In the 14th Season

In the 14th season....

..of Major League Baseball (1889) theree were still two leagues - the National League and American Association.

The National League was still an unstable league. The Indianapolis franchise was $30,000 in debt ($700,000 in 2010 money) and ownership basically walked away from their franchise, saying "here you go, league, see if you can make baseball work in Indianapolis". An ownership group led by John T. Brush took over the franchise.

Even big teams like the New York Giants had to face their own humiliations. The City of New York wanted to build new streets through the Polo Grounds. Supporters of the Giants tried to get a bill passed in the New York State legislature that would block the construction, but New York Governor David Hill vetoed the bill after
it passed - the right of a city over its domain was to be respected, regardless of what he thought of the act.

The Giants had to move to Staten Island to the St. George's Cricket Grounds; the right fielder was basically playing on open soil that served as a stage in the off-season.

Players were unhappy with their low pay, and trouble was brewing. John Montgomery Ward was planning on a strike, but was going to hold off - for now. His plan would be to start a brand new league that would give players greater control over their sport. Players were assigned to look for capital, as it were, in their home cities. Later in the season, the players would issue a manifesto. In November, the National League would denounce the manifesto, and the war was on.

In conservative Cincinnati, church was considered more important than baseball, and the Red Stockings were kept twice by police from playing on Sunday. The American Association, founded by brewers, was the Beer and Whiskey league that played on Sunday; the NL was the league that didn't. Cincinnati and Brooklyn jumped from the American Association to the National League. Kansas City left the AA to join the Western League, and then the Baltimore Orioles dropped out, leaving a four-team league. The American Association would be scrambling for teams at the end of the 1889 season.

Particularly damaging was Brooklyn jumping to the National League - the Bridegrooms were the American Association champions! But the American Associations biggest test would come the following year.

In the 14th season....

...of the National Football League (1933), the league decided to split into two divisions following the success of the 1932 playoff game. "Hey! We shouldn't give the championship to whomever finishes at the top of the league! We should have a playoff!" I'm surprised that the league didn't think of this earlier.

There was a lot of NFL franchise movement. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Cincinnati joined the league. Staten Island suspended operations for the 1933 season, in hopes of coming back the following year. It didn't happen.

Furthermore, the NFL made a decision to separate itself from the college game. For a long time, both the NFL and big-time college football followed the same rules. Now, there would be new rules. Inbounds lines. Hashmarks. The goal post placed on the goal line. The most important rule was that the forward pass would be legal anywhere behind the line of scrimmage. Before that, one had to be five yards behind the line of scrimmage to throw a legal forward pass.

The year ended with the first real NFL Championship Game, with the Chicago Bears beating the New York Giants 23-21. The title game was still being held in December, weeks before Christmas.

In the 14th season....

...of the National Basketball Association (1959-60), the NBA was doing better than the year before. There was a brand new kid playing in the NBA called Wilt Chamberlain. He was not just the Rookie of the Year, but the Most Valuable Player, sort of the Candace Parker of his era.

However, the Minneapolis Lakers still weren't making money in Minnesota. Given that Bob Short couldn't make basketall work in Minneapolis, and given that Los Angeles was interested, Short relocated the Lakers to Los Angeles. For two years, the Lakers would be all alone out on the West Coast.

And the league was still an eight-team league.

In the 14th season....

...of the WNBA (2010), there will be twelve teams. A new team in Tulsa. I just keep telling myself, "three more months"...!

Thinking of the 2010 WNBA Draft

With the 2010 WNBA Draft, the Atlanta Dream will draft at the #10, the #23 and the #36 positions. This comes from the regular season record, which was ranked as fourth best in a heavy-parity league this year. The question then becomes if the Dream can find anyone good at the 10-spot.

I read something interesting at 82games.com which provides a sort of "blunt force" metric to evaluate draft choices. The highly simplistic metric goes:

rating = points/game + assists/game + rebounds/game

From there, players fall into several categories depending on their ratings:

Star: 16 or more
Solid: 12.5 to 16
Role player: 8 to 12.5
Deep bench: 4 to 8
Bust: 0 to 4
DNP: "did not play"

(The numbers above are adjusted to the shorter WNBA game.)

I then applied the metric to the various draft picks. The first column states how many picks at that rank have existed. For example, the WNBA has been around for 13 years and there have been 13 #1 picks.

					Role	Deep
Pick Total	Pick		Star	Solid	Player	Bench	Bust	DNP
13	1		11	2	0	0	0	0
13	2		5	4	1	3	0	0
13	3		6	1	4	1	1	0
13	4		5	5	2	1	0	0
13	5		3	4	4	2	0	0
13	6		4	3	4	1	1	0
13	7		1	1	5	5	1	0
13	8		0	3	5	4	1	0
13	9		0	2	5	6	0	0
13	10		2	2	4	4	0	1
13	11		3	1	5	3	1	0
13	12		1	0	4	5	1	1
13	13		0	3	2	3	3	2
13	14		0	2	5	4	2	0
13	15		0	0	3	4	5	1
13	16		1	1	0	4	5	2
13	17		0	1	3	3	4	2
13	18		1	0	1	6	5	0
13	19		0	0	2	5	2	4
13	20		1	0	0	5	4	3
13	21		0	0	3	3	4	3
13	22		0	1	2	5	2	3
13	23		0	0	2	4	3	4
13	24		0	0	2	6	2	3
13	25		0	0	4	4	2	3
13	26		0	0	2	6	3	2
13	27		1	1	1	5	1	4
13	28		1	0	3	1	2	6
13	29		0	1	1	2	6	3
13	30		1	1	0	4	3	4
13	31		0	1	1	4	3	4
13	32		1	0	0	4	3	5
12	33		0	0	2	0	1	9
12	34		0	1	2	2	1	6
12	35		1	0	0	2	3	6
12	36		0	0	1	0	2	9
12	37		0	0	0	0	5	7
12	38		0	0	0	2	0	10
11	39		0	0	0	3	0	8
8	40		0	0	1	3	0	4
7	41		0	1	0	0	1	5
7	42		0	0	0	1	3	3
5	43		0	0	1	1	1	2
4	44		0	0	0	0	1	3
4	45		0	0	0	1	1	2
4	46		0	0	0	0	3	1
4	47		0	0	0	0	1	3
4	48		0	0	0	1	0	3
4	49		0	0	0	1	0	3
4	50		0	0	1	0	1	2
3	51		0	0	1	0	0	2
3	52		0	0	0	0	1	2
3	53		0	0	0	1	1	1
3	54		0	0	0	1	0	2
3	55		0	0	0	0	0	3
3	56		0	0	0	0	2	1
3	57		0	0	0	1	0	2
3	58		0	0	0	0	1	2
3	59		0	0	0	0	0	3
3	60		0	0	0	0	0	3
3	61		0	0	0	0	0	3
3	62		0	0	0	0	0	3
3	63		0	0	0	1	0	2
3	64		0	0	0	0	0	3

