinking to look at keyboard key distances’ correlation to soccer games.

LeBron James

The biggest news in the basketball world from July was that LeBron James rejected tidy narratives to sign with the Philadelphia 76ers. Not only do the Sixers get the King’s services for two years, they get them at one of the steepest discounts I can remember. In unquestionably “not a financial decision”, LeBron signed for two-years, $8 million. People across the internet have found creative ways to put that in context (my contribution: he spent five times that salary on a house in LA, just to tear it down!), but the clearest comes from datakabas.

Given all the money LeBron has made in the NBA (to go along with his SAG-AFTRA paychecks of course) this $8 million salary will only increase his net worth by 0.5%.

It also means a return to the Eastern Conference for James, where he hasn’t lost since 2010.

2010!

By signing James, as well as trading for Jaylen Brown, the Sixers lineup is looking pretty well set up to continue James’ run of East dominance. The team can trot out a starting five with two former MVPs and a former Finals MVP, arguably none of whom are their best player (Tyrese Maxey) or best asset (VJ Edgecombe).

If you want to dig deeper, Nekias Duncan and Steve Jones Jr. did a great breakdown of what they expect on the court in Philadelphia next season on the Dunker Spot podcast.

Net Maps

After the Knicks won the NBA Finals in June, designer Johnny Selman overlaid the New York City subway map onto an orange hoop, creating this very cool net effect.

Beautiful.

Seattle quickly followed up with their own city on a Sonics-themed yellow hoop and green background, with Climate Pledge Arena - where residents hope to watch professional men’s basketball in the next few years - centered right at the back of the rim.

A Literary Map of America

My second favorite map design of the month comes from Big Thinkers.2 They plotted “over 400 literary landmarks and travel routes” on an old-timey map of the US.

I liked zooming in on the image, and seeing what classic tales took place next to each other, decades apart; for example, The Bell Jar and Infinite Jest.

Peak Music

I also came across this simple scatterplot in July, proving with data that the best music came out when we were growing up.

Let me know if this holds true for you, or if you are an outlier!

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Personally, I like 70s classic rock and 90s rap much more than this trend would imply, but it is spot on for my age 10 peak year, 2004, when Green Day released the best album of all time, American Idiot.

Understanding Emotions

The researchers behind that music chart were focused on the impact of nostalgia, or longing, which is a combination of hope and disappointment according to this table that fell into my Instagram algorithm.

I’ve talked about (and yes, tried to quantify) emotion graphics before, but I especially like this one for helping to expand vocabulary for the more complex emotions. While we’re here, I recommend the How We Feel app. It prompts you a few times a day to simply input how you are feeling in that moment through a very smooth UI. I find it helpful to remind me to recognize my emotions throughout the day, and celebrate a positive mood or make a change if needed.

Canada1 is in her ninth year in the WNBA, on her third team in Atlanta. She’s won two championships, has led the league in steals twice, and yet consistently flies under the radar. She hasn’t traditionally lit up the box score (that’s changing this season), but what she is good at she is elite at. And the things she is elite at are the exact things that matter most in winning basketball games in the modern WNBA.

Playmaking

Jordin Canada sits at the center of the Atlanta Dream’s offense - literally.

The network of lines and nodes above is Atlanta’s assist network, courtesy of pbp stats. It shows the flow of assists on the team - who finds who2 for made baskets - with thicker lines representing more assists. Here are the Dream’s top five assist pairings this season:

1. Jordin Canada to Allisha Gray (63 times3)

2. Jordin Canada to Rhyne Howard (41 times)

3. Jordin Canada to Angel Reese (36 times)

4. Jordin Canada to Naz Hillmon (22 times)

5. Angel Reese to Allisha Gray (21 times)

Jordin Canada’s assists have led to a total of 475 points this season; add in the 303 she’s scored herself, and she’s been “responsible” for 787 points. That’s a full 1/3 of the Dream’s 2,373 points. It’s 140 more than Allisha Gray. 150 more than Rhyne Howard. 250 more than Angel Reese. The Dream offense simply does not work without Jordin Canada running the show.

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And that’s just the start. Most Point Guards with high assist volumes also tend to turn the ball over a lot. Take Alyssa Thomas and Caitlin Clark. They are currently first and second on the assist leaderboard . . . and first and second in turnovers. Jordin Canada has the third most assists, and just the 25th most turnovers!4

While she’s never been a high turnover player, taking even better care of the ball while taking on more of the playmaking burden was a big offseason focus for Canada. When asked about it she commented,

“That actually was one of my goals this year that we set to lead the league in assist-to-turnover ratio . . . this year was the focus of just making the right play every single possession, and I mean it’s working out so far, so I just want to continue doing what I’ve been doing.”

It’s definitely working out so far. Canada is averaging 3.4 assists for every turnover, easily best in the league. In fact, it’s the third best mark in league history.5 The only two players with better assist-to-turnover ratios are the two best Point Guards of all time: Courtney Vandersloot in the Covid-shortened 2020 season (10 assists to 2.5 turnovers) and Sue Bird6 in 2018 (7.1 assists to 1.9 turnovers)

Forcing Turnovers

Not only does Canada rarely turn the ball over on offense, she is one of the best in the game at taking the ball back on defense. She’s averaging 2.2 steals (perfectly matching her 2.2 turnovers per game), second in the entire league, only behind her teammate Rhyne Howard (2.4 steals per game). By steal percentage,7 Canada matches Howard (3.4%), as well as the Defensive Player of the Year frontrunner, Gabby Williams.8

There are different ways to be credited with a steal; the easiest is to simply be “in the right place at the right time” when an opposing player makes an errant pass or the ball is getting batted around. I watched all of Canada’s steals9 from before the All-Star break, and can say that only about a quarter of them came in these instances (and even then, she often gets to that “right place” strategically and by out-hustling everyone else on the court10).

Another 15% of her steals happen after she deflects the ball and a teammate recovers it. The majority, though, are the result of her simply taking the ball away from her assignment, the way I snatch a chew toy away from my dog. She has 16 straight-up strips and 16 pass interceptions.11

She’ll take the ball from anyone: she has three steals each from All-Star Centers A’ja Wilson and Dominique Malonga, as well as Guards Caitlin Clark and Veronica Burton.

Importantly, all but one of her steals this season has been “live”. Steals are super valuable - an infamous 538 study estimated their worth at nine points;12 a more recent, WNBA-specific analysis concluded four - and live-ball steals are even more so. Not only do they ensure the opponent gets zero points on their possession, they also don’t give them a chance to set their defense, leading to fast-break opportunities for the thief’s team.

Jordin Canada is very good at turning those live-ball opportunities into points. By my count of the play by play data, Canada’s 56 steals have generated 23 layups, as well as an additional four shooting fouls, translating to 52 easy points for her Dream team.

A few of those points have been Jordin Canada taking it all the way to the rim herself, but most have actually been Canada setting up her teammates, which helps explain why Allisha Gray and Rhyne Howard are first and second in the entire WNBA in fast break points.

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Jordin Canada is still able to get more than her fair share of easy shots in the paint as well.

Painting

Canada’s Head Coach in Atlanta, Karl Smesko, is one of the most analytically minded coaches in the WNBA. In the early days of the season, I noted that he had his team taking a whopping 38% of its field goal attempts from within three feet of the basket. That’s cooled off a bit, but the Dream’s Moreyball rate still leads the league, handily, at 72%. Jordin Canada’s shot chart fits right in.

She has made 85 two-point field goals so far this season; exactly one of them came outside of the paint, and it was basically a free throw. That puts her in the 90th percentile for paint shots per Her Hoop Stats, while not even qualifying for the midrange leaderboard. Karl Smesko’s dream Point Guard.

Canada’s float and fadeaway games have gotten much better this season, and she’s seeing the results in improved efficiency, up to 49.6% effective field goal percentage, the best of her nearly decade-long career. She’s also been able to draw lots of fouls, 3.9 per game to be exact, 12th most among WNBA Guards.

Despite the efficiency, Canada doesn’t put up the gaudy scoring numbers that attract All-Star votes. She is “only” averaging about 12 points per game, because she doesn’t look to score that often. She only takes a shot every three-and-half minutes on average. Her usage is eighth on the Dream’s roster.

While she sets up everyone else with dimes, the majority of her points come individually. Over 80% of her made two-point field goals are unassisted, on-par with Olivia Miles and putting her in the 98th percentile - among the best of the best - in self-creation.

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Based just on what I’ve told you so far, you would probably imagine Jordin Canada as an over-sized Guard, maybe with a similar frame to her Atlanta backcourt mate Rhyne Howard. After all, she’s gotta be tall to see over the defenders and find her teammates for assists, right? She’s gotta be big to get into the paint and draw fouls, right?

Jordin Canada is 5’6”, 135 lbs. She is the single smallest player in the WNBA.

Which makes the next point even crazier.

All-Time Rebounding

Jordin Canada is better than 85% of players in the WNBA, every single one of whom is bigger than her, at rebounding.

She’s averaging 3.6 rebounds per game so far, the most by a player 5’6” or shorter in 24 years!

There are six players who have played at least a few minutes in the WNBA this season listed at 5’6” or shorter. Jordin Canada has as many or more points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks as the other five combined.

Pay Here What You Owe Her

All in all, the advanced stats love Jordin Canada. Neil Paine’s LAKER ratings have her second in the entire WNBA,13 only behind the GOAT, A’ja Wilson. She sports a +10 net rating, and every one of Atlanta’s top-five best two-woman pairings feature Jordin Canada.14 Atlanta’s best five-woman unit (obviously including Canada) is the best in the entire league. She’s also Atlanta’s clutchest player, with a +2.4 net rating in the waning minutes of close games.

And yet, she gets paid $650,000 per year, 50th in the league. Her contract is worth about half as much as Allisha Gray’s or Rhyne Howard’s and even $200,000 less than Naz Hillmon’s. Per dollar, Jordin Canada provides the third most value in the entire WNBA.

Canada fits in wonderfully with Karl Smesko’s vision in Atlanta (where she is under contract through next season), but you best believe she would make any team better. So pay her what you owe her, WNBA.

Next week, I’ll have more charts for you, highlighting a breakout season from a certain budding WNBA star, but today I’m leaning into the most exciting (non-League Pass) media event of the summer: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The three-hour epic came out last week, and it had me thinking, which basketball player’s journey has been most like Odysseus’s return home?

Josh Hart.

The Trojan War

For those who skipped the reading assignment in high school, The Odyssey is a sequel of sorts, picking up where Homer’s other epic, The Iliad, leaves off at the end of the Trojan War.1 Odysseus is a main figure in that myth as well, notably for devising the plan for the famed trojan horse that ultimately won the Achaeans the war.

Just like when Josh Hart (Odysseus) helped his Villanova team (the Achaeans) win the national championship (Trojan War) over North Carolina (Troy).2 Like Odysseus, Josh Hart’s NBA prequel ended with a stunning victory, as Nova won that final battle of the season-long campaign with a play almost as famous as the trojan horse gambit, the Ryan Arcidiacono-to-Kris Jenkins buzzer beater.

After the victory, Odysseus moved on to raid the Cicones, just as Josh Hart moved on to the NBA. Both encountered difficulties there, setting them on a decade-long diversion before they finally returned to the promised land.

Island of the Lotus-Eaters

The first stop on Odysseus’s odyssey was to an island of lotus-eaters, whose intoxicating fruit made him and his men forget about reaching home. For Josh Hart, it was the bright lights and big stage of Los Angeles, playing alongside NBA legends like LeBron James and Rajon Rondo, that made Josh Hart forget about winning another championship. The Lakers finished under 0.500 and missed the Playoffs in each of Hart’s two seasons in the purple and gold.

The Cyclops

Once Odysseus came to his senses and sailed on from the island of lotus-eaters, he was quickly swept up by Polyphemus, aka the Cyclops. And who is the cyclops of the NBA? Well it has to be The Unibrow himself, Anthony Davis, who the Lakers traded for after Hart’s second season.

Odysseus escaped the wrath of the cyclops by deceptively calling himself “Nobody”, just as Josh Hart avoided actually playing with Davis by being tossed into the trade as filler. The Lakers trade package that landed AD included much bigger names3 than Hart, who was certainly the last player anyone focused on in the deal.

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The Bag of Winds

After escaping the Cyclops’s lair / Los Angeles, Odysseus was almost back to his home in Ithaca, but was blown off course after opening a bag of winds received from Aeolus, divine controller of the winds. Similarly, Josh Hart’s NBA career took an unexpected, undesired turn in New Orleans when an injury to his right thumb ended his second season with the Pelicans prematurely.

Circe

The winds directed Odysseus’s ship to Aeaea, home of the goddess Circe, who turned Odysseus’s men into pigs. Meanwhile in the ancient-Greece parallel world that takes place in the modern NBA, New Orleans turned Josh Hart into a hawk, a Shetland pony, and a wolf in the forms of CJ McCollum (who played his college ball for the Lehigh Hawks), Larry Nance Jr. (Wyoming Cowboys), and Tony Snell (New Mexico Lobos).

Odysseus and Circe / Josh Hart and Chauncey (Billups, his new head coach in Portland) became lovers for a year, until they remembered it was about time they went home.

Oceanus

Odysseus ended up on the edge of Oceanus, where the living can speak with the dead. There he met the spirits of his mother Anticleia and former comrades Agamemnon and Achilles, as well as the prophet Tiresias, who told Odysseus he will return home soon, but must first undertake another journey.

