Taurasi Serves Her Time

It wasn't hard time. The judge ended up suspending nine days of her ten-days sentence. But Diana Taurasi pleaded guilty to drunk driving and she ended up spending one day in jail.

"The long national nightmare is over." Next time, just call a cab.

Taurasi Gets Some DUI Charges Dismissed

I suppose victory has its privileges. According to Cheryl Coward at hoopfeed.com, Diana Taurasi has had three of the four DUI charges against her dismissed.

The charges that were dismissed were the ones related to speeding and to having a alcohol content above .08. The "DUI-Impaired to Slightest Degree" charge still stands, and Phoenix has heavy (some say draconian) penalties for drunk driving.

Diana Taurasi Named MVP; Lyttle Gets a Mention

Diana Taurasi received the majority of votes for MVP.

(UPDATE: I thought she had received all of the votes, but the corrections are in the comments below.)

The complete list of votes and vote getters:

323 Diana Taurasi Phoenix Mercury
163 Tamika Catchings Indiana Fever
128 Katie Douglas Indiana Fever
99 Cappie Pondexter Phoenix Mercury
77 Becky Hammon San Antonio Silver Stars
73 Lauren Jackson Seattle Storm
39 Candace Parker Los Angeles Sparks
27 Deanna Nolan Detroit Shock
10 Sue Bird Seattle Storm
9 Lisa Leslie Los Angeles Sparks
8 Sophia Young San Antonio Silver Stars
7 Sancho Lyttle Atlanta Dream
1 Alana Beard Washington Mystics
1 Candice Dupree Chicago Sky
1 Sylvia Fowles Chicago Sky

I'm glad that Sancho Lyttle at least got a few mentions. However, I'm surprised that Erika de Souza didn't even get a mention. I suppose Erika will have to be satisfied with repeating as MVP of the Liga Femenina.

Big Booms

According to the Associated Press, Lauren Jackson of the Seattle Storm is out indefinitely with an Achilles injury. She will pretty much be day to day. She will remain in Seattle for the treatment of the injury.

With Jackson off the court, you'd think the front runner for MVP would be Diana Taurasi. However, her status is up in the air after her court date in Phoenix for drunk driving charges. The Mercury didn't wait for the league to take action and suspended Taurasi for two games without pay (remember, the WNBA season is only 34 games long.) She will be suspended for the July 18th and July 22nd games.

Taursi made the following statement:

“I am deeply sorry and embarrassed for causing this distraction for my teammates, the Phoenix Mercury, the WNBA, family and fans. While I cannot say more with regards to the specifics of the case, I do want to make sure that everyone knows how much I appreciate their support and that I’ve learned a valuable lesson. I am committed to making sure a lot of good comes from this experience.”

The WNBA said, "sounds good to us" and passed the buck on any further action.

None Dare Call It Conspiracy? Diana Taurasi and the All-Star Vote

A bunch of stat-heads have been tossing the ball around regarding Diana Taurasi's jump from front-runner to third place within one week of All-Star voting. (I believe the time frame between the first round of voting and the final round was one wek.)

My first impulse was that the shift in voting was clearly a conspiracy of the WNBA to make sure that Taurasi wasn't voted a starter. Taurasi, as probably everyone knows by now, was arrested for drunk driving and was found to have a 0.17 blood alcohol level. The conspiracy-theory concludes that the W didn't want Taurasi as their headliner on one of the occasions where the media would turn its brief attention to the WNBA.

However, is this really true or not? Can numbers tell us anything about whether such a change is possible?

In the first round of voting, Taurasi was leading all of the Western guards with 21.6 percent of the vote. Suppose we wanted to find, say, the 95 percent confidence interval of Taurasi's true percentage of votes. According to simple stats,
we should be 95 percent confident that Taurasi's true percentage should be between 20.3 percent and 22.9 percent.

By that time, there had been around 150,000 votes cast. 150,000 votes is a good sample size. If you have 150,000 votes in, that sample size is good enough to determine the probabilities to about 1 or 2 percent or so. Taurasi was clearly in the lead, with Sue Bird far behind at 14.4 percent.