Some thoughts about the above:

* The bust at the #3 spot was Sandora Irvin.
* The bust at the #6 spot was Cindy Blodgett.
* The bust at the #7 spot was Shona Thorburn.
* The bust at the #8 spot was Sun Min-Jung.
* At #10, Molly Creamer is the highest draft pick never to play in the WNBA. Not surprisingly, she was drafted by the New York Liberty in 2003.
* The bust at #11 is Danielle Crockrum.
* At #12, Alison Curtin never played for Houston. She was drafted in 2003. No telling whether or not Ashley Walker is a bust yet or not.
* At #16, Nicky Anosike is the outlier - the good player among the bad.
* At #18, Tammy Sutton-Brown is the outlier.
* At #20, Sheri Sam is the outlier.
* At #27, the star is Adrienne Goodson and the solid player is Cathrine Kraayeveld.
* At #28, the star is Brandy Reed.
* At #29, the solid player is Dominique Canty.
* At #30, the star is Charde Houston, the solid player is Tamika Whitmore.
* At #32, the star is Taj McWilliams.
* At #34, the solid player is Sandy Brondello.
* At #35, the star is Jia Perkins.

The modern draft ends at the #39 position. Let's look at each of the draft spots.

The #10 Pick: It is actually quite possible to get good players at #10. Two stars (Katie Douglas, Michelle Snow) and two solid players (Rebekkah Brunson, Loree Moore) have come out of this spot. It's unlikely that a bust player will come out of the #10 spot, but this is the level in the draft where there's the fractional chance that one's draft pick might not play a single game. (The aforementioned Molly Creamer.)

Marynell Meador's reputation for drafts can be questioned. In 2008, her first pick was Tamera Young, but she passed up Nicky Anosike. Then again, who saw Nicky Anosike coming. In 2009, she picked Angel McCoughtry, and the #1 position has always yielded at the very least a solid player. You could end up with anything at the #10 spot.

The #23 Pick: One thing I've noticed is that all of the star players generally get picked in the first round, the #1 through #13 positions. Afterwards, all you usually get is role player...until around the #27 spot of the draft. Then, there's a smattering of star picks afterwards, testimony to teams that just got lucky.

Why is that? Here's my theory. For the early part of the draft, teams stick to a list of pretty much the top 20 players or so - players about which everyone is in agreement. These players are the group of "great players". Some are great, but by the early twenties the "name picks" have run out. Everyone is guessing.

However, if all of the players you wanted are gone - now is the time when you just have to guess. Or, if you don't guess, you take risks. You stray away from the tried and true, and you pick that player out of the Ohio Valley Conference who is 6-2 or 6-3 but led the NCAA in blocks. All that are left are the risky picks at this stage, and sometimes, risk turns into reward.

The #36 Pick: Unfortanately, even the risky picks are gone by the time you get to the #36 picks. 11 out of 12 of the #36 picks in history were either busts or never played at all. The only player that was any good was Kara Wolters. Everything else has been disaster.

This is the level where you should be thinking of a local player. Odds are good that the person you pick will never see a WNBA court. You could pick someone from Georgia, or Georgia Tech, or Kennesaw State, or Mercer. Why not use the #36 pick for publicity, if nothing else? Either that, or sign some Eurostar and at least keep the drafting rights to that player.

(* * *)

Drafting is more of an art than a science. Still, in the second and third rounds, there's no reason not to just spin the roulette wheel. But that very first pick has to pay off, because if it doesn't, your entire draft could be flushed away - nothing more than a bad memory.

In The 13th Season

In the 13th season....

...of Major League Baseball (1888) there were two leagues - the National League and the American Association. The National League was the "purer" of the two leagues, the AA was the upstart. (Since the American Association was called the "Beer and Whiskey League" what better initials for it than AA?)

The leagues were in direct competition with each other. There were probably too many teams in baseball at the time - there were sixteen - but the AA was still holding on. Each league played each other in what could loosely be called a "World Series" but there was no fixed number of games between the two leagues. Each league was quite happy to poach the other's players when it could.

Already, the AA was instituting cost-cutting measures. There might not have been giveaway tickets, but prices were lowered to 25 cents and visiting teams were denied a percentage of the gate - they simply got a flat $130 for showing up.

There were still franchises in trouble. Oddly enough, the franchise that was in trouble was Detroit of the National League. One reason the AA made the move to limit visiting gate receipts was to kill Detroit - the Wolverines knew the only way they could survive was to sign big stars and hope for a big showing at the gate while on the road. Home attendance wasn't good enough to keep the team alive, and it disbanded after the 1888 season.

Detroit was gone at the end of the year. The National League stole the AA's Cleveland team and the AA replaced that team with one from Columbus.

Oddly enough, not only did the Detroit team disband in the 13th season of Major League Baseball, that Detroit team won the league championship the previous year.

In the 13th season...

...of the National Football League (1932) the fortunes of the NFL were at their lowest ever. In the midst of a Depression, the league had contracted to just eight teams. The previous season, the Frankford Yellow Jackets folded in mid-season. In the off-season, the Providence Steam Rollers and Cleveland Indians called it quits.

Generally, the rule of the previous 12 seasons was that the regular season champion was also the league champion. However, there were a lot of tied football games in those days - the Bears finished 6-1-6 - and the championship was given by winning percentage with ties excluded. Chicago and Portsmouth each finished 6-1 (not counting ties) and rather that split the title the NFL decided to have a playoff game.

Unfortunately, it couldn't be played at Wrigley Field due to severely cold weather. It was moved indoors to Chicago Stadium, which wasn't large enough for a full-sized football field. In spite of that, the idea of a playoff game was very popular.

You could say that the playoffs rejuvinated the sport. The following year, the NFL expanded with two more teams.

In the 13th season....

...of the National Basketball Association (1958-59), the league was actually doing very well. However, there was quite a bit of relocation going on, mostly from small cities to big cities. There were still the Minneapolis Lakers and the Philadelphia Warriors. The Celtics finished the year by winning their second NBA championship. It was only Bill Russell's third year as a Celtic, and Bob Cousy was still with the squad.

Looks good doesn't it? Oh by the way, the size of the NBA in 1958-59? Eight teams.

At the end of the 13th season....

...of the WNBA (2009)...it looks like there will be a 14th season to follow.

Time to Run the Chamique

Helen Wheelock writes about the changes taking place in the WNBA with coaches and how the game is different between college and the pros.

Currently head coach of the Dream, Meadors established the basketball program at Tennessee Tech, and has helped start three WNBA franchises – Charlotte (’97), Miami (’99) and Atlanta (’08). “I think that that has been my call of duty,” she quipped, “to be a starter person.”