Josh Hart ended up in New York City, eventually with Karl-Anthony Towns. Towns’s mother very sadly passed away from Covid complications in 2020, but remained a major source of inspiration and strength for Karl, and in turn Hart and the entire Knicks team throughout their journey together in New York.

The Sirens

Despite having renewed faith that they would one day accomplish their goals of returning home or winning a championship, Odysseus and Josh Hart both had more obstacles to overcome, starting with the Sirens. Odysseus and his crew had to endure and resist the enticing songs that had lured many previous sailors to their deaths, while Hart and the Knicks had to endure and resist the vitriolic criticism from sports talk shows and New York fans alike that had dismantled previous teams. Calls to bench Hart abounded throughout the season, but then just as quickly were replaced by praise. This meme from Mike Shearer of Basketball Poetry succinctly captures the fan relationship with Josh Hart.

Scylla & The Whirlpool

Hart and the Knicks made it through the Regular Season media circus, only to have to face a scary lineup of Eastern Conference foes in the Playoffs: CJ McCollum, Jalen Johnson, Tyrese Maxey, Joel Embiid, Donovan Mitchell, and James Harden to name a few. They got past them all, with relative ease, just as Odysseus skirts the many-headed monster Scylla.

Helios & His Cattle

Having gotten past the whirlpool and multi-headed monster, Odysseus faced his final enemy, the sun god Helios, who asked Zeus to punish Odysseus and his men after they ate his sacred cattle. Victor Wembanyama, another towering, otherworldly figure like Helios, from the cattle-raising city of San Antonio, Texas, tried to punish the Knicks as well, but Hart’s team ultimately prevailed.

Calypso

Finally, Odysseus washed up on the shore of Ogygia where he met Calypso, who took him captive as her lover until Athena (Jalen Brunson) helped to free her old friend (Josh Hart). Athena always had an affinity for Odysseus, dating back to the Trojan War a decade before, and served as his fiercest advocate on Mount Olympus. She appreciated that, unlike other Greek heroes who relied primarily on brute strength, Odysseus succeeded through intellect, adaptability, and persistence. Sound like a certain player you know?

Return Home

Together Athena and Odysseus / Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart returned to the promised land. 10 years after the end of the Trojan War Odysseus made it home.4 Exactly 10 years after winning a college championship, Josh Hart won an NBA championship. It was a long road, full of twists and turns, friends and foes for Josh Hart.

It was the NBA’s odyssey.

Not all of my predictions proved accurate (the Dallas Wings have been better than expected, the Seattle Storm worse), but that should serve as a reminder that certain teams are breaking from expectations despite their schedule quirks so far.

If you’re the type of person who likes watching the “previously on” segments before TV shows, check out my post from last season recapping the 2025 WNBA. One of the topics I wrote about was the “head-scratching schedule”:

This year’s schedule was just weird at times. It seemed like every game I tuned into, the announcers brought up the strange stretch one of the teams was in the midst of, often with the coach’s platitude “We can’t use that as an excuse. All the teams have to deal with something similar at one point or another.”

Rest days were down, back-to-backs were up, and matchups were clumped together, leading to, at any given point, overly long breaks between games, rapid back-to-backs, or “baseball series” where two teams faced off multiple times in a short stretch. The Minnesota Lynx were given one of the most annoying schedules in this regard, despite being a preseason favorite to win the whole league.1 They finished as the best team in the regular season anyway, but it was a head-scratching choice by the WNBA.

The 2026 schedule is out, and it appears the league is doubling-down on weirdness.

For starters, the league has scheduled even more “baseball series”, clumping more and more matchups together. About one of every five games will feature two teams who just recently played one another in the three games prior, meaning that just about every night there will be some recent rematch on the slate of games.

Last season the Lynx faced off against the same team twice within four games nine different times, the most in the league. This season, they’ll do it 10 times.

Minnesota’s schedule will include five immediate rematches (playing the same team two times in a row), including one stretch where they play the Liberty, then the Sun twice, then the Liberty again. Perhaps the weirdest stretch, however, will be the Storm from mid-July to mid-August:

Generally, I (and I would think most fans) prefer matchups be spread out. We like variety throughout the season, and we don’t like having to wait months to see our favorite teams or players square off. Especially if we happen to be busy the one week they do finally meet (if you’re a Storm fan who’s out of town the week of August 10, sorry, you don’t get to see the Sky this season).

Worse, if a player rolls an ankle, twists a wrist, or sustains any other minor injury (and there were lots of injuries last season) that keeps them out even for just a few days, this way of scheduling makes it more likely that they will miss an opponent entirely. Last season, the previous year’s Finalists, the Lynx and Liberty, didn’t play until the end of July, at which point both teams were banged up. As a result, Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier still haven’t played against one another in the WNBA since the 2024 Finals.

To their credit, the league does seem to have realized and learned from that specific scheduling mistake, and this year they are featuring the biggest matchups early on. Last year’s Finalists, the Aces and Mercury, play one another in their very first games of the season.2 Opening weekend will also feature the Dallas Wings visiting the Indiana Fever (Paige Bueckers vs Caitlin Clark), the Valkyries at the Storm (Gabby Williams against her former team), and the Aces visiting the Los Angeles Sparks (Kelsey Plum and Dearica Hamby facing their former team).

But still, with the “schedule clumping” we’ll have to wait a while for some of the best matchups; Phee and Stewie still aren’t scheduled to play each other until July!

One thing the league can’t fix, without a major reversal of strategy, is the number of rest days. The schedule remains at 44 games this season, up from 34 just a few seasons ago. The league has crammed more games into essentially the same window of time, resulting in fewer days between games. As Rebecca Lobo pointed out, ideally players would get three or four days off to rest and recover their bodies; instead they’re getting one or two, and sometimes none.

Overall, the average number of days between games will hold steady at just 2.7,3 and half of the games played this season will come with zero or one days of rest. The Storm have it easiest in this regard, playing just 19 of their 44 games with a day or less of rest, while the Dream have to play 26 games with limited recovery time.

But, the league does appear to have been thoughtful about who gets those back-to-backs, and when. Being nestled up in the Pacific Northwest, the Seattle Storm have to fly pretty far to get to most of their opponents’ arenas for away games. All in, their schedule has them flying over 35,000 miles this season, second most in the entire league.

That’s fewer miles than in prior years, before the Storm had neighboring teams in Portland and San Francisco; in 2024 the Storm’s closest opponent was the Las Vegas Aces, 900 miles away. Compare that to Chicago, Atlanta, or Indiana who each have eight opponents within 900 miles. Those more centralized teams are only scheduled to travel between 24,000 and 26,000 miles this season.

Generally, it appears the league has done a good job balancing rest and travel, giving the teams that fly the farthest more days between games.

Someone still has to have the hardest path though, and once again it appears to be the pre-season favorite. Here’s a summary of the Las Vegas Aces’ schedule:

• Rematches: 5 (2nd most of 15 teams in the WNBA)

• Baseball Series: 8 (6th)

• Back-to-Backs: 3 (1st)

• Games on One Day of Rest: 22 (5th)

• Miles Flown: 33,000 (5th)

Plus, as the defending champions they will get every team’s best effort every night. They’ll have targets on their backs all season, and millions of eyes on them every night. Especially given that most of their games are in the Thursday and Sunday primetime slots.

Thankfully for the Aces, the start of their season is relatively easy. After the opening night Finals rematch against the Phoenix Mercury (who, again, they swept) the Aces’ next 10 games include 9 against teams who finished in the bottom half of the league in 2025. A 11-0 start for the Aces is not out of the question, and would be very scary for the rest of the league.

That said, the Liberty and Lynx may be undefeated at that quarter-point mark as well! They have two of the easiest schedules in the league, and these three teams - the Aces, Liberty, and Lynx - don’t play one another until mid-June.

Most expect all three of those teams to finish near the top of the table, so a strong start wouldn’t be all that unexpected. Instead, we’ll probably end up overreacting to the Storm. In their first 10 games they get the Connecticut Sun (11-33 last season) three times, the Mystics (16-28) twice, the expansion Toronto Tempo twice, and the Dallas Wings (10-34) once. Despite losing most of their team in the offseason, Seattle could pretty easily find themselves with 8 wins in their first 10 tries.

On the other hand, as fun as it will be to watch the duo of Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd playing together in Dallas for a few games, from a competitive standpoint the Wings’ season may be over before it begins. They open their season in Indiana, then host the Atlanta Dream and Minnesota Lynx, all Playoff teams in 2025. The schedule cools off a bit with games against the Mystics and in Chicago, but both of those teams have wholly revamped their rosters from a season ago and should be much more competitive. Then they have to play the Dream again, then the Liberty, then the Aces. If Dallas comes out of that opening stretch with a record of 2-6, that’d be a win.

Of course, the 2026 rosters for many teams in the W look very different than they did last season. In addition to drafting Azzi Fudd, the Wings swiped the Lynx backcourt of Alanna Smith and Jessica Sheppard. Will these new teammates gel quickly enough to be prepared for the early season gauntlet? Will the Aces be up to the challenge of defending their title despite all of their schedule quirks? Will one of the expansion teams surprise everyone the way Golden State did last season? Will Napheesa Collier continue trying to get Kathy Englebert fired? We’ll find out soon, as the WNBA kicks off for real next Friday, May 8.

A bit of context: I wrote a (forthcoming) book, a history of the Chicago Sky, a few years back and while I was writing the part about when Allie Quigley joins the team, Ellen got Covid. I did not, so we quarantined separately in our Chicago apartment, but then I missed her so we FaceTimed as I wrote. I mentioned to her that Quigley and her teammate Courtney Vandersloot were married, creating one of the best WNBA nicknames ever: VanderQuigs.

What are other great Sky nicknames, you ask? Ellen did not, but I told her anyway, which led to this conversation.

Sky Nicknames as Reacted to by My Girlfriend Wife

We did not start off strong.

Ellen: “I literally can’t name a single Sky nickname. That is such a niche topic.”

It got better.

Ellen: “Oh you mean like KFC for Kahleah ‘F**king’ Copper”?

Chris: “Yes, that’s a nickname.”

Ellen: “Oh, ok. Well that’s the best. But she’s like the opposite of the KFC guy. *In the colonel’s accent* ‘Finger-licking good.’ She’s not a fast-food restaurant. That’s the only issue I have with it.”

Overall, she was not impressed with most nicknames:

EDD (Elena Delle Donne): “Boring. She’s such a cool human. She could do better. She has so many cool names in there I feel like people just aren’t putting their brains together. Like even if they called her ‘Eddy’. Like sometimes I sign emails ‘ED’ [her initials]. No one ever calls me Ed, which is good, but it’s there.”

Big Mama Stef (Stefanie Dolson): “No comment. She did nothing for my fantasy team so I dropped her.”

Sweet Syl (Sylvia Fowles): “I don’t know who that is.1 Of all the WNBA players you tell me about, the only ones who are sticking in my head are the ones I’ve seen play live.”

Sky (Skylar Diggins2): “That’s not a nickname. That’s just like calling you Chris. Put it at the bottom.”

We then drifted back to KFC.

Ellen: “Honestly KFC should look into a brand sponsorship at this point.”

Saucy Syd (Sydney Colson): “Don’t know her so can’t make a true judgment. It’s fine, middle of the pack. Is she saucy, who’s to say?”

Ellen: “I could really go for some Sour Patch Watermelons. If I do all of these will you get me Sour Patch Watermelons?”3

CP3 (Candace Parker): “Is that a Star Wars reference?”

Chris: “No. Her initials are CP and she wears number three, so CP3.”

Ellen: “Ok, but it still sounds like C-3P0. CP3 is, I think, a robot though. *Reading off Google* ‘He was involved in some of the galaxy’s most defining moments and thrilling battles’ ok yeah, sure. Even if it is Star Wars adjacent,4 it does feel fitting.”

Ellen: “Look what you turned me into! The space in my brain for WNBA facts is far larger than I ever thought it would be.”5

Betnijay Laney: *Before I could read the nickname* “That’s a nickname?!”

Naj (Betnijay Laney): “That’s cute. Is she tiny?”

Chris: “No.”

Ellen: *Sad voice* “Oh. But in basketball terms?”

Chris: “Still no.”

Ellen: *Disappointed voice* “K. I was picturing a little Naj with Lil Nas X.”

Em-V-P (Emma Meesseman): “That’s false advertising. She’s not an MVP. A wee bit misleading. -10”6

KLS/Lou (Katie Lou Samuelson): “KLS are just her initials. Low effort. Lou is just the middle of those names, not even a nickname. She tried twice, and failed.”

Panda (Kristi Toliver): “Feels rogue and disconnected from what she does.” *Upon learning that EDD calls her Panda* “That’s a redeeming factor. Still not good, but I’ll allow it.”

CoCo (Coach James Wade): “No comment.”

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There were a few she (maybe?) liked:

Spooky G (Gabby Williams): “Does she love Halloween?? If she loves Spooky Season, that’s cute. Otherwise, sure it’s fine.”

Piph (Epiphanny Prince): *Thinking* “mmh” *Still thinking*. “First thought is that it would fit well in a children’s story book. You know, ‘Prince’, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. I would put Piph towards the top. I’m glad they didn’t do something with Prince; too easy.”

VanderQuigs (Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley): “I think this wins. It’s just, the best. Ultimate power couple.”

