Dream Waive Ashley Shields

The press release is right here. It looks like Ashley Shields's career with the Atlanta Dream ended before it even started.

Here's what training camp on May 17th looks like now:

A: Players Who Played Last Year

C Snow (free agent signing)

F/C de Souza
F Lacy
F Lyttle

G/F Castro Marques
G Latta
G Young

B: Players Who Didn't Play Last Year, But Whom We Expect To Play

C Anderson
G Teasley
F Holdsclaw

C: Players Acquired by Draft or Who Have Not Made a Commitment

C Leuchanka
G/F McCoughtry
G Lehning
G/F Morrow

That's fourteen players. Believe it or not, we could actually invite someone else to Pre-Draft Camp if we wanted to. Why not a local player? (Although Holdsclaw has been talking about Cheryl Ford....)

This also means that we traded a second round draft pick to Detroit for, essentially, nothing. Trader Bill looks smarter and smarter every day.

UPDATE: Richyyy at RebKell explains it best: "Trade in full: Atlanta sends the 18th pick (i.e. Britany Miller) and Kristin Haynie to Detroit for the right to no longer have to pay Kristin Haynie (and three weeks of pretending they had any interest in Ashley Shields)."

About Ashley Shields

One day the Commissioner is shaking hands with you, the next....

Initially, the Atlanta Dream had two picks in the second round for the 2009 WNBA Draft. With roster sizes being cut from 13 to 11 and with the chances of non-veterans making a team diminishing, that second second-round pick became one pick too many. Enter Trader Bill Laimbeer, who needed a second-round draft pick that we just happened to have and wanted to get rid of.

Therefore, he traded Ashley Shields to us. Detroit used their brand-new second round pick to pick up Britany Miller, formerly of Florida State and now of Valosun in the Czech Republic.

So who is Ashley Shields? Shields was a first-round Draft Pick in the 2007 WNBA Draft by the Houston Comets, and was probably one of the reasons there isn't a Houston Comets anymore. She was a guard chosen out of Southwest Tennessee Community College; I have no idea if she graduated.

I'll look at Shields by Wins Score and by John Hollinger's PER. In Career Wins Score, she is fourth from the bottom in WNBA history - and since Wins Score is an additive metric that takes away points for doing bad things, she has a worse score than those players that literally played for just a few minutes. The only active player worse than Ashley Shields is Tan White. Most likely, Shield's low rating comes from her horrible 27.5 percent percentage shooting inside the 3-point line - she's 34.5 percent shooting from behind it. Her 72.8 percent free throw percentage isn't that impressive.

PER Ratings:

2007: 6.44
2008: 1.90

Both of these are what we euphemistically call "below replacement level". Let me put it this way - Shield's PER for 2008 was below that of Chioma Nnamaka. In 2007, it was above Chioma Nnamaka's 2008 stats, but that was the only player on the 2008 Dream she was above.

I suspect - strongly - that Ashley Shields will not see her way on a Dream roster, unless the Dream either a) knows something about the talents of Ashley Shields that two franchises weren't able to see, or more likely b) have lost their damn minds. We basically burned the second round pick; I'll guess we'll know for sure when those training camp invites come out.

The First Blurb

Work promises to be busy today, so I'll provide the barest of information. I woke up at 3 am in New York City, took the plane out of LaGuardia at 6:30, and was back to work at 10:15 am. So obviously, I have a lot of work to catch up with. Blogging is light today.

* As you all know, Katie Mattera was waived by the Dream. Somewhere in Atlanta, Art Eckman is wearing a black armband.

* In exchange for one of our extraneous second-round draft picks, Ashley Shields was traded to the Dream. More on that later.

* Atlanta gets an Angel. Angel McCoughtry, that is, who becomes the very first #1 Draft Pick for the Atlanta Dream in the 2009 WNBA Draft.

* Shalee Lehning out of Kansas State and Jessica Morrow out of Baylor become Atlanta's second and third round draft picks.