That, as well as being an assistant with several of the league’s teams, has given Meadors plenty of opportunity to see how coaching has changed at the professional level. “When we first started this league, we were all college coaches and we ran the college plays,” she explained. “None of us do that anymore. We’re all running sets. We’re always trying to get the ball to the people that we know that can hit the shot.

There was an interesting comment made about how little current college players know the WNBA by former Sacramento Monarchs coach Jenny Boucek:

Something that has surprised Boucek is how unfamiliar many of the newly drafted college players are with the league’s players. “I have a few that were fans growing up and they love talking about old players that played in college or the WNBA,” said Boucek. “But most of them have never even heard of stars that have been through this league. They don’t know them, they’ve never even heard of them. And it never even occurred to them that they should know them.”

Her solution? We have named our post moves after older [female] post players. One of our moves is Katrina [McClain] and one of them is Lucy Harris. I make them Google the names of the players and learn their women’s basketball history.”

I guess Boucek will have to take her teaching skills elsewhere.

The Five Rules for League Survival

In 1981, William "Bill" Haarlow, retired vice president of AT&T, proposed to restructure the then-still-surviving Women's Professional Basketball League (WBL). In 1981, the league was in trouble and he proposed to become the new commissioner of the WBL. In his proposal, he stated five rules which he thought the WBL had failed to follow - rules which impeded its chances for survival.

The rules are all direct quotes from Haarlow and come from "Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League".

1. A commitment to strong centralized league leadership is required. League leaders must not be intimidated from bold action. There must be a clearly defined #1 executive or executive committee who has power and room to maneuver and the leadership must provide realistic and continual reappraisal of long term growth objectives and strategy.

2. Markets must be selected based on potential. There must be a determination of the criteria that is most likely to influence the league's appeal and the economics of a franchise, i. e. size and growth of market, degree of saturation by other sports, target audience, operating cost, and previous experience with an attitude toward other leagues or teams. The league must avoid expanding into new markets at the expense of the talent pool.

3. There must be a commitment of balanced ownership resources. The league must balance the urgency to close a franchise sale against the commitment by new owners of capital to team and market development. Women's basketball has to confront building primary demand which is a costly marketing proposition that requires knowledgeable and well-funded programs. There should be a five-year building plan and owners with the same perspective and building power should be attracted.

4. The league must build and sustain the support as a dynamic entertainment medium. There must be an evaluation of alternative formats and rules to make the sport appealing to the widest range of potential patrons and viewers. For a new sport, the live experience is critical to building viewership for ultimate video revenue.

5. Non-gate sources of revenue should be built. A commitment must be made to professional league headquarters marketing services, video strategy and negotiation, licensing and advertiser-sponsor development. This function must be undertaken gradually as the sport develops and grows.


His proposal to become commissioner was rejected. Marhsall Geller, the owner of the San Francisco Pioneers, thought that a new commissioner was a cosmetic solution to a league whose very survival was almost day-to-day. Geller might have been right. In September 1981, Dallas Diamonds president Dave Almstead made the public statement that the league was finished. The league still had some life in it, but he was essentially right - the 1980-81 season was the final season of the WBL.

However, Haarlow's rules were not bad rules. Has the WNBA managed to avoid the pitfalls identified by Haarlow? Let's look at the reign of WNBA president Donna Orender in particular. Orender became WNBA president in 2005.

Is Orender a strong president with freedom to move around? I believe that the answer is "yes". If there are owner/president clashes, I've not heard of them so far. (With one exception, stated later.) Granted, the open secret of the WNBA is that NBA Commissioner David Stern provides finanical support, and one would assume, guidance. However, Orender and Stern appear to be on the same page. No one has accused David Stern of being hemmed in by owners who are too independent and contentious, and the problem doesn't seem to exist in the WNBA.

How have markets been assigned? In only two instances in Orender's career has she been in charge of opening up new territory for the WNBA: the Chicago Sky in 2006 and the Atlanta Dream in 2008.

Chicago was the third-largest media market in the United States and the largest American inland market. Chicago, however, had a slight problem with saturation from other sports. The Cubs, White Sox, Bears and Bulls were all big in Chicago, and it would be hard for a WNBA franchise to draw attention away from "big name" sports. However, Chicago had hosted an American Basketball League franchise - the Condors - which appeared to be fairly solvent in the brief number of games it played in the 1998-99 season. Clearly, there was some interest in women's college basketball in Chicago.

As for Atlanta, Atlanta was a major cable programming center and was the 7th (or 8th) largest media market in the United States. Atlanta, too, once had an ABL franchise - the Atlanta Glory - but that franchise folded at the end of the 1997-98 season. The University of Georgia had a great women's basketball team, but even that team was smothered by the popularity of University of Georgia men's sports - even successful pro teams like the Atlanta Braves had trouble filling seats sometimes, but never the Bulldogs. One person stated that Georgia sports was "(Bulldogs) football, spring football, football recruiting, and the Gymdogs". (The U of G gymnastics team.) In terms of professional sports, however, loyalties to pro teams were much weaker in Atlanta than they were in Chicago.

Looking at either city, one could hardly claim that Orender has chosen poor locations for the expansion of the WNBA. Over-expansion has not been an issue, with the size of the league staying between 13 and 14 teams during her term.

In terms of ownership, there have been several changes including the Storm, Sparks, and Comets. If any mistakes were made in Orender's management of the WNBA, granting Hilton Koch the ownership of the Houston Comets would have to be the most prominent. Koch was already claiming finanical problems in his first year, and my understanding is that Koch and the league clashed over financing. His tenure proved to be such a financial disaster that the Comets were forced to fold. Koch's tenure was the last major ownership change in the WNBA - William Davidson of the Shock passed away but his family now own the franchise - and time will tell if Orender can not only find owners, but find owners with both the money and the patience to build a league and make the five-year investment mentioned by Haarlow.

In terms of the live experience, clearly, the league has done the best that it can. Arenas are professional and clean, and there are lots of in-game entertainments, activities and diversions. As for rule changes that might make the game more exciting, the WNBA is loathe to experiment. Rules, such as say, forbidding the coach to stop game action with a timeout (in international play, timeouts must be reported to the scorers table and only come into effect with a stoppage of play), have simply not been considered.

Why the WNBA has not experimented with rule changes that might make the game more exciting is uncertain. It could be that the WNBA is already wary enough from the bashing of the sports media, some of whom act more like sexist louts than the Gatekeepers of the Fourth Estate. Significant rules changes might inadvertantly support the argument from ignorance that the WNBA is not "real basketball". Furthermore, fans might want the WNBA to mirror the NBA's rules or international rules as clearly as possible - even thought this might adversely affect the quality of the game - in the belief that adherence to conventional rules give the WNBA gravitas.