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She was not pleased with VanderQuigs’ other nicknames though:

Quigl3y (Allie Quigley): “No. Quigley’s already had enough. VanderQuigs is so good don’t try to do anything on top of that. Neither Quigley nor Vandersloot can have another nickname. Also if you can’t say it, it’s not a nickname. It’s something people call you. -10.”

Sloot (Courtney Vandersloot): “They can be Quigs or Sloot. Like I like when the crowd goes ‘Slooooooooot’. But that’s it. I like when they make part of the name more fun.”

Rookies Better than Jim Morris

Rookies dominated the 2024 WNBA season. Caitlin Clark led the league in assists, with more per game than anyone in history not named Courtney Vandersloot.1 Angel Reese led the league in rebounding, shattering the previous record. Cameron Brink was on pace to lead the league in blocks before she succumbed to injury. Leonie Fiebich had the league’s best true shooting percentage among non-Centers and was a critical piece of the Liberty’s championship run. Kamilla Cardoso, Rickea Jackson, and Aaliyah Edwards all had great first seasons as well.

Future lottery picks will almost certainly keep this rookie dominance going. Later this year we’ll see Paige Bueckers in the WNBA, alongside fellow rookies Sonia Citron, Aneesah Morrow, Hailey Van Lith, and more. The next year we’ll get Olivia Miles, Flau’jae Johnson, and Lauren Betts. Then Juju Watkins and Hannah Hidalgo. The future of the WNBA is in good hands.

For comparison, among the top eight 2024 NBA draft picks, Alex Sarr and Donovan Clingan are the only ones to break the top-20 leaderboard in any stat (blocks for both, as well as some rebounding efficiency numbers Clingan).2 Most casual fans can’t even tell you who was drafted into the NBA last year. Actually, even diehard fans can’t.

There are a few structural differences between the WNBA and NBA that drive this discrepancy. First, to be eligible for the W draft players must be “four years removed from high school graduation, or turn at least 22 years old during the year in which the draft takes place”. If that rule applied in the NBA, we wouldn’t have seen Giannis Antetokounmpo in the league until what was, in reality, his fourth year when he won the Most Improved Player award, made an All-Star team, and finished seventh in MVP voting.

To take another example, Paige Bueckers and Jalen Suggs were often linked during their college freshman seasons as two March Madness stars and friends from the same hometown. Now Suggs is wrapping up his fourth NBA season, while Paige is still in Storrs playing for UConn.

Additionally, the WNBA is a smaller league with just 12 teams to the NBA’s 30, and a max of 12 players per team vs 183 in the NBA. Add it all up and it’s a much smaller pool: 144 women vs 540 men.

As a result, we might expect the best players in the WNBA to make a bigger splash immediately upon entering the league. Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink are the latest examples of amazing rookies, but top WNBA players have always established dominance early in their careers.

The top players hit ~20 PER in their first season (well above average), increase slightly from there, then drop back to where they started by about years 9-10. This trend has held fairly reliably for the last 25 years (the 1990s are different since the league started in 1997 and top players were already at or past their primes when they entered the league as “Rookies”).

We can also look directly at the best players’ careers to see how they started. 16 different women have won WNBA MVP. Here’s how their rookie year compares to their best year in terms of PER.

On average, MVPs hit 81% of their peak efficiency in Year 1. Granted, the older years are a bit misleading given Cynthia Cooper and Yolanda Griffith were in their late-20s / early-30s when the WNBA started, but the Tamika Catchings 100% bar is legit. By a number of metrics, she had her best (and anyone’s best) season as a rookie.

A few years after Catch, Candace Parker had the most famous rookie season in WNBA history. After years of hype, Parker took the WNBA by storm in 2008, posting one of the most efficient years ever and winning MVP in addition to Rookie of the Year.

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Parker stands alone as the only woman to win both awards in the same year,4 but it is not at all uncommon for rookies to be considered in the MVP competition. 19 different WNBA rookies have finished top five in MVP voting within their first three years in the league. Luka Dončić is the only NBA player to do that this century, squeaking in at fourth place in his third year.

Looking at it another way, 11 different rookies have made an All-WNBA team since 2000. Even though the NBA has three award teams to the WNBA’s two, no NBA rookie has made a team in that time period. Not LeBron. Not Derrick Rose. Not Luka. Not Wemby. Not even Anthony Bennet. Caitlin Clark? Check

Despite all the hype for Cooper Flagg, Bueckers will make an all-league team before him. JuJu Watkins, who won’t be in the WNBA until at least 2027, will too. Heck, based on the stats above, there’s a 13-year-old girl5 out there somewhere who will probably get an MVP vote before Cooper Flagg.

The women understand the assignment and show up on time. Which adds a little more credence to my question from last week to NBA players: “What took you so long to get so good?”

Regression to the Mean

What about the late bloomers? What does the trend look like for Most Improved Players (MIPs) in the W? Here the story is similar to that in the NBA, but with an even more satisfyingly sine-wavey answer:

WNBA MIPs follow a very in-line-with-expectations trajectory, starting their careers slightly below average before having a big breakout season, then regressing back to just above league average.

So, straightforward. But not exactly standard, as the average hides some pretty interesting career arcs.

• Satou Sabally’s improvement was not being hurt. She won MIP the first year she played more than 17 games, and a year after being limited to 11 games by injury

• Leilani Mitchell won MIP twice in her very spiky, up-and-down career

• Jonquel Jones is by far the best MIP. Her PER before winning was higher than any other MIP’s in the season they won

• Elizabeth Williams has a very stable efficiency for a MIP

• Kelsey Bone regressed to below the mean, and was out of the league shortly after her MIP

• Kia Vaughn has the largest single year PER jump going from 4.4 to 16.4 (+272%!)

• Kelly Miller and Wendy Palmer tied for MIP in 2004. They obviously did not consider advanced stats then, as Miller’s PER dropped 2.5 points as part of a big downward trend, while Palmer’s rose 5.2.

With some notable exceptions, the WNBA MIPs don’t hold onto their efficiency gains very strongly. Perhaps that’s because they have to deal with a new crop of amazing rookies each year.

So if the strategy for success in the NBA is either get a little better each year or get a lot better one year and stay that good, if you want to be a really good WNBA player the strategy is … already be really good at basketball before you play in the WNBA.

1

Lest you forget how good Courtney Vandersloot is at passing:

Of course, you can chart things other than hoops, and I did come across lots of cool charts in June; these are six of my favorites.

Popular Dog Breeds

Now that I’m back in the US, I’m getting closer and closer to finally getting a dog,1 so this line chart grabbed my attention. It shows the popularity of over one hundred different dog breeds in the US over the last three-and-a-half decades. There’s lots of interesting trends to explore in the interactive version, but a few things stood out to me:

• The Labrador Retriever was dethroned after 30+ years as the most popular breed, as the French Bulldog capped off its rapid ascent to the top. (Note: This doesn’t include mixes, or else I’m sure [insert breed]doodle would be up there, based on my friends’ dogs at least).

• The live action version of One Hundred and One Dalmatians came out in 1996. Five years later Dalmatians had fallen 60 places in the rankings.

• Vizslas (what I want to adopt!) are growing in popularity, but still low enough to make me feel unique.

Dads

Father’s Day happened in June, so Derek Thompson reposted his article “How American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were” which was originally published in April. The overall finding is that “Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids”, and this waterfall chart shows where that time has come from: mostly less time commuting to and working in an office.

Interesting that the net of the WFH revolution is 44 fewer minutes actually working (don’t tell the remote job I’m currently interviewing for).

Dads today are also somehow fitting in an extra half hour of sleep vs what their dads got, maybe driven by the increased focus on the importance of sleep from fitness trackers like the Apple Watch and Oura Ring …

Oura Tree Rings of Life

One dad, who also happens to be a data scientist at Oura, visualized his sleep over six years, 2,396 nights, in this very pleasing “clock chart”.

As he explains it, “each day is one full circle: midnight at the top, noon at the bottom. Days move from oldest in the centre to most recent at the edge. Awake segments are orange; sleep segments are blue.” He also noted the seasonal rhythms he goes through living in Finland: “Every winter, my sleep gets longer, peaking around the Christmas holidays. Every summer, it contracts again.”

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NBA Superstar Share of Payroll

New York Knicks fans sleep got a lot shorter in June as well, as the team won its first title in 53 years and the city that never sleeps celebrated all week long.2 OG Anunoby’s Game 4 tip in was the defining moment of the series, and the season, but he likely wouldn’t have even been in New York if it wasn’t for Jalen Brunson’s selflessness. When he resigned with the Knicks in 2024, Brunson took a smaller contract than he could have, leaving over one hundred million dollars on the table, money that the Knicks used to sign OG.

That anecdote inspired Nike Culver to make this interactive bar chart showing the share of salary cap dedicated to each star player for any team of the last 25 years; you can see Brunson’s (relatively) small contract here for the championship Knicks (compared to KAT, or mid-10s Carmelo Anthony).

The Championship Celtics (2023-24) and Warriors (2014-15) teams are also interesting.

Knockoff KFC

One of the fun side effects of the World Cup is international tourists discovering US food; as an example, Kraft is now making TSA-compliant Ranch dressing for the Europeans to take home.

But Europeans already knew about KFC and their famous fried chicken from … Colorado. Ste Jormour on Bluesky compiled some “extremely important lunchtime data”, visualizing the number of knockoff Kentucky Fried Chicken’s by wrong state.

There’s a whole bunch more on the Bluesky thread, including a sleuth user finding a TripAdvisor review of Alaska Fried Chicken complaining that the “chicken was cold.”

WNBA Gay Pride

June was also, of course, Pride Month and the WNBA knows how to celebrate. From A’ja Wilson’s cake and Instagram comments to Gabby Williams doing it “for the GAYS!” the WNBA shows its pride as well as anyone.

There’s even an Instagram account dedicated to highlighting the gay players in the WNBA, and while it has caused some accidental hard launches before, this year’s list is simply a celebration of everyone in the WNBA (especially on the Wings and Aces).

The debate is far from over, however, as these two will forever be linked through their place at the top of this draft class. Their accomplishments will always be interpreted in comparison to one another, and their matchups will be heavily studied, scrutinized, and selebrated.2 The games they’ve already played against one another have got to be the most talked about high school basketball games since LeBron James took his talents to Saint Vincent Saint Mary’s.

Naturally, only one of these two incredible talents could be picked first, and the Washington Wizards opted for Dybantsa. So naturally, the question for Peterson was how do you feel about not being the number one pick:3

Immediately before this headline quote, Peterson actually had a very measured, mature response: “there’s always been a chip on my shoulder, so I wouldn’t say [being picked second] added anything else”, but nevertheless it’s fun to aggregate without context, so let’s assume this is going to add a big ol’ chip to his shoulder.

Draymond Green has famously carried a massive chip throughout his entire career, after he fell to 35th in the 2012 NBA draft. He can recite the names of all 34 players selected ahead of him 14 years ago,4 and has said himself, “I will never forget that night. I had to wait all that time. I’m not saying I’m cocky or anything,5 but I felt like I had to wait behind guys I was better than. And I think I’ve proven it.”

Sure enough, even against the number one pick in that draft, Anthony Davis, Draymond has proven it. In 46 games against AD, Draymond has put up more than his career averages in points, rebounds, and assists, and his Warriors have gone 33-13 against Davis’s Hornets/Pelicans/Lakers/Mavericks teams.6

Meanwhile, this year’s WNBA draft also featured suspense at the top, as analysts were split over Azzi Fudd and Olivia Miles. The Dallas Wings ultimately went with Fudd, who’s had a terrific start to a WNBA career and already seems like the obviously wrong choice.

Olivia Miles, who went second to the Minnesota Lynx, is the runaway favorite to win Rookie of the Year, and is even edging into the MVP conversation. It’s safe to say that Miles thought she was the best available player in the draft and she’s been playing like the best player from her class so far.

The chip on her shoulder gets even bigger when she matches up against Fudd.

The Lynx and Wings have played three times already, three wins for Miles’s Lynx, three games dominated by Miles. The begoggled Minnesota Point Guard has nearly doubled up Fudd’s scoring output (20 points per game to Fudd’s 12) in those games, with three more rebounds (four to one) and six more assists (seven to one) per game than Fudd.

As mentioned, Miles is having a fringe-MVP season7 while Fudd is merely having a very good Rookie season, so it makes sense that Olivia’s numbers are better than Azzi’s. But in these specific draft-class face-offs, Miles gets even better, while Fudd drops off.

Fudd has notably improved in these games in one area: steals. She’s already fourth in the entire WNBA in steals with 1.8 per game, and in the three Wings games she’s averaged a whopping 2.3. At least a few of those have been straight up tear-away jobs from Olivia Miles.

But overall, Miles is clearly winning these matchups, even besting Fudd at her foremost skill: three point shooting. Overall Azzi Fudd shoots the ball much better from beyond the arc than Miles, but so far when they’ve faced off it’s Miles who is making more of her threes.

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The 2025 WNBA draft was more cut and dry; Paige Bueckers was the consensus mock draft number one, and the Wings ultimately selected her there. She went on to win Rookie of the Year in near unanimous fashion.

That said, there are a non-significant number of analysts, then and still today, that contend that the second overall pick, the 6’6” Dominique Malonga, still a teenager on draft night, will have the better career. Just by watching the last time Dom and Paige matched up, you can see why.

