The Dream's Resurgence and McCoughtry's Role

Sue over at the They're Playing Basketball blog asked me why Atlanta Dream is in second place after being in seventh place last year.

If I were to ask Bob Corwin, he'd probably roll his eyes and say, "Well, Pet, they have better players than they did in 2008." However, I think Sue F. is asking a more subtle question - "why is this group of players so good"?

Indeed, if you look at the Dream, they don't seem to have the kind of player like a Diana Taurasi or a Lauren Jackson, the kind of player that simply dominates every game. Yes, we have Chamique Holdsclaw, but she's not the player she was 10 years ago. Sancho Lyttle and Erika de Souza are All-Stars, but they don't strike anyone as superstars. How has the Dream been able to come together?

If I were to answer this without looking at a metric, I would say "depth". We have players like Angel McCoughtry, Michelle Snow, Ivory Latta all of whom are capable of having a breakout game - 15 plus points - on any night. Armintie Price was a former Rookie of the Year, and Jennifer Lacy isn't chopped meat. A lot of Dream games this year seem to be predicated on the philosophy, of "Okay, let's take our five starters and see if they're enough to win the game. If they can't, then we'll just find someone on the bench who is "up" tonight and wait until something clicks." It seems to be working, because it's rare the entire bench is cold.

In particular, I would have answered, "because we have Angel McCoughtry". I was thinking about a stat called "usage" which goes like this:

usage = 40 x (field goal attempts + (0.44 x free throw attempts) + (0.33 x assists) + turnovers) x (team pace / league pace) / minutes played

This is the "unadjusted" version of the stat. Technically, you need to know team pace and equalize it with league pace. But even the unadjusted version (as an estimate) can tell you a lot.

What fact did I remember about usage? I remembered that offensive efficiency declines with usage. I therefore jumped to one true conclusion and one false one:

1) That offensive efficiency increases with low usage, and that
2) Angel McCoughtry's low minutes indicated that she had a low usage rate - therefore, high offensive efficiency.

Which of the above is true and which is false? To know that, we have to know what usage really stands for:

usage = how much of a team's possessions a player uses up

Then this means that #1, above, is true. The more possessions any particular player uses up, the less efficient she's going to be. If an opposing team knows that player X is going to end up with the ball most of the time, defenses are going to key on player X and player X's efficiency will fall. Likewise, if player X doesn't have the ball, player X gets the benefit of the enemy not thinking about her.

However, as it turned out, #2 is wrong. (jaye would be chasitising me - "Really, Pet, did you think that McCoughtry wasn't using up Atlanta's possessions?")

Unadjusted Usage Rate for Atlanta Dream Players
Current roster only

McCoughtry 27.62
Holdsclaw 25.68
Castro Marques 24.31
Lyttle 21.65
Latta 18.36
De Souza 18.01
Snow 16.61
Miller 16.34
Lacy 15.62
Lehning 11.30
Price 0.00

As you can see, McCoughtry only plays 17.6 minutes a game but she gobble's up Atlanta's possessions. She's what would be called an "offense creator". McCoughtry loves to make her own shot, and the players behind her are Holdsclaw and Castro Marques...and you know that neither of them are afraid to take shots against all odds.

So McCoughtry's ability has little to do with how often she's played. What you can say is that McCoughtry, in terms of offense, is virtually a "sixth starter" - she can come off the bench and play just as well as a starter plays. She certainly controls the ball as often as a starter does. There aren't too many teams in the WNBA that have players like McCoughtry.

Look at the bottom of the list - next to Price, who has played all of 3 1/2 minutes, we have Lehning with an 11.30 usage rate - possessions don't end with Shalee Lehning for the most part. Q of Rethinking Basketball described five point guard styles: the initiator, the distributor, the facilitator, the scorer and the combo guard. Lehning's usage rate says nothing bad about her - it simply puts her at the Vickie Johnson/Tully Belivaqua end of the point guard spectrum instead of at the Sue Bird/Becky Hammon/Lindsay Whalen end.

Shalee Lehning vs. Everybody

Q over at Rethinking Basketball writes a long post about Atlanta Dream rookie starting point guard Shalee Lehning.

She had her detractors when she came out of college.