As for sponsorship and alternative forms of revenue, the WNBA has made galloping strides in 2009 - partly out of necessity. In order to find a source of revenue, the WNBA has sold the naming rights to jerseys in Phoenix and Los Angeles, and a third team might follow. The WNBA has embraced social media and now broadcasts over 95 percent of their games on the internet. Increased web hits correlate with the potential of attracting advertisers.

My conclusion is that if one is looking at Haarlow's guidelines, one can argue that President Orender and the WNBA are doing things right. If the WNBA falters like the WBL faltered, it will not be because of poor management.

On the Way to a Long History

I noticed in two places - the "13 Teams, 1 Journey" blog and the Rebkell message board - that someone remarked that the WBNA has just passed the All American Girls Professional Baseball League of "A League of Their Own" fame for the longest enduring women's professional sports league of any sort. The AAGPBL lasted from 1943 to 1954 for a total of 12 years. This year is the WNBA's 13th year, putting it at the top.

What's not noticed is that the WNBA is as far as I can tell the third longest running professional basketball league of any kind outside of European teams. It's currently tied for third place and in 2010 it will hold third place in longevity all by itself.


64 years NBA 1946-present
64 years CBA 1946-present (*)
13 years WNBA 1997-present
13 years National Basketball League 1937-49
11 years American Basketball League (I) 1925-35

Not bad. Maybe we can get a movie with Geena Davis and Lori Petty?



(*) - The CBA has suspended operations. This might be it for the Continental Basketball Association.

The Phoenix Lifelock - A Proud Tradition

Scott Ostler over at the San Francisco Chronicle brings some historic perspective with regards to the Phoenix Lifelock and Los Angeles Farmers:

"Memo to knee-jerk WNBA haters laughing at the Phoenix Mercury and L.A. Sparks for wearing a sponsor on their jerseys, instead of team-name/city: It's a grand tradition. The Detroit Pistons began in Fort Wayne, Ind., as the Zollner Pistons, named for their owner and his business. Also in the NBL, no joke, were the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots and the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets."

I don't think they were laughing so much as they were terrified, like a bunch of old people yelling at the girls to Get Off Their Lawn.

The Difficulty in Playing in the WNBA Over Time

How much does skill level change in any sport over time? In baseball, you can enjoy a whole evening's worth of hot stove league arguments on this very subject. Pluck Babe Ruth magically out of the 1921 lineup of the New York Yankees and drop him into the 2008 lineup. Would he still be the Sultan of Swat? Would he be an All-Star player? Or would he be washed up trying to hit against 2008 pitching?

We know that in many sports, nutrition advances, improvement in training methods, population growth, and a increase in a sport's popularity (leading more potential athletes to choose the sport) change the skill level of sports leagues year by year.

The shoe can be placed on the other foot. A league's competition level can be weakened by overexpansion or by a decrease in a sport's popularity, giving players a chance to compete that wouldn't have made it in years past. Leagues can be watered-down as easily as strengthened.

Given that, is there a way to estimate how much tougher a league gets year by year?

There's a very simple way to do it:

a) Take a group of players from 1997 and see how well they do against the league,
b) Follow that exact same group of players from 1998 and see how well they do against the league.
c) If the group did better in 1998 than they did in 1997, the league got weaker - the reason that they put up better numbers was that the competition was weaker.
d) If the group did worse in 1998 than they did in 1997, the league got stronger - they put up worse numbers because the competition was tougher.
e) Do this for 1997 vs. 1998, 1998 vs. 1998, etc. until you get to 2008.

This "cohort" way of doing things makes sense. The only problem is how big should the cohort be? The ideal answer is that the cohort should be the entire group of players in 1997 who were also active in 1998.

Unfortunately, I can't do that. I don't have a database of year by year performance for players that automatically does these calculations. So I'll use Basketball Reference and choose the ten WNBA players with the most minutes in one year, and compare the performance of this group over to the next year. When I use the next year as the starting point, I'll perform the same process with a new group of players - the players who had the most minutes in the new starting year.

Occasionally, you get situations where a player was among the top ten in minutes one year and disappears the next year - the Kym Perrot case. In which case, I substituted players from the most field goals category. The goal was to choose players who were very active.

Another problem (which I was forced to ignore) was differences in coaching style. Players from the 2007 Indiana Fever are going to have different levels of production than the 2007 Phoenix Mercury. I don't have a solution for this problem, but I'm not looking for exact values, just an estimate of how much tougher a league gets over time.

The next problem: what metric should I use to measure a player's overall performance?

I chose the metric of Wins Score. I don't like the Efficiency Metric used by the WNBA because I feel it overvalues shooting percentage, awarding points for poor field goal shooting. Furthermore,

a) Wins Score is an "additive metric", giving points for everything a player does right, and
b) It takes into account all facets of a player's game, both offensive and defensive.

I looked at combined Wins Score, and then divided that into a "Wins Score Per Minute" for my particular group of players to take into account different amounts of total minutes players. This "Wins Score Per Minute" rating was tracked over two successive years for each of the cohorts to determine relative strength and weakness of a league.

The Analysis

So here we go. We set the difficulty value for the 1997 WNBA at 1.00.

Year	Difficulty	Comments
1997	1.000	8 teams, 28 games, halves, 30 second clock
1998	0.910	expansion from 8 to 10 teams, 30 games
1999	1.385	expansion from 10 to 12 teams, 32 games, ABL players join
2000	1.113	expansion from 12 to 16 teams
2001	1.301
2002	1.546
2003	1.601	contraction to 14 teams, 34 games
2004	1.730	contraction to 13 teams
2005	1.873
2006	1.429	expansion from 13 to 14 teams, movement from halves to quarters, 24 second clock
2007	1.404	contraction to 13 teams
2008	1.472	expansion to 14 teams

A graph is attached below:



Conclusions

Let's look at the graph and the numbers in the table above.

The dip in league quality from 1998 shouldn't be a surprise. With extra teams, we'd expect the team to get weaker, and this was the year when the Houston Comets won 27 out of 30 games. According to the estimate, 1998 was the weakest year in the WNBA's history.

Going to 1999, a flood of American Basketball League stars entered the league and the role players who filled spots on WNBA rosters were suddenly displaced. The league took a 52 percent jump in level of competition, the biggest jump between any two years out of the 13 years the WNBA has existed. Having the former ABL players did a lot for the WNBA.

The league's quality suffered in 2000 with an expansion to 16 teams, the largest number of teams ever in the WNBA. However, you'll notice that the league's quality slowly edged up year after year after year. Most likely, these changes reflect changes in coaching both at the WNBA and college levels, as well as the growing popularity of women's basketball as a sport. The level of play got tighter and tighter year after year, reaching a high in the 2005 season. Contraction down to 13 teams also helped moved the process along.