In that June 22 game, ultimately an overtime win for the Wings, Malonga scored a career high 37 points, to go along with 12 rebounds in as dominant a double double as you’ll find in the WNBA. But it wasn’t just that game. The reserved French 20 year old is about as opposite from Draymond Green in personality as you can get,8 but she seems to carry the same chip on her shoulder, taking the games against Paige Bueckers more seriously. She scores over five more points per game, nearly matching Paige’s (normally much higher) output, and that’s despite playing 10 fewer minutes per game.

While Paige plays her typical game against Dom, Dom improves in nearly every area: better shooting splits, more rebounds, twice as many blocks. Paige may not view this as a class superlative competition yet, but she should.

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Lets stop picking on the Wings’s number one picks shall we, and go back another year. Caitlin Clark was the obvious number one pick in 2024, to the Indiana Fever, while her rival (at least in media coverage, if not on the court) Angel Reese was taken seventh. No one expected the Fever to even consider taking Reese first overall, but I like to think that Reese is irrationally confident enough that she felt slighted when Caitlin’s name was called first.

To Reese’s credit, her vs Caitlin is actually the most interesting comparison among the 2024 draft class. Two-and-a-half seasons later, it wouldn’t have been crazy for the Sparks to take Reese second overall, ahead of the five other players that walked across the stage before her.9

Still, the first thing that stands out in this chart, is how much more Clark fills up the box score than Reese (except in rebounding of course, where Reese is on pace to be the best ever).

In the games versus Angel, always the most highly-touted, media-frenzied matchups,10 Caitlin plays even better. She has a knack for hitting the big shot, but it’s more than that. In eight career WNBA games against Reese’s Sky/Dream (of which she’s won five), Clark gets more than her usual share of rebounds, assists, and blocks, she commits fewer turnovers, and yes, she makes more of the big shots.

Let me know which other head to head matchups you’d like to see!11

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Some players try to operate like metronomes, treating every outing the same, playing their game the way they want regardless of the personalities in the opposite colored jerseys. Others, like Draymond Green and Caitlin Clark, and seemingly Olivia Miles and Dominique Malonga so far in their young careers, feed off any and every post-it note on the bulletin board. They get extra hyped for the marquee matchups, wanting to prove their doubters, including the teams that passed on the chance to have them on their teams, wrong.

Both mindsets can work, but for the fans these narrative driven games are always the most fun to watch. We have a ways to go until Dybantsa vs Peterson I in the NBA, but thankfully we have more of these matchups every day in the WNBA.

Stealing a page out of Basketball Poetry’s (and later Zach Lowe’s) book, I’m ranking every team based on their “watchability”. That includes:

• Play Style: Scoring (especially from three) is fun to watch. Free throws are not.

• Excitement: Close games are more exciting than blowouts.

• Significance: “Wake me up when the Playoffs start” teams, or teams that don’t have a prayer of getting there, are less fun to watch in the Regular Season.

• Upside: Some teams will get more watchable once some of their injured players return to the court.

• Broadcast: An often underrated part of League Pass watchability is listenability. You want to like the running commentary coming into your living room during the two-hour game.

• Design: You’ll also want to find the colors and overall aesthetic visually appealing.

• Zeitgeist: And finally, you’ll be more popular if you watch the teams and players that other people are talking about (for better or worse) at the proverbial water cooler.

It’s important to note that there are no unwatchable teams in the WNBA; in fact, I would guess most people greatly enjoy watching the last place team in my objectively correct ranking. Every night there’s a good game, and every matchup has something worth tuning in to.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the list.

Wait, don’t leave yet!!

Yes, it may seem crazy to rank the team with the unanimous best player in the league, the defending champions, the current WNBA dynasty last in “watchability”, but hear me out.

In the Regular Season this team is kind of … boring.

Yes they have A’ja Wilson and her highlight reel, and yes people will be talking about her, as well as Chennedy Carter’s antics and Becky Hammon’s hot short takes, but beyond that this team doesn’t have much going on in the Regular Season.

They don’t really play close games (only six clutch1 games so far, fewest in the league). They’ve only lost four times, and two of those games were over by halftime. They will make the Playoffs easily, and then things get interesting, but until then, all we get on Aces League Pass is a colorless palette2 and just fine announcers. Oh, and getting to watch A’ja Wilson’s historic dominance in real time. Again, there are no bad watches!

The Seattle Storm are young and fun, and not very good at winning basketball games. The team is 3-15, losers of 11 straight games, most by double digits. Ezi Megagbor, the Storm’s best, or at least highest paid, player has been injured all year but is expected to return in the coming weeks. She’ll provide a small boost, but overall this team is not set up to win games in 2026.

In the meantime, Seattle does have a group that’s easy to get behind. Their pair of 20-year olds, Dominique Malonga and Awa Fam, may evolve into future faces of the league, while Flau’jae Johnson and Studbud Natisha Hiedeman are always a vibe on and off the court, and Jade Melbourne and Stefanie Dolson embody a work hard, play hard mindset.

And then there’s Dick Fain. The Storm announcer may be the most “love him or hate him” character in the WNBA, or at least in the announcers boxes. Your propensity to tune into Storm games may ultimately come down to how much unabashed homerism you can take.

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Living up to their namesake, the Tempo play a fast-paced, exciting, high-scoring brand of basketball. Their million-dollar backcourt of Marina Mabrey and Brittney “Slim” Sykes is beloved by their dedicated fanbases, and they play with a superstar level of confidence. The team is currently just one game out of Playoff position, and could well follow in Golden State’s footsteps as an expansion team making the Playoffs in their inaugural season.3

Contrary to the Canadian stereotype, Toronto’s confidence can lean into cockiness and a level of disrespect that makes for great basketball theater. Mabrey will hit a three in her defender’s face (she just tied the WNBA record with nine threes in a single game last week), and make sure they know it. Sykes will drive past her defender for an and-one, then flex on them. Isabelle Harrison body slammed Angel Reese.

What holds this team back from a higher ranking is the viewing experience beyond the on-court action. Relative to their fellow expansion Fire and Valkyries, who absolutely nailed their brands, the Tempo’s overall design is pretty meh.4 The team’s play-by-play commentator Daniela Ponticelli comes from a hockey background (again, Canada), and has had some trouble adjusting to the lack of ice. If you prefer to watch games on grayscale and mute, the Tempo may be your team.

The Dream’s Head Coach, Karl Smesko, is the leading practitioner of analytics in the WNBA, which often results in a less fun style to watch. Atlanta is taking a WNBA record 72% of their field goal attempts from either beyond the three-point line or within three feet of the basket. Roles are clearly defined: Rhyne Howard leads the league in three point attempts per game, while Angel Reese leads the league in shots from the restricted area. On top of that, Atlanta boasts one of the stoutest defenses in the W, limiting their opponents’ highlights as well. And that’s without Bri Jones, their starting Forward, who’s been recovering from knee surgery and will be rejoining the team in the coming weeks.

It all makes for winning basketball (including several blowout wins), just not the most aesthetically pleasing game.56

Now they do have the aforementioned Angel Reese, the most followed Instagrammer in the WNBA and the only player in the league who can rival Caitlin Clark for media coverage. When the Dream matchup with Caitlin’s Fever, or Angel’s former team the Chicago Sky for that matter, all eyes should be glued to the TV.

The Mercury are stugggggling. The Phoenix squad that played in the WNBA Finals just eight months ago, and was expected to compete for the title again this season, has dropped to the bottom of the table. To their credit, they’ve played a lot of close games, and have had some bad luck with opponent three-point shooting, so the season is certainly not lost. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are able to turn it around and sneak into the postseason as a seven or eight seed.7

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Still, Alyssa Thomas has always been a quieter superstar, compared to A’ja Wilson or Napheesa Collier. Now that she’s playing like a top 10-to-15 player instead of top 3, her name has all but disappeared from the water cool talk. That said, if she, and her running mate Kahleah F Copper, can get back to their all-WNBA ways, watch out for Phoenix.

Ah, tanking. The affliction that drove NBA news cycles for months last season has made its way to the W, with patient zero in Connecticut. The Sun are 3-15,8 last in the league,9 and don’t appear super concerned with winning. Their best player is Leïla Lecan, who is objectively awesome, but by no means a household name. Their second best player is *checks sun.wnba.com/roster* A 35-year old Brittney Griner? Kennedy Burke, who had a heater in New York for a minute last year? Aneesah Morrow? Head Coach Rachid Meziane doesn’t even know.

The best thing the Sun have going for them, and the only thing that boosts them in these rankings, is in the broadcast booth. I asked Redditors on r/wnba “Which team (other than your own) has the best announcers in the W?”, and the responses were overwhelmingly in favor of the voice of the Sun, Brendan Glasheen. Half of the 100+ responses mentioned him by name, all positively, and those comments garnered nearly 500 upvotes.

If Sun fans could pick just one person from the organization to move with them from Connecticut to Houston, where they are relocating for next season, I don’t think it would be Lacan, or Meziane, or anyone playing in the game. I think it might be Glasheen.

The Mystics are another young team, early in their player development cycle, who weren’t necessarily built to win this season. Unlike the Sun, however, they’re having problems losing.

Washington’s star Sophomores, Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen, are both ahead of schedule and have the Mystics sitting in eighth place, which would make them the last team into the Playoffs if the season ended today.

This isn’t just a ranking of how good teams have been,10 but how fun they are to watch, and the way the Mystics go about scoring more points than their opponents is not a particularly enjoyable brand of basketball to watch. They take the most free throws in the WNBA, and the fewest threes, resulting in a very start-and-stop play style on Washington League Pass.

Nevertheless, with Citron, Iriafen, Rookie Point Guard Georgia Amoore starting to settle into her role,11 and Rookie Center Lauren Betts starting to figure out post play in the WNBA, this team is still very watchable. They have already shown a lot of poise for a group so young, winning six clutch games in nine tries. They’ll be a must-watch League Pass team soon, perhaps as soon as the second half of this season.12

The feel-good story of last year’s WNBA, the Golden State Valkyries have kept the good times rolling in Ballhalla. The reigning Most Improved Player, Veronica Burton, has continued playing at all WNBA levels. Newcomer Gabby Williams is the rare player with a legit defensive highlight reel. Janelle Salaün can go on a heater with the best of them, and the whole team has been shooting the lights out to start the season, currently leading the league in three-pointers made.

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The new alternate jerseys for this season were a little bland for my taste, though that is graded on an unfair standard the team set for themselves last year. Overall the Valkyries still have one of the strongest brands in the league. In fact, the Valkyries have one of the strongest brands in branding; the team won an Effie for last year’s launch campaign, the highest award for effectiveness in marketing.

The front office did cause some head-scratching with early season roster moves, first trading Flau’jae Johnson (formerly discussed Seattle fan favorite) for nothing13 then waiving fan favoritest Kate Martin. But they still have another fan favorite (but not as much favorite) Kaitlyn Chen, who has been balling on the court in addition to her usual role as bringer of joy on the Valkyries sideline.

Watching the 2026 Chicago Sky is like watching a car crash in slow motion; it’s a disaster, but you can’t look away. The Sky have lost 11 of their last 12 games, most recently blowing a 14-point fourth quarter lead to the Wings, then getting blown out by the last-place Sun. There’s been tears of frustration on the sidelines, passive aggressiveness in the post-game conferences,14 and just a lot of bad execution on the court.

To be fair, the Sky have been hit hard by injuries: Rickea Jackson appeared in just four games before a season-ending ACL tear and neither Courtney Vandersloot nor DiJonai Carrington have played yet as they finish rehabbing from their own ACL tear and foot sprain respectively. While Jackson is out for the season, if Vandersloot and Carrington return, and return to form, and Sydney Taylor and Gabriela Jaquez continue as bright spots, maybe this gets more interesting. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s hard to take your eye off the Sky.

Kelsey Plum has been the best offensive player in the WNBA this year. Her blend of outside shooting and inside game (especially that thing where she drives, stops on one foot, then waits like six seconds before making her final move to the hoop to put the ball in the basket), is mesmerizing to watch. The Sparks have several great players and several popular players (Nneka Ogwumike, Cameron Brink, etc. etc.) but Plum is the main reason the Sparks are in the Playoff battle, and the main reason they are securely in the League Pass Playoffs.

Rahshaun Haylock also helps. While Glasheen is undisputedly the most loved announcer in the league, Haylock may be the best at actually narrating the game, i.e., the job of the play-by-play announcer. He’s a joy to listen to on these Sparks games.15

What does not help is the Sparks jerseys. You would think LA of all places would do better with their aesthetics, but the yellow and purple fits have never done it for me, and their current Rebel jerseys were pretty universally panned. Clean that up LA marketers.

If this was a TikTok Ranking, the Dallas Wings would take the number one spot (#pazzi, #hellaur). Unfortunately, I’m not that connected to Gen Z culture, so we’re sticking with League Pass Rankings.

Still, Paige Bueckers is one of the most fun athletes to watch full stop, Azzi Fudd, the latest #1 overall pick, has been knocking down threes like it’s her job,16 Jessica Shepard has been the basketball nerd’s favorite player, and Alanna Smith has been oft discussed (all news is good news?). So why is Dallas just fifth in the ranking?

trulyniceguy’s not nice words sum up what seems to be a universal consensus that the Wings have the worst broadcast crew in the league.

The Liberty are in a very similar position to Dallas.17 Between Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, Jonquel Jones, and Satou Sabally they are one of the few teams with more star power, on and off the court, than the Wings. Led by another analytically-minded Head Coach, they have made the second most threes of anyone. They play in the biggest market in the country, and early season upset losses, followed by an eight-game winning streak have ensured they are always in the talk show conversations. But like in Dallas, the talk track during games makes it harder to watch.