But at the end of the voting, 600,000 votes were cast and Taurasi's 21.6 percent among guards had plummeted to 12.3 percent. Even if we were outside of the 95 percent confidence interval, Taurasi's true percentage shouldn't have been that far off. What the hell happened?

Conspiracy! Clearly, the WNBA simply fudged the vote count.

Or did it? The problem with the first sample - the sample with 150,000 votes - is that is might not have been a random sample. If the sample was biased, we have to rethink the results. Concluding that Taurasi's true percentage was 21.6 percent might be akin to concluding that John McCain's true percentage in the 2008 presidential election was 55.6 percent...simply from counting Texas's votes.

The first returns of the ballots were on July 2nd. Let's look at WNBA schedules since then:

Home Games Played Before and After July 2, 2009

Phoenix: 7/1
Seattle: 3/3
San Antonio: 4/2

We notice that Phoenix's game schedule before July 2nd is top heavy with home games. Let's make an assumption for which we have no proof - namely, that voting is heavier at the arena than it is on line. If this is true, Phoenix players had an advantage at the first round that couldn't be seen in the totals. Phoenix fans inadvertantly stuffed the ballot box for their favorite players.

However, Phoenix would have only one home game between the first round results and the final results. Seattle would have three home games and San Antonio would have two. In short, Seattle and San Antonio had opportunities to catch up with arena-based fan voting that Phoenix just couldn't match.

If this hypothesis is true, it should affect Phoenix players all across the board and not just Taurasi.

Phoenix Player Percentages Before and After First Round

Taurasi: 21.6/12.3
T. Johnson: 11.6/10.2
Pondexter: 17.8/11.7
Bonner: 11.4/7.1
T. Smith: 21.9/12.6

The numbers hint at about a 6 percent (or more) drop at every single position except for Temeka Johnson. This doesn't prove the hypothesis, but it grants it some support.

Now look at Seattle:

Seattle Player Percentages Before and After First Round:

Bird: 14.4/14.5
Wright: 2.6/2.9
Jackson: 12.1/14.7
Cash: 11.4/13.0
Burse: 8.6/15.9

In every case for Seattle (except for Janell Burse) the percentage of votes remained pretty much the same between rounds. The Storm had three home games before the end of the first round, and three home games after it. It leads further credence to the hypothesis that first round voting percentages for a particular player and number of home games played by the player's team have a strong correlation.

I think I'm convinced. The only conspiracy was in the schedule that gave Phoenix only one home game between the end of the first round and the final All-Star vote. In short, there was no conspiracy.

Of course, you can still ask, "Why did Taurasi's numbers drop the most?" It could be one of two reasons: either the kind of voters who vote from arenas (as opposed to on-line) don't like Taurasi as much as Phoenix fans like her, or that there was simply an additional drop off caused by the notoriety of Taurasi's DUI arrest. Combine those two untested hypotheses with the illustrations above, and the "mystery" solves itself.

Diana Taurasi to Face Three Counts of Something

From this link: looks like Diana Taurasi's blood alcohol level was 0.17. And this was blood drawn, and not the breathalyzer. The trial date is July 22nd.

The worst place to get pulled over for DUI is in Phoenix, due to the psychotic sheriff there. This is going to be interesting.

(Note: the title of the article is "Taurasi Faces Extreme DUI Charge". Sponsored by Mountain Dew. "To the EXTREME!")

Dee's Drunk Driving

Diana Taurasi was arrested at 2:30 am this morning in Phoenix for driving "under the influence".

Here's what I expect. I expect the league to suspend Taurasi for two games. If the league can suspend Kara Braxton of Detroit two games for her first offense, Ms. Taurasi can serve a two-game suspension as well. Maybe more, as Taurasi is better known than Braxton.

UPDATE: With new linkification on ESPN.