However, in 2006, the league's quality mysteriously dipped. There were a set of rule changes named for the 2006 season, and the league's strength overall dipped 23 percent. These changes, according to the Chasing the Title blog, had great impact on the game. They allowed players with superior athleticism to dominate other players. Players had a couple of minutes of rest. The shorter clock gave quicker athletes a premium and hurt teams trying to run the old 30 second full court offensive.

My suspicion is that the changes hurt a lot of players that weren't able to adjust. Like changes in the enviroment in an evolutionary example, some of the players in the W found themselves handicapped. Two minutes of rest where formerly no rest existed might help some players over other players.

The last two numbers are paradoxical. You'd expect the league to become tougher in 2007 (contraction and fewer places for players) and weaker in 2008 (expansion). It could be that the 2008 change is reflected by the strength of the draft class in 2008; I don't know what accounts for the 2007 dip. It might be random fluctuation.

Using a model like this provokes further questions:

1. Some American players thought that the WNBA would be able to offer enough money so that they wouldn't have to play overseas anymore. I'm sure that some players enjoyed a couple of years at home in the offseason. When it became obvious that salaries were going to remain small, players had to begin playing year-round again, playing in Europe in the off-season. How did this change competitiveness?

2. After a certain point, the pipeline of European players dried out for similar reasons. Why go overseas when you could just make the same crappy amount of money at home and work in the offseason, possibly for a company that was sponsoring your European team? How did that change competitiveness?

3. Has college basketball gotten tougher or easier over the past 12 or 13 years? How has that changed things?

4. Most of the early WNBA coaches were women, who moved from the college level to the pros. Now, the best female coaches stay at the college level, because it pays more and offers more security. Furthemore, former NBA players are preparing their resumes by coaching at the WNBA level. Do the NBA players bring a better skill set to WNBA coaching? How does that effect league strength?

WNBA: Better Than the NBA?

nickv1025 over at RebKell posts the following for comparison.

For the 12th season:
WNBA
Games played: 34
Teams: 14
Semi Finals Series: 3 Games
Conf Finals Series: 3 Games
Finals: 5 Games
Average Attendance: 7,918

NBA
Games played: 72
Teams: 8
Semi Finals Series: 3 Games
Conf Finals Series: 7 Games
Finals: 7 Games
Average Attendance: 4,824

For 13th season:
NBA
Games played: 72
Teams: 8
Semi Finals Series: 3 Games
Conf Finals Series: 7 Games
Finals: 7 Games
Average Attendance: 5,077

(* * *)

Of course, comparing two different leagues over a span of fifty years of time is like comparing apples and oranges. But like I said in an earlier post, "one statistic doesn't mean everything". Think about this the next time some one throws attendance stats at you to knock the W.

P. S. I wonder how much those NBA attendance stats were being...inflated.

P. P. S. The W had a better field goal percentage than the nascent NBA when comparing 12th seasons. The same for comparing 13th seasons.

The Value of One Statistic

I remember reading in some comment about the WNBA - by someone drunk on haterade - that a .420 average shooting percentage for the WNBA was weak and proof that the W was entirely second-rate, because a lot of NBA teams shoot better than .420. And of course, my computer at work denied me the chance to respond. The following shows what happens when you go by one statistic only to make your argument.


NBA Field Goal Percentage over Time

1946-47 .279
1947-48 .284
1948-49 .327
1949-50 .340
1950-51 .357
1951-52 .367
1952-53 .370
1953-54 .372
1954-55 .385
1955-56 .387
1956-57 .380
1957-58 .383
1958-59 .395
1959-60 .410
1960-61 .415
1961-62 .426
1962-63 .441

...

2007-08 .457

WNBA Field Goal Percentage Over Time

1997: .414
1998: .423
1999: .420
2000: .432
2001: .411
2002: .420
2003: .417
2004: .420
2005: .425
2006: .425
2007: .420

First, note that the current team average in shooting betwen a WNBA team and an NBA isn't much. Out of 100 shots made, an NBA team will make only three or four more baskets than an NBA team. You'd have to watch a lot of games over a lot of time to notice the difference.

Second, note how poorly teams in the NBA shot early in their history. This was the era when basketball was to other sports as the WNBA is to the NBA. Pro basketball didn't crack the WNBA worst league shooting percentage - .411 - until the 1960-61 NBA season. They didn't have a season that was better than any WNBA season until 1962-63.

Why did things change so much? I suspect two reasons - evolution and the changing nature of the game.

The first is evolution. Probably back in the late 1940s, there simply wasn't much known about proper basketball - what kind of plays to run, what to expect, what kind of players should be drafted and which released. A league has to evolve to the point where everyone knows what they should be doing - this is an argument from SABRMetricians like Bill James and scientists like Stephen Jay Gould. The art of running a proper pro franchise simply hadn't been perfected yet. As coaches and teams found out what worked and what didn't, shooting got better.

Compare this to the WNBA, where the shooting percentage seems to stay right around .420. Most women came into the WNBA "fully evolved" - they had the advantages that the men had in terms of training and pro play making, and simply infused the knowledge it took decades to learn into the game right at the beginning. By 1997, basketball as an art had sort of plateaued and the women came in at the top of the plateau. Barring some fundamental changes in rules, playmaking, training, or some quantum leap in strategy, .420 might be the upper limit of shooting in the WNBA.

The second change is the nature of the game. Frankly, back in the 1950s, players were shorter. You looked for the bounce pass and the layup. In the 1960s, the first wave of players to take advantage of their height and strength took over. The standard play then changed to the lob pass, with some airborne player slamming the ball in from above the rim. Height became at an even greater premium. More than likely, the 4 percent difference in field goal percentage can be explained by greater male height and strength.

I suspect this is also why NBA players appreciate the women's game. NBA players know they're taller and physically stronger and have greater vertical leaps. Most likely, they wonder what life would have been like if they had just been that much shorter or smaller, and they are reminded of the great ground-level games (and players) that they saw in high-school and college. If there's any ball player out there that knows that the game is not about the dunk, it's the NBA. I don't think I've heard of any NBA player disparaging the W, for the simple reason that they all know how hard it is to go out there and play at the pro level.

So if the WNBA is "weak", then a lot of players in the 1950s like George Mikan and Bob Cousy were "weak", too. You might be able to learn some things from a statistic, but you can't learn everything.

Worst WNBA Teams of All Time: #10 Through #6

Earlier, I hinted that the use of standard deviation - a statistical concept - might help determine which teams historically have been the worst WNBA teams of all time.

Every year, there is a different sort of "scatter" among wins and losses in the WNBA. In one year, you can have extremes like 1998, in another year you have a lot of teams that have .500 records, like 2004. Every year in the league is different, but there is something called "standard deviation" - the idea that a certain percentage of teams will be within a certain range of a .500 record. (Since the number of games has differed from year to year in the W, we'll be looking at the standard deviation of winning percentage.)