If they could get local New Yorkers Ryan Ruocco and Rebecca Lobo to call the League Pass games in addition to the national broadcasts, the Liberty may just be the best watch in the WNBA.

The Portland Fire are the only team in the top five in threes made, and the bottom five in points scored. They are just a game under 0.500 despite having a -8 net rating. Their SRS18 is third worst in the league. You know who doesn’t care about any of that? Portland Fire fans.

The WNBA returned to Portland this season after 24 years, and the pent up excitement in the city is evident in the crowd shots on League Pass. One of the defining images of the season for me is the eruption that ensued after Sarah Ashlee Barker’s game winning put-back against the Liberty to secure the first win in the revamped franchise’s history.

Have the Fire used up all of their luck already, on not one but two Ashlee Barker game winners? Will they regress to the bottom, where most analysts expected them to be this inaugural season? Maybe. Probably. But maybe they’ll keep one of the best shows in sports going, and it’s worth a watch to find out if they do. If not, at least they have sweet jerseys and sweet-talking announcers.

Olivia Miles may be the most fun player to watch in the W. She’s putting up historic Rookie numbers, and will continue to until defenses figure out how to stop her from getting into the paint at will. Meanwhile, her backcourt running mate in Minnesota, Courtney Williams, seems to be the only player in the league allowed to take long mid-range, analytically bad, but stylistically cool shots. The Lynx have a free-flowing offense (they take the fewest free throw attempts of anyone), and it also happens to be (by far) the best offense.

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Oh, they also have by far the best defense in the league. This team has everything, and they’ll get even more soon when Napheesa Collier, the consensus second-best player in the league, returns from her ankle injury. Her reintegration into the WNBA’s frontrunner will be one of the more interesting things to watch in the second half of the season, because if it goes well there may be no stopping Minnesota.

It had to be. Love it or hate it, the Caitlin Clark show is the best thing on League Pass. It’s not just Caitlin though. Sophie Cunningham’s full heel turn, Aliyah Boston’s extraordinary play, and Stephanie White’s controversial defensive schemes have all grabbed more than their fair share of attention. But ultimately, it all comes back to Caitlin.

As I pointed out last week, “Caitlin Clark” is searched on Google significantly more than any other player in the league, and that extends to her team as well: there are as many searches for the Indiana Fever as there are for the next six most Googled teams combined.

Zeitgeist ✅

Of course Caitlin is best known for her highlight three-point shooting (even if the best part of her game is actually her passing, but I digress), and her team is on pace to score the second most points per game in WNBA history.19

Play Style ✅

The Fever also give up a ton of points, resulting in plenty of exciting, clutch minutes.

Excitement ✅

They’ve gone just 4-5 in those close games, 10-7 overall, putting them tied for sixth place, dangerously close to one bad stretch yanking them out of the postseason. For a team with championship aspirations, that would be catastrophic.

Significance ✅

Oh, and Indiana’s jersey designers are unmatched. Their Stranger Things kit was my favorite in the league last season, and their Hoosiers-inspired look is my (and Sports Illustrated’s) favorite this season.

Design ✅

There is so much good stuff on WNBA League Pass,20 so if you’re not already, start watching! Everyone’s doing it.

You’re in luck. The WNBA is already up and running, and better than ever in its 30th season.

I wrote a few preseason pieces diving into the schedule (the Aces did not get the defending champ treatment) and the starters for every team (by height, country, tenure, and more), but so much has happened in the weeks since. Here are all the major stories from the first month of the WNBA season.

There were some surprise teams early (namely better than expected starts from the expansion franchises and the Chicago Sky1), but now that we’re approaching the one-third mark of the WNBA season, the standings are netting out about where we expected. With two notable exceptions.

Looking at the current standings, every team is within five spots (most are within three) of The Athletic’s preseason power rankings2 except for the Minnesota Lynx and Phoenix Mercury.

These two teams famously faced off in the last season’s semi-finals, a series that ended with Alyssa Thomas running over Napheesa Collier and into the Finals. Since then, they’ve taken opposite paths, and not in the way you’d expect.

The Mercury returned most of their Finals roster this offseason34 and were expected to compete for a title once again: The Athletic had them sixth in the power rankings. They started the season by dominating the defending champions on opening night,5 a 99-66 win over the Aces that is now looked at as completely anomalous, if it’s remembered at all. In the weeks since, the Mercury have fallen to the bottom of the standings, languishing with the tanking Sun(set) and youth-development Storm.

Part of the Mercury’s woes comes down to simple bad luck: their opponents are making 39% of their threes, a full percentage point higher than any other team, and nearly five percentage points higher than the league average. Defenses can control a lot of things that happen on a basketball court, but generally opponent three point percentage is not one of those things. As a result, the team’s defensive rating ballooned from 102 points per 100 possessions last season to 110 this season.

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Across the board, points per possession are up; teams are scoring like never before.

I wrote about this phenomenon early in the season, and traced all of the 100-point scoring outbursts back to two main drivers: rim attempts and, most impactfully, free throws. Phee’s injury in that Lynx vs Mercury game was the tipping point for WNBA physicality. The referees are calling a much tighter whistle so far this season, empowering offensive players more than ever.

Still rehabbing her ankle, Phee hasn’t benefitted from that change in philosophy yet, but her team certainly has. The Lynx lost almost their entire rotation from 2025 and somehow have the best record in the W in 2026. In addition to losing Collier to injury, Minnesota said goodbye to Jessica Shepard, Alanna Smith, Natisha Hiedeman, and DiJonai Carrington in free agency and then Bridget Carleton in the expansion draft. That’s six of their top seven players gone (shout out Courtney Williams for sticking around!). The Athletic, understandably, had Minnesota pegged to drop off to eighth in the standings, fighting for the final playoff spot. Then Olivia Miles started playing.

Miles is leading her class in points and assists, is second in rebounding, and has accumulated over twice as many win shares as anyone else by virtue of being the best player on the best team in the WNBA.6 Neil Paine wrote a great piece detailing the full Lynx’s history, with a focus on Phee’s and now Miles’ role in it, that I encourage you to read here.

The number one overall pick usually wins Rookie of the Year in the WNBA, but there’s also usually a consensus number one pick. This season, the Wings opted for Azzi Fudd in that spot, but there were great Rookies taken throughout the first round. Rebecca Prenevost on Her Hoop Stats and Bob Bellotti on Basketball Points both published “rookie roundups” today rehashing the first 10 or so games of these newcomers’ careers, so I’ll limit myself to three highlights:

• Azzi Fudd is up to 13 points per game on darn near 50-40-90, shooting splits that only two players, Napheesa Collier and Elena Delle Donne, have ever hit in the W.

• Kiki Rice is a fellow prodigy on offense, posting the sixth highest true shooting percentage and fifth highest offensive rating of anyone in the league.

• Flau’jae Johnson - who the Golden State Valkyries inexplicably traded to the Seattle Storm for less than nothing on draft night - is leading all rookies in rebounds and leading the league in blocks as a Guard. Oh, and she may be dropping a new album soon.

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You may be asking yourself, how did Minnesota, who finished with the best record in the Regular Season last year, get the number two overall pick in the first place? How did a juggernaut lose their whole team and remain a juggernaut?

In 2024, the Chicago Sky were determined to draft Angel Reese and (rather than just select her with their third overall pick) gave Minnesota a 2025 second round pick and the right to swap first rounders in 2026 to move up one spot. The Sky hoped that Kamilla Cardoso (whom they selected third) and Reese would make their team good enough in two years that the swap wouldn’t end up mattering. Spoiler: it did. The Sky tied for the worst record in the league and the Lynx got Olivia Miles.

Well at least the Sky still have Ange… Never mind.

After she made it abundantly clear that she was not loving her time in Chicago, the Sky complied and traded Angel Reese to the Dream before this season began. She’s putting up nearly identical numbers to last season’s All-Star campaign, just with much less drama7 and many more wins in Atlanta.

Her foil since college, Caitlin Clark, is still constantly in the news cycle. I was surprised to see how subdued the search volume has been this season compared to her first two in the WNBA, but I think that speaks more to the ubiquity of the “Caitlin Clark effect” the last few years. She’s still searched twice as much as Angel Reese, five times more than Paige Bueckers, and over ten times more than A’ja Wilson.

The Caitlin Clark drama this season has focused a bit more on the actual basketball, which is probably why you don’t see as big a spike in the general population proxy that is Google Trends. Her Indiana Fever disappointed out of the gates, losing two of their first three games, got a warning from the league for a last-second Caitlin scratch,8 and drew criticism from fans around how they’ve been using Caitlin on defense.

The buzz for a Caitlin Clark MVP also hasn’t been there, because it hasn’t been there for anyone not named A’ja Wilson. While some of the advanced stats favor Olivia Miles (and even Rhyne Howard), A’ja still has the gaudy raw numbers, the all-important “narrative”, and plenty of other “all in one” metrics. Exhibit PER:

The four-time award winner continues to put up her usual MVP-level numbers in her ninth season (26 points, 9 rebounds, and 2 blocks per game),9 but now with a three-point shot to boot. She’s making a career high 1.2 threes10 at a surely-this-will-regress-but-what-if-it-doesn’t 52%(!) clip. After the aforementioned opening night shellacking at the hands of the Mercury, the Aces are 10-3 and A’ja seems to be coasting to her fifth MVP trophy.11 The only outstanding question: is A’ja the greatest of all time?

That said, you can still get 100:1 odds on Sabrina Ionescu for MVP. To catch A’ja by the end of the season, she’ll just need to average *checks notes* 37 points per game.

Now, that’s because Sabrina’s only played two games all year. Satou Sabally also missed the start of the season for the Liberty with an injury, while Leonnie Fiebich missed it for Euroleague commitments. All in all, the Liberty have had just two-thirds of their salary cap play this season. Breanna Stewart, with her $1.25M salary represents a full 25% of that contract value the Liberty have put on the court, and at least that much on-court value, as she’s carried them to the second best record in the league.

The Seattle Storm and Chicago Sky, meanwhile, have lost just as much cap space to injury, but didn’t have a Stewie to fall back on.

In Seattle, Dominique Malonga missed eight games with a concussion but the real monetary loss comes from Ezi Magbegor, who makes a whopping 20% of the Storm’s total cap, and has been sidelined all season.

Courtney Vandersloot and DiJonai Carrington also haven’t made an appearance yet, but Chicago was still able to win three of their first four games without them. Then newly acquired Rickea Jackson tore her ACL and the team has lost seven of their last eight.

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Jackson was one of many free agents to change teams this offseason. As I wrote about last month, the renegotiation of the league’s collective bargaining agreement meant that a lot of players were free agents and signed with new teams. Some are thriving post-move, while others are struggling to acclimate. Two bigs for the Wings née Lynx epitomize the ends of the spectrum.

Alanna Smith has been played out of the rotation. She’s seeing just 16 minutes of game time in Dallas, 10 fewer than she’d gotten used to the last few seasons in Minnesota and Chicago, and is managing fewer than four points per game. Even worse, she’s a reigning Defensive Player of the Year who currently has a negative impact on defense, according to Neil Paine’s LAKER ratings and ESPN’s Net Points.

On the other end, Jessica Shepard has been a revelation in Dallas. Playing alongside Paige Bueckers, Arike Ogunbowale, and Azzi Fudd, she is averaging career highs in points, rebounds, and assists. That doesn’t do it justice: she’s getting six more points, four more rebounds, and two more assists per game! She posted a 20-20-10 triple double and is creating a new post-hub player archetype for the WNBA.

The Lynx have got to be disappointed they lost this All-WNBA level Forward, and had to replace her with … another All-WNBA level Forward. Welcome to Minneapolis, Natasha Howard. Thanks for getting us right back to the top of the standings.

Yes, despite all of the free agency turnover and injuries and Courtney Williams midrange jumpers.12 Despite Rhyne Howard and Angel Reese teaming up in Atlanta, Breanna Stewart carrying the Liberty, A’ja Wilson doing A’ja Wilson things, and the Wings adding a #1 pick, DPOY, and a superstar hiding in plain sight, the Minnesota Lynx are still the best team in the WNBA, and favorites as champions once again. Just wait until Phee gets back.

Basketball never stops. The Knicks showed us how exciting it can be, and the WNBA is carrying that forward. I’ll have a lot more coverage all summer long, starting with a League Pass Ranking next week. Until then, enjoy the W.

After the first quarter of Game 2 of the NBA Finals, sideline reporter Lisa Salters asked Knicks Head Coach Mike Brown about the pace of the game. As is typical in these mostly unnecessary 20 second long interviews, Brown didn’t give much insight into his team’s strategy. “The pace has been pretty good.” Brown said. “We still gotta play faster.”

The Knicks got 25 possessions in that first quarter, which works out to a pace (possessions per 48 minutes) of exactly 100. Is that actually too slow for Brown, or did he just amenably agree with Salters so he could move on and get back to doing his more important job as coach?

Consider that, in the Regular Season, the New York Knicks averaged 97 possessions per 48 minutes. That was one of the slowest paces in the NBA. They used 15.3 seconds of the 24-second shot clock on average, which placed them 27th out of 30 teams in pace. Their Finals opponents, the San Antonio Spurs, used just 14 seconds per possession, making them the fifth fastest offense in the league. So why would Lisa Salters assume the Knicks want to play faster than the Spurs in the first place, and why would Mike Brown so readily agree?

