The People's Introduction to the WNBA, Pt. 1

Why the WNBA today looks like the NBA of the mid-2000s

All women’s basketball needed to do to get popular was start talking trash.

Caitlin Clark got me.

I have been - by the loosest definition - a casual women’s basketball fan for years. My childhood TV routine approximated “whatever ESPN would show”, meaning I’d watch the tournament and occasional WNBA game. I didn’t get hooked until last year. Caitlin Clark’s ascent - the Indiana buzzer beater, the South Carolina Final Four game, the Angel Reese trash talk, the 49 points to set the all-time scoring record, the Angel Reese rematch, the Paige Bueckers showdown - was the stuff of a sports movie. The only college basketball players I recall getting there were Steph, Zion, JJ Redick, and Kevin Durant.  

This year, I paid more attention to the women’s bracket than the men’s. Sports is at its core, the world’s best reality show, and the women’s game just has far more interesting characters up and down the roster (Flau’jae Johnson, Kim Mulkey, Cameron Brink, Dawn Staley, etc.). At this point, I am fully hooked. As the NBA playoffs have wound down, I’ve been watching more and more WNBA. 

While doing that, I’ve been learning more and more about the league. I’ve found it shockingly hard. The print coverage of the league is minimal. There are no real advanced stats websites. The history is fascinating (the best team in the league is owned by a Native American tribe! The players may be inadvertently participants in Russian money laundering schemes?) but jumbled and hard to sort through. Normal for leagues in their early years, but annoying nonetheless.   

So, here’s part 1 of the article that I wanted to find when I set out to learn. Let’s call it a People’s Introduction to the WNBA. I started by trying to understand the WNBA at a 10,000 foot view. How do the rules compare to other leagues? How does the quality of play match up? In future posts, I’ll zoom into the history, fascinating personas, salary structure, and advanced stats.   

At a high level, the WNBA bears almost no resemblance to the modern NBA. But it looks a lot like the NBA of Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant. The early 2000s NBA is a good mental model for the WNBA: grinding schedule, very physical, and defense oriented. 

Predicting quality of play from stats alone is an inexact science, but I ballpark the WNBA at the level of middle-tier men’s college basketball. It’s a high quality of play that has gotten a lot better since the league’s first year in 1997. 

Rules

The WNBA rules are almost identical to the international FIBA rules that govern Olympic play and most international basketball leagues. In the table below, I’ve plotted them against the NBA, the G-League, the college leagues, and two top international leagues (French and Australian¹). 

The NBA / G-League play by a unique set of rules. No other serious league plays 48 minute games or uses such a long three-point line. The WNBA’s set-up mimics the FIBA international rules that govern international play, the Olympics, and (more or less) college basketball. 

Despite shorter games, the WNBA is a serious grind. The league runs during basically the NBA offseason, giving just 5 months for 40 regular season games and 3 playoff rounds. All-in-all, the season is 20-30% longer than most international men’s leagues, with much less rest between games. They manage this with just 144 total players, one of the smaller pro leagues in all sports. No wonder they were so excited to finally fly charter… 

Quality of Play

What makes for high quality basketball? The easy answer echoes Potter Stewart - “you know it when you see it”. Another way to think about it is what separates play in lower-level leagues from the higher-level ones. The answer is offensive skill: bad passing, poor outside shooting, no left hand, poor post moves, etc. The first thing that jumps out from higher-level basketball may be the athleticism and size, but what makes the NBA so watchable is when you combine that with skill. If you leave someone open to shoot from 22 feet, you can make a good guess what level of basketball you’re watching if the shot hits all net, the rim, the backboard, or nothing at all.  

Looking at basketball across levels reinforces this theory. Below are the shooting splits for various levels of men’s basketball. I split college basketball in three levels (the top 100 teams, the next 100 teams, and the rest) to emphasize the wild splits between conferences.

Looking at overall offensive output (points per game) and sloppiness (assists, turnovers, fouls) tells a similar story. Here’s the full table:

In basically every case, the better league shoots and passes better, scoring more and committing less fouls and turnovers. More skill, better basketball! The same is not true for defensive stats - blocks, rebounding, etc. don’t tend to follow the same trend. 

So where does women’s basketball fit in? Here is the updated table, including the WNBA and women’s college basketball.

A couple things stand out immediately about the WNBA. First, they are incredibly shooters. Their free throw shooting is the best in the world and has been for some time - no level of competition other than the NBA comes close. They shoot quite well on 3s as well.

Some of this may be due to a shorter line, but not all. During the All-Star weekend, the NBA and WNBA faced its best shooters against each other in a three-point shooting face-off from the NBA line. While the WNBA rep, Sabrina Ionescu, lost to Steph Curry, her score would have won the regular three-point contest with the rest of the NBA’s biggest stars.

Second, the WNBA has elite passing and playmaking, better than the best men’s college players and a small step below the G-League. Their game is clean too, without a ton of turnovers or fouls.

Two factors hold their offense back: (a) 2-point shooting, and (b) not shooting as many few 3s. I mentioned before how the WNBA reminds me of the pre-LeBron NBA and this is why. Their shot diet includes a lot less shots from the highest value parts of the floor (at the rim² and from three) and a lot more from floater / long-two distance.

As the NBA’s evolution attests, leagues get better over time. I mentioned before that the WNBA trails the 2024 NBA in basically every ‘quality of play’ measure, but the NBA wasn’t always so fun to watch. Combining the two charts above, here’s how the WNBA compares to the NBA of 20 years ago. It’s a dead ringer. 

That era of the NBA is remembered for its defensive style and physical play. The WNBA should be thought of the same way. The physicality Caitlin Clark is struggling with is a feature of a league that has a foul on basically one of every four possessions. This is not because the league is sloppy. In fact, the WNBA is a decent bit cleaner than the NBA was in the Duncan/Kobe era – it shoots better from every spot on the floor, passes the ball more, and commits basically the same amount of turnovers. 

(Brief) League History

I’ve yet to really learn about the league’s history and players, but I’ll quickly note that the league wasn’t always this way. Early versions of the WNBA were significantly messier and its (unfair) reputation for low-quality basketball probably came from some of these earlier iterations. The offense was worse then and it’s not because the defenses were any better, it’s because the offenses turned the ball over and couldn’t shoot as well.

Below, I have plotted two stats over the WNBA’s 27 year history: how many points a team scored per 100 possessions and how many turnovers / fouls it committed over the same span. The bigger the gap, the better the basketball. 

When the WNBA started, play was choppy and slow. Teams turned the ball over a lot more, fouled on nearly every third possession, and shot just 41% from the field. It looked a bit like lower-level women’s college play today. There are not a ton of highlights from that time, but you can see the contrast if you check it side-by-side with today’s footage. 

Thankfully, that era is over. The WNBA today is a much better watch and with more talent coming in each year, the quality is getting better and better. What reputation it has carried before is a poor match for the quality of play today.  

1. Not coincidentally, these are the league’s the top two projected NBA draft picks (Alex Sarr and Zaccharie Risacher) played in last year. Last year’s top pick Victor Wembenyama also played in LNB Pro A. According to the same analysis from the 'Quality of Play’ section, the level of competition grades out about equal to top college programs and a step below the G-League.

2. A big part of why they shoot worse at the rim than the NBA, I suspect, is because there is no dunking. Dunk attempts are the highest-percentage shots in the NBA - even better than open threes. They make up about 6% of shot attempts and players shoot 90%+ on them. Only a few WNBA players can dunk, and alley-oops are not a part of the game.