About 67 percent of teams are within one standard deviation of the mean winning percentage. About 95 percent of teams are within two standard deviations. It's very rare to find a team in any year that's more than two standard deviations away from the mean of winning percentages. Undoubtedly, winning percentage is not distributed binomially, but the concept gives us a running start.

Ten Worst Teams in WNBA History

10. 1998 Washington Mystics: -1.682. This team finished with the worst winning percentage of any team in WNBA history - .100, a 3-27 record. The reason that they're not the first team on the list is because the "scatter" of teams was great in 1998 - two other teams, Sacramento and Washington, went 8-22. The average margin of victory was an amazing -15.4 points. They were at the bottom of the league in two of the four keys to victory: field goal percentage (.395), turnovers (625, 98 more than the 9th place team), and shot .645 from the free throw line.

At the time, it was the worst performance by an expansion team in the brief two years of WNBA history. It was a horribly young team, about 25 years old on average. At least the fans supported the "Mistakes" at the gate. They got Chamique Holdsclaw the following year as their number one draft pick, so the argument could be that they did a tank job. But if you look at their Pythagorean Percentage, this team actually overperformed.

9. 2000 Seattle Storm: -1.695. Another expansion team, this one finishing at 6-26 in its first year, at the bottom of the league. Like the 1998 Mystics, it too lost games by an average of about 10 points. Only the Miami Sol (another expansion team) shot worse from the field and the Storm were at the bottom of the league in offensive rebounding.

Coach Lin Dunn had to acquire and release players frequently in an attempt to keep the team in games. At least, the fans supported the "Drizzle" and at least they knew their audience. The WNBA was one of the first teams every to hold a "Gay Pride" night. The next year, they'd get Lauren Jackson as the first pick in the WNBA Draft and the team would never win less than 10 games again. Coach Dunn is still coaching (with the Fever) and the Storm clouds eventually cleared with a WNBA championship.

8. 2005 San Antonio Silver Stars: -1.715. Unlike the first two teams, the Silver Stars didn't have the excuse of expansion to explain their 7-27 finish. Nor did they lose games by more than 10 points.

It was Dan Hughes's first year as the San Antonio head coach. Hughes had been hired because the 2004 Silver Stars, believe it or not, were even worse. This was a good while before the Silver Stars had Becky Hammon, and they were not media darlings in any way. Hughes's job was to convince his players that the bad old days were over and things would be different. That was, until he could get rid of them - the top five scorers on the team in 2005 wouldn't be on it in 2007. Now, it looks like the Silver Stars are everyone's favorite team - but it wasn't always like that.

7. 2003 Phoenix Mercury: -1.867. Ever since 2000, the Mercury were on a downward slide, going from winning 20 games to a record of 8-26. A good 21 players saw time on a Mercury roster that year, including Plenette Pierson and Iziane Castro Marques.

It was the first year for head coach John Shumate, who implemented a new defensive scheme. The Mercury would lose eight games by five points or less, giving fans heartache pains and possibly serving as one of the reasons Shumate would flee to the NBA the following season. The only attraction was that Lisa Harrison was the sexiest babe in basketball. (Playboy wanted her to pose nude for them in 2001, but she turned them down.) In 2004, the Mercury would get a #1 draft pick, who would be Diana Taurasi, and four years later, they'd be WNBA champions without any help from Hugh Hefner.

6. 2005 Charlotte Sting: -1.886. 2005 was a banner year for the WNBA, with two worst teams of all time.

It would also be a heartbreaking year in another sense, as coach/GM Trudy Lacey dealt away Dawn Staley in the middle of the year. Lacey didn't last long, as she was kicked upstairs after a 3-21 start and Muggsy Bogues, an ex-NBA player with no coaching experience (he was working in real estate) was asked to turn the team around.

Management bet that the opening of a new arena, the Charlotte Bobcats Arena, would help turn things around. They selected Janel McCarville with the first pick in the 2005 WNBA Draft, but that Janel McCarville wasn't the Janel McCarville of the 2008 Liberty - she started only 3 games and shot a horrible 34 percent from the field in her rookie year and was best known for adding personal fouls rather than points.

In 2006, the Sting got their new arena, and finished 11-23. The next year, owner Robert Johnson did not wish to keep the club running, and with no purchasers, the Sting faded out of existence.

Did Houston's Early Dominance Hurt the WNBA?

While netscouring, I found an interesting opinion about the WNBA found in a blog about NASCAR, of all things. As Julie Bork says it....

Let me explain:

How many people remember when the WNBA was emerging a couple of years ago? It had a great start and there was lots of interest, and there were many basketball stadiums that were built and remodeled to accommodate a national women’s team. So what happened? The Houston Comets dominated the first five years of the sport, and people lost interest. So you say what about those people from Houston, they did not loose interest, right? WRONG! The ticket sales declined to almost nothing even in the Comets home town. You can hardly give the tickets away for free now. I am from Houston, and I lost interest too.

There's no way to prove that hypothesis, of course. But it's a very interesting one.

Review: the 1997 WNBA Elite Draft

Remember this fine lady?

The Elite Draftees were a second class of draftees. One step below the allocated players, the distinction of this group was that it wouldn't be required to attend any combines or tryouts.

Liberty: 4th pick

Kym Hampton (7.5), Vickie Johnson (17)

Hampton graduated from Arizona State in 1984 and was already in her mid-thirties when she was drafted. She was a great field goal shooter, which made up for her 69 percent free throw shooting. In 2000, when she stepped into training camp, she noticed swelling in a knee, swelling which ended her basketball career.

Vickie Johnson, the second round pick, would stay with the Liberty for nine years. She went to San Antonio in 2006 and is currently playing for the Silver Stars. She would become the first Liberty player ever to reach 2,000 points and at the end of 2007, she was first all-time in Games Played. Picking up Johnson in the second round was a wonderful pick by the Liberty.

Comets: 5th pick

Wanda Guyton (0), Janeth Arcain (23)

Guyton graduated from the Univesity of South Florida in 1989. After some pro experience overseas in Italy and Germany, Wanda Guyton had a great first year with Houston, both in rebounds and rebound percentage. Unfortunately, back spasms were a problem for Guyton in 1998 and she only played one game for Houston that year, then finished her WNBA career in Detroit in 1999. She is probably best remembered for landing on her head fighting for a rebound during a playoff game in 1997 against the Charlotte Sting and being carried off on a stretcher.

A New York Times article implied that players like Hampton and Guyton hoped that the WNBA would pay well enough to keep them from having to play in Europe. Waived by the Shock in 2000, Guyton went back overseas and played her final six years in Germany, supposedly playing her last game in November 2007. (But her name is still on the roster!)

As for Janeth Arcain, the Brazilian played eight years for Houston, although she did not play in 2004 in order to prepare for the Olympics. A great shooter and ball-handler, Arcain was another integral part of that four-year Comets dynasty, but she was overshadowed by the presence of so many other great players. She would play overseas in Spain after she finished her WNBA career in 2005, and played her final game in the summer of 2007, on the Brazil squad at the Pan-American Games.