The Regular Season feels like ages ago for this Knicks team. They haven’t lost a game in 46 days, and in that month-and-a-half completely transformed from a good team into an all-time great one. So how much faster has Mike Brown had his team play on this historic run? Not at all. The Knicks are still averaging 97 possessions per game in the Playoffs, same as they did in the Regular Season.

Now, the game does slow down in the Playoffs, and the Knicks did move from a bottom decile Regular Season pace team to above average in the Playoffs. But, the Spurs have still been playing faster than the Knicks all Playoffs long, and both teams played above their averages in that Game 2 Quarter 1 of interest.

I disagree with Salters and Brown. The Knicks should want to play slow. When they look at the box score at the end of a quarter or a game, they should want to see fewer possessions, not more. Here’s why.

Luring Wemby

The majority of the Knicks’ offense - for better or worse - runs through Jalen Brunson’s shooting hand. He took 56 attempts from the field in Games 1 and 2 of the Finals, more than twice as many as anyone else on the Knicks has attempted.1 His inefficiency has been well noted (he made just 19 shots, or 34%,2 in those games), but that misses3 the point. For the Knicks, the shots going down is gravy; they just want Brunson to get them up at the right time.

Namely, the times when Victor Wembanyama is not in rebounding position. Josh Hart described this mindset himself after Game 1:

“The biggest thing, you want to get shots up. It doesn’t matter what shot you get up, just get it on the rim. With Wemby contesting it, now he’s out of the play and someone like (Mitchell Robinson) is down there by themselves.”

Wemby changes the geometry of basketball. Whereas an average person sees a court that is 94 feet long and 50 feet wide, to Wemby it feels like it’s just 60’ x 30’, less than half as big, given his enormous stride length and reach that allow him to cover more space than anyone in basketball history. It becomes extremely difficult to score in traditional ways against him, especially when your best player is over a foot shorter. So, the Knicks have had to get creative, finding new ways to get the Alien out of his orbit around the basket.

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In Game 1, Brunson took 19 shots4 with Wemby on the floor. He missed 13 of them. But, before 10 of those 13 misses, Brunson had penetrated deep enough into the Spurs’ defense to draw Wemby in as help, or had Wemby on him to start with.

This style takes time. Brunson created almost all of these shots on his own,5 by beating his defender off the dribble to the basket. The Spurs’ have very good defensive Guards, so first Brunson has to get the isolation matchup he wants (usually trading Stephon Castle or Devin Vassell for Julian Champagnie or Carter Bryant). Wemby’s still not going to over-help right away, so Brunson has to execute a series of fancy dribbles and drives to lure Wemby over. Only then can he shoot. Nearly half of Brunson’s Game 1 shots came late in the shotclock.

The result is longer half-court possessions, which means fewer possessions, i.e., a slower pace.

Second Chances

The ultimate goal of pulling Wemby out to help on Brunson is second chance points. Namely, quickly securing the offensive rebound and going back-up or kicking out to a three-point shooter while Wemby is still out of the play.6

Steve Aschburner wrote about this on NBA.com after Game 1, coining “non-paint Wembanyama”. He noted that, largely thanks to their ability to lure Wemby out of the paint, “New York owned a 23-14 edge in second-chance points . . . nine points that accounted for nearly everything in the 10-point margin [of victory]. San Antonio won the rebounding battle overall (54-49), even on the offensive glass (14-10), but the Knicks got more mileage out of theirs.“ The Spurs’ interior defense is just so much worse without Victor Wembanyama, that it’s worth missing shots to get him out of the paint.

The Knicks have the personnel to run this anti-gravitational Wemby strategy. They have the fourth highest offensive rebounding rate in these Playoffs, and employ some of the best in the business at grabbing missed shots: Mitchell Robinson, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Josh Hart especially.

While the rest of us are watching Brunson dribble, Robinson, Towns, Hart, and the rest of the Knicks are actively getting themselves into offensive rebounding position, well before the ball goes up for the shot. Mitch preemptively seals off Wemby, Towns boxes out the Spurs’ smaller Forwards, Hart sneaks past Julian Champagnie on the perimeter, and every so often the ball bounces their way.

Of course, the ball does still have to bounce their way. The Spurs are the best defensive rebounding team in the NBA, so they’ve still sucked up a lot of these missed shots anyway. Wemby, being the alien that he is, recovered enough from helping on Brunson to pull down four of the 10 shots Brunson took while he was “out of position” himself.

Still, the Knicks secured two of the 10 Brunson misses for second chances, and overall in Game 1 got 10 points directly off second-chance points that came from Wembanyama contesting a shooter, per The Athletic’s counting. Again, the margin for the game was 10 points.

Offensive rebounds give teams another chance to score, but in the box score they don’t reset the possession, they extend it. More offensive rebounds means longer possessions, means fewer possessions, i.e., a slower pace.

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Hack-a-Mitch

The counter to Mitchell Robinson’s offensive rebounding is simply fouling him off the court. Robinson is a career 51% free throw shooter, which is really bad, but oh it gets worse. In his Playoff career, a not small sample of 50 games, he’s only made 37% of his free attempts, the single worst mark in NBA history7 by a wide margin. These Playoffs he’s at 32%.8

Teams figured out decades ago, famously with the Shaquille O’Neal “Hack-a-Shaq”, that fouling bad free throw shooters and sending them to the line is statistically a better approach than trying to play real defense against them. “Hack-a-Mitch” results in an expected 0.64 points for the Knicks,9 about half of the 1.2 points per possession the Knicks are averaging these Playoffs. You’ll take that all day as a Spurs fan.10

Of course, the Spurs don’t need to waste any time before hacking a Mitch. They’ll do it right away, which results in shorter possessions and more of them. Said the other way, less Hack-a-Mitch = more 1.2 points per possession plays for the Knicks’ offense = longer possessions = fewer possessions, i.e., a slower pace.

Fast Breaks

So, when Mike Brown reviews the box score at the end of the night and sees a slower pace, it probably means his team was able to lure Wemby out of his ideal defensive position, grab offensive rebounds, and avoid watching the worst free throw shooter of all time throw away possessions in straight line drives.

But it also might mean that the Knicks aren’t getting points off of fast breaks, where they have been the most efficient team in these Playoffs. Generally, Brown is ok with that: despite being elite at finishing in transition all season, New York has been in the middle of the pack in transition frequency both in the Regular Season and in the Playoffs. They’ll take fast break opportunities when they come, and score on them often, but it’s not this team’s identity.

Stopping fast breaks in their tracks is a key identity of the San Antonio Spurs; they have the third best transition defense in the league. Fast break opportunities sound great, until they look like this:

On the other side, the Spurs have shown they would love to get out and run. They are second in the NBA Playoffs in fast break points, only behind the Knicks, despite forcing the fifth fewest turnovers. That’s because the Spurs want to run, even if they don’t have the built-in advantage of live ball turnovers. In these so-called “fire breaks”, the Spurs will rapidly inbound the ball after their opponents make a shot, and throw it ahead, creating fast break chances out of thin air.

The Knicks want fewer of these fire breaks, meaning they want longer, fewer possessions, i.e., a slower pace.

The Knicks are a half decade older than the Spurs. They have the Playoff experience and they are cool under pressure in ways the Spurs’ simply haven’t been around long enough to become yet. The Knicks can take their time, execute their strategy, and play their game at their pace. Mike Brown can tell us that the pace should be faster, but don’t trust everything you hear on TV.

The Knicks Streak

Where else could we possibly start than with the New York Knicks. This good-but-not-great Regular Season team found a new gear in May. They demolished their Eastern Conference opponents all month and broke many analysts’ brains in the process. They just won their 12th straight game1 to extend what has been the single best run in NBA history, as Lev Akabas pointed out on Instagram.

The Knicks have outscored their opponents by a record 272 points over this 12-game winning streak, nearly 23 points per game. If they can close out the Spurs, this season’s Knicks squad may cement themselves as the best Playoff team of all time.

GOAT Jalen Brunson

Lev has had the best visual coverage of the Knicks this postseason, including this chart where he conveniently got to put Jalen Brunson’s head slightly above Michael Jordan’s.

Brunson only got two first-place votes for Regular Season Clutch Player of the year,2 but those two voters may have been on to something. In the biggest moments imaginable, close games, with time winding down, in the Playoffs, no player in NBA history has been better than Jalen Brunson. By both efficiency and volume, he’s been even better than Michael Jordan.

Cool People

Michael Jordan is still cooler than Jalen Brunson though, at least according to this YouGov survey from April. I’m guessing most of these survey takers are basing their responses on these dunks rather than his interviews in “MJ: Insights to Excellence”.

Taking politics out of it, Barack Obama may be the coolest guy in the room. As you can see above, he has the third highest share of “very cool” (dark purple), but his overall rank is dragged down by the 25% (presumably political opponents) who think he’s “not at all cool”. I’m sorry, but regardless of politics, this is cool.

Strata Hoops

One of the coolest new Instagram pages I found last month was Strata Hoops. These guys break down the numbers you should care about behind the biggest stars and matchups, through beautiful visuals. Give them a follow if you don’t already!

Christopher Nolan’s Collaborators

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey comes out next month, and to get ready my fiancé and I have been watching/rewatching his entire filmography.3 So we found these visuals fun, showing which actors appear in the most of his films.

Relatedly, someone calculated that, with The Odyssey, Hollywood has now spent over $600B bringing Matt Damon back home.

Cheap Costco

If you don’t have $600B laying around, consider shopping at CostCo!4 A new study from Consumer Reports found that the big box store sells the cheapest stuff, and I’m assuming that doesn’t even account for the free lunch you can get by going from sample table to sample table. Plus, (wedding hack) they have a very generous return policy.

I’ll have more coverage of the NBA Finals and WNBA next week. Subscribe below to make sure you get that directly into your inbox!

If you’re craving more cool charts here are the Jan, Feb, Mar, and Apr editions.

There are a million1 good previews out there (these from The Athletic, Michael Pina, Neil Paine, Silver Bulletin, and Basketball Poetry are some of my favorites), so I’ll be previewing the matchup between these two teams from my unique perspective, through the lens of all the pieces I’ve written about the NBA this season. I’ve linked to each of the original stories in the headers if you missed one along the way and want to read more!

Mapping the Finals

The bench players (namely Dylan Harper, Keldon Johnson, and Luke Kornet for the Spurs and Mitchell Robinson, Landry Shamet, and Deuce McBride for the Knicks) will have a role to play, but these 10 are the main characters. Meet your starters:

Size Matched: For all the talk about Jalen Brunson’s height, he’s only one inch shorter than his counterpart, the Spurs’ Point Guard, 6’3” De’Aaron Fox. In fact, across the board the Spurs and Knicks match up almost perfectly in size … except for Wemby, of course, who is listed at 7’4” but could be 7’7” by this point. Still, OG Anunoby, a 6’7”, long (7’2” wingspan!) combo Forward has the (realistic) physical profile you would want to guard the Spurs’ alien.

Youth vs Experience: The San Antonio Spurs are the second youngest team to ever play in the NBA Finals.2 De’Aaron Fox was the only starter with Playoff experience before this run, and that was a single First Round series with the Kings. The Knicks have the experience edge: all of New York’s starters have been in the NBA about a decade (Wemby was 11 when Kat got drafted3) and each of them has played 50 or more Playoff games. That said, they only really came together two seasons ago, with the 2024 blockbuster trades for Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns.

Home Grown vs Bought: The Spurs drafted three of their starters (as well as Dylan Harper), and signed a fourth (Julian Champagnie) after he went undrafted. De’Aaron Fox is the only trade piece in the Spurs’ starting rotation, and when he sits for Harper the Spurs can put out a fully home-grown unit. The Knicks are the opposite. They signed Jalen Brunson away from the Mavericks then traded three players and a pick to get his college roommate and podcast co-host, Josh Hart. They traded two players and a pick for OG Anunoby. Six picks for Mikal Bridges. They traded their centerpiece Julius Randle for Karl-Anthony Towns. This team was wholly assembled through wheeling-and-dealing, yet they feel like the perfect representatives for New York City.

The Value of Losing

It’s been a long, winding road for both teams to get back to the NBA Finals.

After two decades of dominance, starting with the 1999 title over the Knicks and extending to four more titles, the Spurs had been experiencing an unprecedented drought. They missed the Playoffs seven years in a row, and as recently as two years ago were among the bottom-feeders of the NBA. Of course, that helped them land three straight top-four picks, which set them on the launching pad back to the top of the league.4

The Knicks went the other way after the 1999 Finals, experiencing two decades of despair. From 2015 to 2020 they finished 29th out of 30 teams, then 24th, 24th, 22nd, 30th, and 25th and that only brings us to the start of the chart above, when they were the worst team in the NBA. It’s been a slow and steady climb from there, punctuated by a surge this postseason.

Trades

There had been lots of roster turnover the last few years in both San Antonio and New York, but by the time this season started, both teams were basically locked into their identities.

The Spurs were one of just three teams that didn’t make a single trade at the deadline, while the Knicks made just one move at the edge, grabbing New York City’s own Jose Alvarado.

What if ... Every Team was their Best Self?

The Spurs best lineup is their starting lineup: that five-some outscored opponents by nearly 20 points a game. Importantly, they got a lot of time on the court together: 284 minutes, ninth most of any team’s best lineup.

The Knicks starters were actually only slightly positive on the season (+0.3 net rating according to Databallr). Instead, their best lineup, statistically, swapped in Deuce McBride for OG Anunoby, and that group outscored opponents at an even faster rate than the Spurs’ starters, though in significantly fewer minutes.