She was dismissed as irrelevant after the WNBA draft given the 11 player rosters this year.

She was dismissed after making the Atlanta Dream over incumbent point guard Ivory Latta.

I ignored her when I wrote about the WNBA's talented group of rookie point guards earlier this year.

She was dismissed as nothing more than a “ra-ra” player after becoming an important part of the Dream’s rotation.

And now she’s still dismissed after transitioning into a more substantive full-time starter on a potential playoff team. She is not even included among WNBA.com’s top 10 rookies despite starting 8 games for her team, tied for the most of any rookie.

During the Dream’s four game winning streak from July 22- August 1st, Lehning had 17 assists and 2 turnovers.

It's a very good article. And I'll say in my defense that even though I've knocked the rookie around a bit on the blog, the Senior Prospects Metric had her ranked #6 among WNBA prospects.

P. S.: I'm working on the next version of the SPM. So who's best, Tina Charles or Jayne Appel?

New Rethinking Basketball Post

Q at Rethinking Basketball has written one of the best articles I've read from him about gender and marketing in the WNBA.

The title is "What Difference a Year Makes: Why Ahistorical Analyses of Sport Perpetuate Misrepresentations of the WNBA". He writes about the recent placement of Candace Parker on the cover of ESPN: The Magazine, about all of the brouhaha about the first paragraph of the article about her discussing her cup size (of all things), and delves into an analysis of basketball and gender narratives.

My comments:

1. From a paragraph:

"However, the big difference this time around is that given all the media attention given to Parker and the Olympics last year, speaking from a place self-imposed ignorance about the WNBA no longer carries much credibility. Parker's arrival on the national (and international) sports scene last summer was one of those special moments in sports history that even the below-average lunkhead male would have had a hard time just ignoring. This does not mean we suddenly have a whole lot of enlightened, gender-conscious WNBA commentary...it's just a new sort of ignorance I guess..."

I concur. I don't think a person can pass themselves off as a sportswriter anymore without at least a basic knowledge of the WNBA. Part of the task of being a sportswriter these days is that you have to know a little bit about everything...or at least, you have to be able to fake it. In the old days, sportswriters were assigned one beat (baseball, or whatever) and rarely wrote about other manners. With the rise of television, with the power of syndicated columns and with cutbacks in press coverage, sportwriters are expected to be a bit more ranging in their knowledge. Even if they're called upon to comment upon golf or tennis, they had better know at least the names of the major names in those sports.

Q believes the days of calling yourself a sportswriter and bleating "I don't know anything about the WNBA" are pretty much over. The W might not make the news that much, but it makes it enough. You'd better know something about the league other than the same old tired arguments before you pontificate about its success or failure, not just "I watched one game and I didn't like it."

2. The back half of the blog post elaborates on two different subjects that aren't so much contradictory as that they have a tenuous connection: first, the idea of women as athletes. Second, the idea that other sports have greater gravitas and therefore deserve more attention.

With regard to the first, Q writes that the problem is not so much that men's basketball is inherently exciting because men can do more with a basketball, but the problem is that for many people - even some females - the concept of "female" somehow does not include "athlete". When some people try to put the two together, you can almost hear the computer in their head smoke and belch, with an electronic voice shouting "Does not compute! Does not compute!"

For those unenlightened (and I choose the word deliberately) persons, female athletic achievement can only be understood in comparison to male athletic achievement. Even when outsiders write about the sports and how to improve the WNBA, they either a) make suggestions so that it becomes a version of the male game played by smaller people - lower the rims, etc., or b) fall back on the baseline definition of female as "someone attractive to men" - wear unitards, etc.

(On most threads filled with comments by the red-bellied-woodpeckers (RBWs) among us, one of the suggestions - term defined loosely - for the WNBA is that everyone should be dressing like the women's volleyball players, bikinis and all. At first, I thought this was just gender-bashing, but with the announcement of an actual season of the Lingerie Football League, I'm not so sure...I'm coming to believe that these RBWs thought they were actually giving rational advice!)

The second part - the part about the legitimacy of a league in the public eye - I've written about before. Particularly, in the first two decades of baseball, basketball and football the new-born leagues were racked with franchise relocations, collapses, and other embarassing failures.