Sting: 3rd pick

Rhonda Mapp (8), Michi Atkins (--)

Rhonda Mapp graduated from Maryland in 1992. She would play four years for the Sting, from 1997 to 2000 and shoot 47.9 percent from the field as a center during her career. At the end of 2000, she was traded to the Los Angeles Sparks but never made her way into the starting rotation.

Then it began to fall apart. Mapp missed the 2002 season for "personal reasons", then was booted from the league near the end of the 2003 season for violating the anti-drug program, and would not be allowed to reapply for two years. She played for an Israeli team in 2003-04. What happened after that is unclear, but as of 2007, Mapp owned two women's wear stores and was opening a third in Charlotte.

Michi Atkins graduated from Texas Tech in 1996. She played briefly for the Israel League, and her WNBA career was over before it started, as she was waived by the Sting in 1997 without playing a game. She now works for TD Ameritrade in Texas.

Rockers: 2nd pick

Isabelle Fijalkowski (7.5), Lynette Woodard (-1.5)

Isabelle Fijalkowski played only two years for Cleveland -- but they were very good years. Fijalkowski had a field goal percentage over 50 percent. Then a contractual dispute sent the French center right back to Eurpoe, where she played until 2002.

Lynette Woodard had a lot of great accomplishments. She graduated in 1981 as the major scorer in women's college basketball. She helped the US win a gold medal in Los Angeles in 1984. She was the first woman Harlem Globetrotter. But by the time she got to the WNBA, she was 37. She played one year for Cleveland, one year for Detroit, and then retired.

Sparks: 8th pick

Daedra Charles (-0.5), Zheng Haixia (2.5)

Daedra Charles graduated in 1991 from Tennessee, played for the Olympic Team in 1992, and was a member of three US national teams. After playing overseas, she'd play for the Sparks in their inaugural year, but it was the only year she played. She would be waived by the Sparks the next year.

Afterwards, she would coach at high school, in Detroit and Auburn before being signed this year to coach at her alma mater, Tennessee. Charles is a member of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.

At the time she was signed, Zheng Haixia was the tallest player in the WNBA at 6'8" tall. (Margo Dydek would later exceed her in height; Haixia is tied for second.) She started in 1983 as the youngest player on her team and participated at the Olympic level. She might be arguably the best woman's player China ever produced. She is currently a coach in the Chinese Women's Basketball Association (WCBA).

Monarchs: 6th pick

Judy Mosley-McAfee (-1.5), Mikiko Hagiwara (-1)

Mosley-McAfee would only play one season for the Monarchs, and then go to Europe to play for a team in Hungary. Her only distinction in the WNBA would be that she was the first player from the University of Hawai'i to play in the WNBA, having graduated in 1990. She sort of disappeared after that.

As for Mikiko Hagiwara, her only distinction was that she would be the first player in WNBA history to be traded, in mid-1997 to Phoenix. She would conclude her career in Phoenix in 1998, where she would only play in 10 games. She has been a coach in Japan since 2001 and has coached the Japanese Women's National Team.

Starzz: 1st pick

Dena Head (-5.5), Wendy Palmer (-1)

A graduate of Tennessee in 1992, she would play in Europe before heading to the WNBA. She would play two years for the Starzz in 1997-98 and one year for the Mercury in 2000 before retiring. She was a great free throw shooter, but didn't provide much offense, with her best year 1997 where she averaged 5.7 points per game. After her WNBA career, Head would serve as an assistant coach at Central Connecticut State University until 2007.

Wendy Palmer graduated from Virginia in 1996 and would go right to the WNBA the next year. She averaged around 17 points a game while with the Starzz, and was traded to Detroit in the 1999 season. Palmer was a top ten career rebounder whose last active year was with the Seattle Storm in 2007. She was not re-signed in 2008 after the achilles tendon injury she suffered the year before deceased her production.

Mercury: 7th pick

Bridget Pettis (-5.5), Nancy Lieberman-Cline (-2.5)

Pettis graduated from Florida in 1993. Bridet Pettis had two good years with the Mercury, but she wasn't the best field goal shooter and starting with 1999 her minutes and production began to wane with each successive year. She ended her WNBA career with Indiana in 2003. Pettis continued to play overseas and tried a comeback with Phoenix in 2006. She would be hired as an assistant coach for the Mercury in 2007.

Nancy Lieberman-Cline went to Old Dominion, but did not graduate. She might be the only WNBA player who also played in the Women's Pro Basketball League, which existed from 1978 to 1981. By the time she got to Phoenix, she was already 39 and her best years were behind her. A member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, Lieberman-Cline would go on to coach the Detroit Shock and is currently a basketball commentator.

Review: the 1997 WNBA Initial Allocation Draft

Sheryl Swoopes, one of the sole survivors of the 1997 Initial Allocation Draft.

The biggest question facing the WNBA was probably how the new teams would be put together. One thing that the WNBA didn't want was a massive free-for-all where any team could sign any player for any amount of money. Furthermore, the owners were NBA owners who were undoubtedly looking towards their own labor history with their male players. Salaries would be capped in the WNBA.

At the beginning, the WNBA was not alone. There was already a professional women's basketball league -- the American Basketball League (ABL). The ABL had signed most of the stars from the 1996 US Olympics Women's "Dream Team" leaving the WNBA with fewer quality players to go around among its eight teams.

Therefore, the WNBA decided on a three-pronged draft in 1997. The first part of the draft would be an allocation draft. Sixteen star players representing both recent college graduates and established players would be allocated to the eight teams. I've never learned whether this allocation was purely random, or whether it was motivated by other factors. I think people were so happy to have a league that was assisted by the NBA that they never thought to ask.

The second part of the draft was an "elite draft". Elite players, usually those who played overseas, would be subjected to something like a traditional draft. It would be very much like a traditional draft, with players choosing from a common pool.

The third part of the draft would be like the other drafts that would follow it -- the player pool would be a pool of recent college graduates. However, the draft would follow a "reverse snake" pattern, where the order of draft would be reversed in subsequent rounds -- the eighth team picking in one round would be the first picking in the following round.

How do you evaluate a player's contribution?

I'm using a stat obtained at basketball-reference.com called "Win Shares Above Average". The idea is that a player earns "win shares" for her team, with one win share being a third of a win. The formula -- a complex one -- is listed at the site. The goal of the formula is to put defensive players and offensive players on the same page.

However, a player can do things wrong. These wrong things are converted into "loss shares". This makes up for showy offensive players who do so many things wrong (turnovers, personal fouls) that their offensive value is limited.

Win Shares Above Average is simply (win shares - loss shares)/2. Having a positive WSAA means that your overall contribution to your team was positive. Having zero means that you contributed no more than the hypothetical average player, and having negative WSAA means that you were a detriment to your team.