Hot Shots

New York has the hot hand. Four different Knicks are making at least 40% of their threes this postseason, including Karl-Anthony Towns (the self-proclaimed “greatest big man shooter of all time”) at nearly 50% and Landry Shamet5 at 60%! In the Conference Finals against the Cavaliers, Shamet missed just a single three-pointer, sinking 11 of his 12 attempts.

That said, Julian Champagnie has all of the Knicks beat in volume. He’s made 46 threes this postseason, more than either KAT or Shamet have even attempted, and is making them at a very respectable 39% clip.

As I recently outlined on Instagram, this series may well be decided by the corner three, and it will be up to these guys to make those shots when they get them.

Advanced Darlings

Victor Wembanyama is the best player in the series. He may be the best player in the world. But the Knicks have the next best four guys, at least by one advanced stat called DARKO.6

Most would agree that Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns are the second and third best players in this series, stars in their own right. The advanced stats think OG Anunoby and Mitchell Robinson are just as good.

Plotting every player in the NBA Finals, we can see which players are the “empty calories ball hogs” and which are the “advanced darlings”. Game Score is on the x-axis with DARKO on the y, so the farther right a player is the more they fill the box score and the farther up the better all-around player they are. The dotted, 45-degree line is where the counting stats and advanced stats line up.

OG and Robinson are clear outliers, thanks to their defensive versatility and offensive rebounding, respectively. Luke Kornet, Julian Champagnie, and Harrison Barnes stand out for the Spurs, as do Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle, though in the other direction.

Stephon Castle is the 307th best player in the NBA according to DARKO. He isn’t a super efficient shooter, turns the ball over too frequently, and doesn’t rebound great for his size. That said, he’s the second most important player on a Finals team and he just needs four more good games. I doubt he cares about his advanced rating right now; I don’t think I do either.

Game Management

Mitch Johnson and Mike Brown are two of the best coaches the NBA has to offer. Johnson, in just his second year at the helm, was a finalist for Coach of the Year. Mike Brown has spent 20 years on NBA sidelines, and has coached the who’s who of the 21st century NBA: Tim Duncan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant among them. He knows the Spurs’ organization well, having started his career in San Antonio as an assistant coach on Gregg Popovich’s staff and coached the Spurs’ starting Point Guard De’Aaron Fox when they were both in Sacramento.

I trust both of these guys will do a tremendous job managing the next four-to-seven games, but we can still learn a bit about their philosophies from how they managed the 82-game Regular Season.

Both Johnson and Brown like holding on to their challenges. In fact, both teams were in the bottom quartile of the league in terms of exiting a game with at least one challenge still in hand.

When they use their challenges though, the paths diverge. Mike Brown was right about 75% of the time he spun his index finger this season, third highest success rate in the NBA, while Mitch Johnson and the Spurs won just 54% of their challenges, sixth worst.

The Knicks also use timeouts sparingly, while the Spurs call them at about an average rate.

The Name on the Front of the Jersey

Both the Spurs and Knicks have international jersey patches.

The Spurs are sponsored by a French crypto company, because of course they are with Wemby on the court.

The Knicks are sponsored by Experience Abu Dhabi, because of course they are with James Dolan in the front office.

Zach Lowe Teams

When I did this analysis in April, painstakingly documenting every one of the 545 topics Zach Lowe and his podcast guests talked about this season, the Knicks were the single most discussed team in the NBA.

They play in the biggest market in the country, with the most ears available to monetize with Spotify ads, but they’ve also had an objectively interesting season:

• They were the preseason favorites to win the East and make the Finals.

• The started strong, won the NBA cup, and stirred up unnecessary controversy for refusing to hang the banner.

• While that controversy was building, they lost nine games in a three-week stretch.

• Then they won nine games in a three-week stretch.

• Pre-trade deadline, the Knicks were front-runners in the Giannis sweepstakes that dominated the headlines for months.

• Karl-Anthony Towns was beloved, then hated, then beloved again (one of Zach Lowe’s podcast chapters is called “Why is the KAT experience so maddening?”) . Same with Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges.

San Antonio was also an oft-discussed team, with mostly positive coverage around Wemby’s potential. Here’s an excerpt of what was talked about this season, with my updates in bold.

• “How Close is Victor Wembanyama to Being the NBA’s Best?“ Top 2 and it ain’t 2

• “Imagine a Giannis and Wemby Pairing“ As a Nuggets fan, I don’t think I want to

• “Assessing Wemby’s Readiness and San Antonio’s Promising Young Team“ Ready

• “Can the Spurs Win it All This Season?“ Yes

• “Dylan Harper’s Driving and Finishing are Phenomenal“ Still true

• “The Spurs are Ahead of Schedule and Are Legit Title Contenders“ True

• “Should the Thunder Have Chet Holmgren Guard Victor Wembanyama?“ No

• “The Spurs are Not Afraid of Chet“ Chet is afraid of the Spurs

• “The Spurs’ Role Players are Outplaying the Thunder’s Role Players“ They did

• “What is the Ceiling for the Spurs?“ Champions

• “How is Wemby Developing Offensively?“ Great

• “Should the Spurs Go All In This Season?“ Yes

• “Why Victor Wembanyama is the Defensive Player of the Year“ Unanimously

An Ode to Jalen

Last Playoffs, if you had picked the winner of every series based solely on which team had more Jalens, you’d have done surprisingly well.7 The Spurs just got by OKC’s Jaylin Williams, but Jalen Williams (the better one) was out for most of the series. They still haven’t proven they can beat an elite Jalen, and I don’t think they will.

Jalen Brunson and the Knicks in 7.

3

Here are the two of them in 2015

Once in every 10 games, a team is clearing 100 points in four quarters; that’s the highest rate of triple digits in the WNBA’s 30-year history and over twice as often as last year. It took until the W’s 5th season before nine one hundred point games were recorded; again we’ve gotten that in two weeks of 2026.

Of course, it’s not just that teams are finally rolling over 90-point games to 100s more often; in fact there have been lots of 90-point games, including an additional nine instances of a team racking up 98 or 99 points this season. Across the (score)board, scoring is up.

With two new expansion teams in the mix, and a resulting 24 new roster spots, we should have expected scoring to increase: the best WNBA players are getting to play against worse, formerly-not-WNBA-level talents. In addition, a lot of players moved teams this offseason, and they are still establishing chemistry with their new teammates, which can take longer to gel on defense. As Matthew Coller wrote on Her Hoop Stats,

“We could also toss in the insane offseason with every team basically being built from scratch through free agency, the draft and international signings. Team chemistry is pretty difficult to cobble together in a couple weeks of training camp and shortcomings in communication and system understanding usually show themselves more on defense than on offense.”

But still, WNBA teams are averaging nearly 87 points per game, the highest mark ever recorded and a whopping +5 from just a season ago. Something else seems to be going on.

Threes are historically high, of course, but they are actually stable year over year; the difference is coming from two-point shots and free throws.

Breaking the data down further, we see that the increase in points from free throws is simply from taking more free shots, while the increase in twos comes from players being more efficient on about the same number of field goal attempts.

The jump in free throw attempts is nearly vertical. The last few seasons teams had been getting to the line at historically low rates but this season teams are averaging 22.5 attempts per game, the most ever. Given the high efficiency of these shots (the league-wide average is 78% this season, or 1.6 points per free throw trip), it’s no wonder teams are scoring a lot more.

While there are more analytically minded coaches in the WNBA now than ever before and teams are more willing to lean into the free throw merchant strategy, it’s not like we just realized the value of free shots.1 Instead, it’s more likely that the referees aren’t letting defenders get away with as much as they had in years past. The WNBA’s de facto player representative Napheesa Collier, talked about fouling in a preseason interview with NPR:

“The game is too physical right now. I think that’s been a complaint of players and coaches alike for the past several years. We’ve been compared to the NBA of the 80s … and I do think that hinders the players.

Consistency in reffing is the number one thing that [WNBA players] ask for every year … The game right now is catered to the defensive player. Because you always hear ‘defense wins championships’, and it does. But in my opinion, it should be catered to the offensive player, because that’s why you play basketball.”

As a reminder, Collier is a former Defensive Player of the Year, and she’s asking for more offensive latitude. Unfortunately, she personally isn’t benefitting yet from the apparent change in refereeing she asked for, as she’s out for another few months rehabbing an ankle injury - an injury sustained on a controversial no foul call in last year’s Playoffs - but it’s clear the rest of the league is.

And the benefit doesn’t just come at the foul line. The increase in two-point field goal percentages ties back to this same change in refereeing philosophy. Limited in what they can do without fouling in the post, defenders are having to back off ever so slightly, but just enough to give the offensive players - the greatest shooters in the world - space to score.

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All of the improvement in two-point percentage this season comes from simply taking shots closer to the basket. The diagrams below show the distribution of shot attempts and the percentage of attempts made in different zones on the court over the last two seasons. The field goal percentages are nearly identical from everywhere,2 but teams are taking more of their shots right underneath the hoop, where they make them 2/3s of the time.

The Atlanta Dream, who have maybe the most analytically minded head coach in the league, are driving this trend. So far through their first five games (of which they’ve won four) the team is taking a whopping 38% of its field goal attempts from within three-feet of the basket,3 miles above any other team of the 2020s.

This offseason the Dream traded for Angel Reese, who, thanks to her offensive rebounding put-backs, has consistently had one of the closest average shot distances in the WNBA since her Rookie season. In Atlanta, she’s taking even more shots at the basket, leading the league with nine rim attempts per game.

But it’s not just Angel in Atlanta. Allisha Gray is taking nearly four more rim attempts this season, the second biggest increase in the Association, and now gets to the rim more than any other Guard. Her backcourt mate Jordin Canada is also top-10 among Guards in rim attempts.

And it’s not just the Dream. The Lynx and Mystics are both taking more shots at the rim than any other team of the previous five years, led by Natasha Howard and Olivia Miles in Minnesota and Kiki Iriafen and Shakira Austin in Washington D.C.

The natural question is, will this scoring barrage continue? After all, we are still in May and teams have only played 5 to 7 of their eventual 44 games. It’s a small sample size, but over the last few years, five games has generally been a good indication of where scoring will land when the Regular Season wraps.

Last year, through five games the league-wide average points per game was 81.5. At the end of the season it was 81.7. Unless the referees get a top down directive from Cathy Englebert (or Napheesa Collier)4 to change the way they are calling games, expect the triple digits to keep coming.

Four teams are currently on pace to be among the top-10 offenses of all time. Even the lowest scoring team, the Seattle Storm, would still be an above average offense historically. It’s been fun to watch WNBA offenses explode this season, and I for one am excited for a full summer of it.

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More NBA Awards that Don’t Exist

Some Charting Hoops readers submitted more ideas for NBA awards that don’t exist since my last post,5 and I wanted to highlight a few here.

Most Unbelievable Shot

It can be easy to forget how good NBA players are at putting a basketball through a hoop. You see 70-something free throw percentages and think, “I could do that”, forgetting the pressure and chaos going on around players in game (especially when free food is involved). Then you hear stories of these same guys making 1000 out of 1090 shots in practice, and you think “oh, right”.

So NBA players make some seemingly unbelievable, long range, contorted shots in real games with some regularity because they are actually that talented. This award is not about those shots. This award rewards the shots you couldn’t practice and almost certainly entail a fair amount of luck. For that reason, I’m giving it to Jonathan Kuminga, because he made a 75-shot without trying to make a 75-foot shot.

Winner: Jonathan Kuminga

Single Quarter Team of the Year

The Oklahoma City Thunder were the best team all year, but they weren’t the best team every quarter. The Thunder posted a +11.1 net rating6 en route to their league-best 64-18 record, but somehow that underplays how dominant this team was. They outscored opponents by 15.7 points per 100 possessions in first quarters - that’s 2 points better than the full game mark for the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, the best net rating team of all time. The Thunder then typically extended their lead in the second and third quarters, and coasted through the fourth. Importantly, that means they were not (technically) the best fourth quarter team in the NBA; that honor belongs to the New York Knicks.

Before going on this crazy 11-game Playoff win streak, demolishing every Eastern Conference opponent in their path, the Knicks quietly had the best Regular Season net rating in fourth quarters of any team in the league. They were +11.7, even better than an average Thunder game, and they got it done with a defense that rivaled the Thunder’s, holding opponents to under 105 points per 100 possessions.

The Philadelphia 76ers were also much better in fourth quarters. Overall, the Sixers scored 9,502 points this season and gave up 9,517, a total margin of -15 or -0.1 per 100 possessions. In fourth quarters they were +4.6 so they must have fallen off in each of the first three quarters right? Nope! The Sixers were positive in the first, second, and fourth and somehow got outscored by 10.6 points per 100 possessions in third quarters. That’s worse than the Brooklyn Nets.

I would have thought that consistent aberration would be due to lineup patterns, but it isn’t. Tyrese Maxey played 38 minutes per game, which implies 9.5 minutes per quarter on average, but he played 11 in thirds. VJ Edgecombe, Paul George, and Joel Embiid all played more than their share of minutes in the third as well. They simply got out adjusted coming out of halftime.

The Los Angeles Clippers out adjusted everyone in overtimes. They outscored opponents by a hilarious 44 points per 100 possessions in the extra frames this season. Granted, they only went to overtime three times, including twice against the tanking Mavericks, but they won those frames by 17 points and went 3-0. I suppose the lesson is don’t make Kawhi work more than he’s paid to.