Club 76

Only seven WNBA players belong to the exclusive Club 76. This is the list of players who have made 76 or more three-point field goals in a season.

Club 76
WNBA Players with 76+ 3-Point Goals, Season

1. Diana Taurasi, 2006 Mercury, 121
2. Diana Taurasi, 2007 Mercury, 95
3. Diana Taurasi, 2008 Mercury, 89
4. Katie Smith, 2000 Lynx, 88
4T. Katie Smith, 2001 Lynx, 88
6. Allison Feaster, 2002 Sting, 79
7. Katie Smith, 2003 Lynx, 78
7T. Nicole Powell, 2008 Monarchs, 78
9. Becky Hammon, 2008 Silver Stars, 77
10. Crystal Robinson, 1999 Liberty, 76
10T. Tamika Catchings, 2002 Fever, 76
10T. Katie Smith, 2008 Shock, 76

This post was inspired by a similar post on the basketball-reference.com blog. Only two WNBA players have multiple seasons in Club 76 - Diana Taurasi and Katie Smith. They have also been able to do it back-to-back, with Taurasi making the club three years in a row. (Maybe four times, if she has a good 2009 season.)

The NBA equivalent is the 220-Three Club - hitting 220 3-pointers in a season. Adjusting for season length and game length, you get 76 3-pointers.

A couple of facts also inspired by the blog post:

1. There is regression to the mean: No player who made the club in successive years ever hit more 3-pointers in the following year - so far when you reach Club 76, there is always a decline in 3-pointers the next year:

2. 3-point field goal percentage in Club 76 seasons: 38.4 percent
3-point field goal percentage in the next season *: 36.4 percent

The (*) indicates that we are not including the 2009 values for the players who made the club in 2008 - Diana Taurasi, Nicole Powell and Becky Hammon. But once again, it seems that we are seeing regression to the mean, which is a fancy of way of saying that players who perform extraordinarly well in one area of their game one year will have seasons that follow that are closer to average.

So we'll make a prediction: Taurasi won't hit 89 3-pointers in 2009, Powell will fall short of 78 and Becky Hammon will have to fight to renew her membership in Club 76. (Her time overseas has most likely doomed her.) On the other hand, if there's one player you can never count out, it's Diana Taurasi.

UPDATE: The ABL members of this club are...Dawn Staley, Crystal Robinson, Teresa Edwards, Niesa Johnson and...Katie Smith. With 44 games in a season, the ABL's club is less exclusive...but Robinson hit 90 3-pointers in the 1996-97 season for the Colorado Xplosion and topped it in the 1997-98 season with 102. She hit 46.6 percent of her 3-point attempts that season.

Diana Taurasi Instructs Becky Hammon in the Finer Points of Basketball

PShizzy: The Blog provides a prospective on the WNBA game from the photographer's point of view. It's definitely an interesting read.

He took this shot of Becky Hammon getting an arm in the face from Diana Taurasi. The author explains it this way:

She has this spin move, where instead of using her elbow against your body and spinning off, she goes high and catches people in the neck area. Stuns them while she spins. It’s great.

Interrrrrresting? Dirty play? Or just hard-nosed basketball?

Diana Taurasi vs. Dan Bickley

I had never seen this before. Dan Bickley, a sports writer for the Arizona Republic challenges Diana Taurasi to a game of H-O-R-S-E.

Let that be a lesson to youse. Never play H-O-R-S-E against someone who plays basketball for a living, male or female.

Diana Taurasi: "Shut the Hell Up, Melissa Rohlin".

A few days ago, a WNBA hater named Melissa Rohlin wrote a article that had so many flaws in it than it would be a waste of my labor to number then. Astronomers don't come down from telescopes to tell morons that no, the moon is not made of green cheese.

Read Diana Taurasi's response to Rohlin's feature "article". Diana says it better than I could.

Air Taurasi

A great article from Slam Online. To paraphrase the rap song, "Damn, it's hard to be a women's b-baller."

Also, if you've never seen them before, the Diana Taurasi shoes. "Air Taurasi?"