Furthermore, players are evaluated only for the period that they were on the teams that drafted them. It doesn't matter if you draft Lisa Leslie if you let her go two days later.

1997 Initial Allocation Draft

Comets: Sheryl Swoopes (54), Cynthia Cooper (35.5)

The heart of Houston's four straight championships came right here. Swoopes was a member of the 1996 "Dream Team", having graduated from Texas Tech in 1993. She was a three-time MVP, three-time Defensive Player of the Year. Oddly enough of the sixteen, she didn't provide the most in WSAA but she has probably added more value to her team than just about anyone. At 37, Swoopes is still playing, now for the Seattle Storm. She is third in lifetime WSAA.

Cynthia Cooper is seventh on the WSAA all-time list, despite playing only five years in the WNBA. She graduated from USC in 1986. She was the Finals MVP during all four of the championships of the Houston Comets. I think it's safe to say that if you give me Swoopes and Cooper at the height of their skills, I can build a championship team around that. Having Tina Thompson only made Houston more dangerous.

Sparks: Lisa Leslie (64), Penny Toler (-7.5)

The WSAA active list (complete to 2007) has Lisa Leslie in second place. If she knows when to retire -- that is, if she quits playing when her loss shares begin to exceed her win shares -- she might surpass Yolanda Griffith at the #1 spot. Leslie has two MVPs and two finals MVPs over her own. Leslie graduated from USC in 1994 and was a member of the 1996 "Dream Team".

However, by the time Penny Toler came along, she had already played in the pros overseas for eight years. She graduated from Long Beach State in 1989. Toler would score the WNBA's first basket, but that was one of the few highlights of her WNBA career. She would move from player to general manager, and she would help put together a Sparks team that would win the WNBA championship in 2001 and 2002. As a player, she couldn't contribute much but her skill as a manager more than made up for it.

Sting: Andrea Stinson (15.5), Vicky Bullett (15)

Poor Andrea Stinson. She got her jersey number retired in Charlotte, and then the team folded at the end of the year. This 5-10 guard out of North Carolina State, a 1991 graduate, led the Sting to six playoff appearances, including a WNBA Finals in 2001.

As for Vicky Bullett, she would only play three seasons in Charlotte. She was a graduate of Maryland in 1989 and helped the US win a gold medal in 1988. Before playing for the WNBA, she played in the Italian leagues. In all three seasons that Bullet played for the Sting, they went to the playoffs. She would retire from the WNBA in 2002, continue playing overseas, and finally end her pro career in 2007.

Liberty: Teresa Weatherspoon (10), Rebecca Lobo (2.5)

Weatherspoon was a fantastic ball-handler and two-time Defensive Player of the Year. She graduated from Louisiana Tech in 1988. From 1997 to 2003, she would have an amazing streak of starting in every WNBA game. In 2003 she was released from the New York Liberty, and Weatherspoon was bitter about it -- but it was time for her to go. She played one more year with the Sparks, and then retired.

As for Rebecca Lobo, she was the face that the WNBA wanted to put on billboards and on commercials. She was a popular college player, graduating from Connecticut in 1995. Despite being named to the All-WNBA Team in 1997, she only had one good year, that in 1998. In the very first game in 1999, she suffered an anterior cruciate ligament tear in her left knee and never recovered. Out for the rest of 1999 and all of 2000, she was traded to the Comets in 2002. She would finish her career in 2003 with the Connecticut Sun.

Monarchs: Ruthie Bolton (9), Bridgette Gordon (-3)

Ruthie Bolton was an efficient three point shooter, and she took one of the fundamentals of basketball at heart, namely hang on to the ball. She's second all time in smallest turnover percentage, second only to Lauren Jackson of the Storm as of the end of 2007. Bolton graduated from Auburn in 1990 and was a member of the 1996 Olympic "Dream Team". However, with no pro outlet in the United States, she had to go to Italy to play before the WNBA was founded. She would spend her entire WNBA career as a Monarch, retiring at the end of the 2004 season.

Bridgette Gordon was a larger-than-life player, loud clothes, loud jewelry, loud personality. She graduated from Tennessee in 1989, and would end up playing eight years in Italy before coming to the WNBA. She would be a major part of the Monarchs roster in 1997, but start only five games in 1998 and was waived by the Monarchs in 1999.

Mercury: Jennifer Gillom (9.5), Michele Timms (-4.0)

Gillom graduated from Mississippi in 1986 and had played for several European teams before coming to the WNBA in its inaugural year. She would only play six years for the Mercury (and one for the Sparks), but would average 13.4 points a game. Her best years were probably behind her as she was already 33 when the league started.

As for Michele Timms, the Australian was 32 when she was drafted. She averaged 12.1 points a game in 1997, and never broke the 10 PPG barrier for the rest of her career, due to her usually poor field goal shooting. (She shot 31 percent from the field in 1998.) She only lasted five years in the WNBA. However, she would lead the Phoenix Mercury in career assists and the Mercury would end up retiring her number.

Rockers: Janice Braxton (10), Michelle Edwards (-9.5)

Braxton only made it three years in Cleveland. She had graduated Louisiana Tech in 1984, so she was 34 when the WNBA 1997 season started and already sort of had one foot out the door, but put up good numbers all three of her years.

Michelle Edwards graduated from Iowa in 1989. She would only play four seasons with the Rockers before being traded in the middle of the 2000 season to the Seattle Storm. Why is Edwards ranked so low? Because she was death at the free throw line. She shot only 61.3 percent from the charity stripe during her career. Furthermore, her field goal percentage declined every year she was in the league.

Starzz: Elena Baranova (1), Lady Hardmon (-6)

Baranova could block shots and she could rebound. Being the greatest Russian women's basketball player of the 20th century didn't hurt, either. The problem for the Starzz was that Baranova's best years came after her tenure in Utah.

After three years in Utah, she was traded in 2000 to the Miami Sol for Kate Starbird and a second round draft pick. She would pick up 6 WSAA in Miami in 2001 after sitting out all of 2000 with an ACL tear. In 2002, she decided to sit out the entire season to train with the Russian national team. The Sun would fold, Baranova would be picked up by the Liberty in the dispersal draft, and she would earn 9.5 WSAA for the Liberty over three years. The problem with Utah is that they got the stub end of Baranova's WNBA years. Her last WNBA year was 2005…but Baranova is still playing in Europe.

As for Lady Hardmon (also known as Lady Grooms), she only played one year in Utah where she scored only 5.5 points per game. Grooms graduated from Georgia in 1992. Back when she was still known as Lady Hardmon, she shot horribly from the field and had a lot of turnovers that first year in Utah. Utah traded her to Sacramento for Chantel Tremitiere and Grooms she settled down in Sacramento to became a near-average player. She would spend the rest of her career in Sacramento, her last year being 2004.