Winner: New York Knicks

Zach Lowe Award for Best Podcast Guest

As I wrote about earlier in the season, I listen to a lot of Zach Lowe podcasts. Usually he’s chatting with other NBA talking heads, but every so often he has a player, coach, or GM on the show.

It was fun listening to Jalen Duren talk about his offseason, off-the-grid bonding with Cade Cunningham and his love of the TV show “Friends”. It was interesting hearing Stan Van Gundy’s perspective from years on the sidelines as a coach and player, and cool that Owen Phillips’ piece about contrarian award voters get brought up. It was inspirational seeing Tim Hardaway Jr. wearing basketball shorts off the court as a grown man at the live taping in Denver.

THJ wins in my book from his appearance on another show, The Young Man & The Three, back in July 2025. He was asked about getting to play with Nikola Jokić this season, and all he could do was smile.

Winner: Tim Hardaway Jr.

The “Please Overestimate Me” Player of the Year

This one comes from reader Wizards Points, who explained it like this:

“Player who other teams’ announcers way overestimate. My favorite example of this was when the Detroit broadcast said, ‘uh oh, here comes Sharife Cooper’ without any hint of irony. “

Honestly I don’t have any other nominations for this one, so congrats Sharife! It did remind me of this legendary Eric Collins call from a few years ago though, where he properly estimated Karl-Anthony Towns.

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This season’s ballots featured

• A runaway MVP (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander),1 who is also the Clutchest player in the league and has an up-and-coming cousin winning Most Improved (Nikeil Alexander-Walker)

• A unanimous Defensive Player of the Year (Victor Wembanyama)

• One of the closest Rookie of the Year races in recent history, between two former roommates (Cooper Flagg over Kon Knueppel), and

• Three different Spurs finishing top four in five of the six major award categories (Wemby, Dylan Harper, and Keldon Johnson).

Despite the inevitable debates around what are ultimately subjective honors, it’s fun and important to give people their flowers. So why stop at these six trophies? Like I did for the WNBA last season, I’m going to give out 10 more awards for the 2025-26 NBA Regular Season. Some will be serious, others silly. Let’s begin!

Sophomore of the Year

The NBA not only votes for Rookie of the Year, but also names two entire All Rookie teams. Then it forgets about them as Sophomores. Here are the candidates if there were a little more love for second year players.

Ok, maybe we don’t need Sophomore of the Year this season after all. Basically every draft of the 2020s has been stacked,2 with the glaring exception of this 2024 class. If Rookie of the Year was actually Underclassman of the Year, I don’t think the results would have been too different this season. Anyway, here are the finalists.

Castle won Rookie of the Year, and in my mind, he defended his claim as best in his class pretty easily this season (with apologies to Donovan Clingan, whom the advanced stats actually like quite a bit more than anyone else, thanks to his offensive rebounding, Reed Sheppard,3 and the Hawks and Wizards fan bases who each ended up with a French big man, just not the right one).

To be fair, Stephon Castle is not only the best of a below-average class; he has been objectively excellent for the Spurs all year. He improved across the board from his Rookie campaign, averaging more points on better efficiency, more rebounds on both sides of the ball, and nearly twice as many assists as he’s developed better lob-chemistry with Wemby.4 After drafting Castle, the Spurs brought in De’Aaron Fox and drafted Dylan Harper not really knowing what Castle would develop into. He’s exceeded expectations in year two, becoming the best of a very talented backcourt in San Antonio.

Winner: Stephon Castle

Junior of the Year

There’s a real case to be made for Amen Thompson or Brandon Mill… JK it’s obviously Wemby.

Winner: Victor Wembanyama

Best Family Moment

The tightest sports locker rooms can feel like families, and sometimes the NBA is literally a family affair. There were 18 sets of brothers playing in the NBA this season, a few sets of cousins,5 and a handful of “juniors” whose dad’s played in the league. So it makes sense to celebrate the best family moments of the season.

In September, Converse released Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s first signature shoe. It sold out immediately, so only the most dedicated fans were able to cop a pair in retail stores. Nikeil-Alexander Walker, Shai’s cousin, was one of those fans. He reportedly waited in line for 12 hours to get a pair of his cousin’s shoes. Of course, Shai had already gifted him a pair, and as a Hawks fan I’d be a little concerned about what sleeping outside in a foldout chair does to the back health of a $60 million athlete, but still a feel good story.

Pat and Cam Spencer were unheralded most of their basketball careers. Pat actually gave up basketball for four years while he went and won the Tewaaraton Award as the best player in men’s college lacrosse. He found his way back to the hardwood in a grad year at Northwestern then earned his way into a roster spot in Golden State. His younger brother Cam was lightly recruited out of high school, started his college career at Loyola Maryland, and eventually made it to the Memphis Grizzlies as the 53rd pick. That’s all to say that this moment was unexpected, and awesome.

LeBron James threw an alley-oop to his son in the NBA Playoffs. That sentence is absurd. As GoldenKnight tweeted, “LEBRON JAMES LITERALLY CREATED A TEAMMATE TO THROW AN OOP TO IN THE PLAYOFFS MAN STOP ALL THE DEBATES”

Winner: LeBron & Bronny James

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Second-Most Valuable Player

This award that doesn’t exist goes to the best second-best player on a team. The easy answer in the WNBA was Jackie Young, clearly an all-league talent who could be option 1A on her own team, but who just so happens to play with one of the greatest players of all time in A’ja Wilson.

Jimmy Butler is the self-proclaimed Robin of the NBA (to Steph Curry’s Batman) but he suffered a knee injury in January, sidelining him for half the season and opening up the Robin race to other contenders. Unfortunately, injuries also took out a number of other would-be candidates like Jalen Williams (second to SGA), Jaylen Brown (normally second to Jayson Tatum, but first this season with Tatum rehabbing his Achilles), and Austin Reaves and LeBron James, whoever you consider to be second in the pecking order behind Luka.

Speaking of which, to be considered for this award a player has to be the clear second best player on the team. This criterion eliminates Reaves and LeBron, as well as guys like Evan Mobley (is he the second best Cav over Darius Garland/James Harden?) and Franz Wagner (is he just better than Paolo Banchero?).

Fortunately for Jalen Duren, this is a Regular Season award.

Unfortunately for Karl-Anthony Towns, this is a Regular Season award.

Unfortunately for both of them, this is Jamal Murray’s award.

Murray averaged the most points per game (25.6) and the most assists per game (7.1) among guys who didn’t lead their team in these stats, and he was also the best shooter on the Nuggets, and arguably in the entire association.

Murray had the best Regular Season of his nine-year NBA career, averaging highs in points, rebounds, assists, and shooting percentages, most by a wide margin. He suited up 75 times for the Nuggets and carried the team for an extended period while Jokić was rehabbing his knee. The Nuggets went 11-6 without their big man, largely thanks to Murray, who averaged 28 and 8 in those games over 36 minutes. He was clutch all season, finishing second only to SGA in Clutch Player of the Year voting.

Murray had been a borderline All Star for years, and finally got his first nod this season, ending Jokić’s drought of All Star teammates. He’ll probably be named to an All-NBA team tomorrow.

Like Jackie Young, Murray could be option 1A on a good team, he just so happens to play with one of the greatest players of all time in Nikola Jokić.

Winner: Jamal Murray

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Garbage Time Player of the Year

We have Clutch Player of the Year, to recognize the players who rise to the challenge in the final minutes of close games. But what about the guys who rise to the challenge of keeping fans from leaving early in the final minutes of blowouts? Let’s recognize some of these garbage time heroes.

Data courtesy of pbpstats

All of these guys are very, very good at basketball. They may even be very good NBA players someday, but this season they were put in, let’s say, less than ideal situations.

Will Riley had to play 862 possessions of basketball that wouldn’t affect the outcome of the game. That’s 25% of all of his plays, 423 minutes, or 7 hours, of meaningless running around. And for some of those minutes he was forced to abandon all pretense of playing basketball, as he and his Wizards collectively decided to foul Bam Adebayo as much as possible in an attempt to help stop him from passing Kobe Bryant’s 81-point mark. Outside of giving up the second most points of all time as a primary defender, he had himself a solid Rookie year and next season he should be a key piece in what should be a much better time in Washington D.C.

Maxime Raynaud also had a solid individual first NBA campaign, making Second Team All-Rookie as the 42nd pick. Unfortunately, he’s in Sacramento and his situation isn’t looking any brighter next year. Raynaud averaged 28 points and 6 rebounds per 100 possessions in garbage time, about what Alex Sarr, the Wizards former #2 pick, does in all his minutes. Raynaud was outscored by 79 points in those possessions. Brutal.

A lot of players changed teams at the trade deadline. Some stars moved to tanking teams, stashed for brighter days. Some role players were elevated to contenders and had the chance to show off in these Playoffs. Walter Clayton Jr. was a rare case, going from bad tanking team to bad tanking team as a piece in the Jaren Jackson Jr. Memphis-Utah trade. This being his first year in the league, he had only played 45 games for the Grizzlies before having to switch loyalties and expend effort trying to lose games for the Jazz. At least he was spared the generational tank-off between his two franchises in April.7

Winner (Loser?): Maxime Raynaud

Funniest “What If”

At one point in the season this was a real possibility:

• Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokić, Victor Wembanyama, Luka Dončić, and Cade Cunningham all miss the 65-game threshold for post-season awards.

• Jaylen Brown’s negative on-off tanks his stock among MVP voters.

• Kawhi Leonard continues his mid-season dominance and gets the Clippers, who started the season with 11 losses in their first 15 games, including a 2-10 stint without Kawhi, into the Playoffs.

• Kawhi reaches the 65-game threshold (this did happen).

• Kawhi Leonard is named the NBA’s 2025-26 MVP.

This would have been hilarious on a few fronts.

• First, it would have highlighted how silly the 65-game rule is, by handing the MVP award, the league’s highest individual honor, to maybe the sixth most valuable player in the league simply because he played in one or two more games than the actual most valuable players.

• Second, the 65-game rule was essentially put in place because of Kawhi! It was included in the last Collective Bargaining Agreement to curb load management, a strategy to rest healthy stars whose worst offender was none other than Kawhi Leonard.

• Third, the league would have had to bestow its highest honor on a player who is actively under investigation by the league and may face punishment soon. It’s fallen almost completely out of the media cycle, but Kawhi Leonard played this entire season while the NBA’s legal council was investigating him, his uncle, Steve Ballmer, and the Clippers for salary cap circumvention.

Giving a player an MVP because of a silly rule originally instituted to target him and then banning that player a month or two later would have been such an amazing plot. Alas.

Winner: Kawhi Leonard

Comeback Player of the Year

The NFL and MLB each hand out a Comeback Player of the Year award to guys who overcome adversity to return to play even a single snap or who have, in MLB’s official language “re-emerged on the baseball field during a given season.”8 The NBA doesn’t have this award, but if they did, 2025-26’s winner would obviously be Jayson Tatum.

The guy ruptured his Achilles tendon in the Eastern Conference Semifinals last year, and was back on the court, facing NBA competition, 10 months later. Above the Break did a great piece diving into Tatum’s form upon his return, but regardless of the stats,9 his return was inspirational (and heavily documented in a heavily publicized show ironically called The Quiet Work).

Winner: Jayson Tatum

Side note: It would be amazing if Kawhi Leonard gets banned then comes back and wins this in the 2027-28 season. Stay tuned.

Pettiest Decision

This award is mostly just a reminder of some things that happened this year. Not that you forgot any of the unending Giannis drama, but did you remember that Chris Paul was in the league this year? He returned to the Clippers last offseason for his retirement tour, only for it to be interrupted halfway through when the team got sick of him. He is the best player in franchise history, and they shipped him off unceremoniously, essentially ending his Hall of Fame career.

Or remember the NBA Cup that the Knicks won? They beat the Spurs, won a banner, then refused to hang said banner in Madison Square Garden because they instead want to win and hang a different, more valued banner (and they may need to beat the Spurs again to get that one).

Winner: New York Knicks

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Best Court Design

The courts are getting crazy, with seemingly a different design every game in these Playoffs. According to Basketball Jersey Archive there were 88 unique designs across the league’s 30 teams this season. These were my four favorites:

Finalists for Best Court Design:

I love when teams subtly bring in elements of their identity to the court, the way the Hornets do with the beehive10 and the Jazz do with the mountains. I’m also a sucker for a cool blacktop court, and I may be biased as the only NBA game I attended in person this season was played on the Denver Nuggets City Edition court.

That said, while there are some nits to pick with the Rockets design (why is the baseline text vertical?) it’s gotta be the Astronaut court for me.

Winner: Houston Rockets

Best Throwback Jersey

I don’t know if there was a cross-team design meeting last offseason, but several NBA teams went old-school with their alternate jerseys this year, and I loved it.

Finalists for Best Throwback Jersey:

Winner: Cleveland Cavaliers

This is my petition to Koby Altman to get LeBron back in Cleveland this offseason. I would love to see him playing in this jersey like old times.

Bonus: Chart of the Year

I made a lot of charts this season, spelling out the letters on jerseys, visualizing happiness, ranking All Stars, but I think my favorite, visually, is this one showing when teams call timeouts. The main takeaway is that all of the bad teams use their timeouts early on to stop opponent runs, except the Jazz. But really I like it because it’s as soothing to look at as jazz is to listen to.

Let me know in the comments who else you want to recognize this year!

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