I believe that the acceptance of the WNBA is closely linked to Kubler-Rosses Five Stages of terminal illness - in this case, not so much as an illness as a paradigm shift and the death of an idea that Women Are Supposed To Be In This Box and Never Come Out of It. It's about being forced to expand one's perception not just about athletes and athletics, but about gender roles:

1. Denial: "The WNBA? What's that? Who cares?"
2. Anger: "God, that league sucks! It's nothing but a bunch of lesbians! David Stern should do something about that league! I swear, if ESPN reports one more time about the WNBA, I'll go to CBS Sports!"
3. Bargaining: "You know the WNBA is inferior. Therefore, you should go along with me and no one should follow it." "You can't win. The interests against the WNBA are too entrenched. Give up."

And when that doesn't work, "I'd like the WNBA, but why do they have to shove it down my throat? Why does ESPN have to report on its front page? Why does ESPN have to show this on TV when they could show (soccer, more baseball, D-league)? If the WNBA just wouldn't do (X) I could put up with it."

I expect in the next 20 years, we'll hit the Depression stage.

"What ever happened to women at least trying to be attractive? Who could it hurt?"
"Women have completely destroyed sports. It used to be that a man had a refuge."
"Remember the days when you didn't have to put the word 'men's' in front of a sport?"

However, don't lose hope. I suspect a few have moved on to Acceptance. "Acceptance" doesn't mean watching the WNBA, it just means not getting your underwear all wound up about it. In the same way that I "accept" NASCAR. (Sorry, it's just not my thing.)

But I digress. Good blog post. Go read it.

"Rethinking Basketball" LIVES!

Just heard from Q at the amazing Rethinking Basketball blog. It looks like after wandering in the wilderness of GAFIA (Getting Away From It All), we found him in the nearby woods of GAFMOI (Getting Away From Most of It).

But enough convoluted acronyms. He's back. With a new post. And just in time for the new season coming up.

Go to the link, and show yer love.

P. S. I re-added the link, with much happiness, to my list o' links.

Some Link Editing

It is with a great amount of regret that I've pulled Rethinking Basketball from the link list.

It was probably one of the best women's basketball blogs out there, both for thoughtful writing and in-depth statistical analysis. Unfortunately, the author disappeared in September. I wrote him at the beginning of the month, asking if he'd ever update the blog - but I got no reply.

In science fiction, they call this "gafiating" - from GAFIA, or "get away from it all". Q has gone to the Glades of Gafia, and he will be missed.

The NBA: "Boy, They Sure Can Jump!"

There's an article from Rethinking Basketball where Cheryl Ford criticizes the men's game, claiming that the NBA's game is simply about who can jump the highest. (This post started as a comment to his blog, but his commenting system is temporarily broken.)

Can't see the video, because I'm at work. However, the linked article is an interesting look at NBA Combines. The WNBA also holds such combines.

It seems that the NBA has borrowed the worst idea from the NFL -- that of the combine. I suspect that the general managers of big-money pro sports are so terrified about making a bad decision that their philosophy is "measure everything we can possibly measure, and something good will come of it". Millions of dollars are at stake, you know.

Thus in football you get all this emphasis on the Wonderlic and vertical leap and speed in the 40, all of which are atomized skills that could only serve as parts of a big picture, but there's no way to know how -- or if -- they'll work in combination. (If speed were all it took to make a great wide receiver, we'd be singing the praises of Renaldo Nehemiah even in 2008.)

I also believe that since NBA players are naturally taller and stronger than WNBA players, brute force is at a greater premium in the NBA than in the WNBA. There's always the hope that some draftee's strength and power will be enough to give him an edge over his future opponents if his comprehension of team defense, ball handling, or essential skills is lacking. (I still can't figure out why Lebron's dunkalicious dunks don't get stopped mid-dunk by a punch to the stomach, unless the NBA *really* doesn't know how to play defense.)

However, in the WNBA -- where it's rarer for one player to be physically dominant over the others -- team play skills are at a higher premium.

Q also suggested the idea of promoting the sport through mock WNBA drafts. Hey, I'm game for a mock WNBA draft! There are all kinds of WNBA blogs out there, so how do we make this happen in '09?