🏀 With characteristic flair, Marine Johannès is building her case as the best shooter in the WNBA
My Week in Sport(s) 🏀 🏉 🏏 ⚾️ 🏈
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
Covered in this edition: 🏀 Marine Johannès, 🏉 the Springboks, 🏏 Phoebe Litchfield, ⚾️ Jacob Misiorowski and 🏈 Arch Manning.
🏀 With characteristic flair, Marine Johannès is building her case as the best shooter in the WNBA
If I can’t persuade you to watch Marine Johannès play basketball, maybe LeBron James can. Her three-point shooting was what got his attention in 2023; back in the WNBA after a year out, the French guard has picked up where she left off.
Because of a spate of injuries to key players — including Jonquel Jones and Breanna Stewart — the New York Liberty’s season hasn’t panned out quite as I thought it might when I wrote about them back in June. Although the defending champions are no longer attempting three pointers at a record-setting rate, Johannès has kept bombing. Entering last night’s game, she was taking 8.6 shots from range per 36 minutes — a higher frequency than in any of her three previous seasons in the W.
While Johannès’ three-point success rate is down slightly — 35.3% on the season, compared to 36.8% in 2023 — she’s comfortably above the league-average rate of 33.8%. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that she’s the best high-volume shooter currently active in the league. No one who can match or better her career success rate of 38.1% takes as many threes per 36 minutes as she does — and none of the five players who shoot them more frequently are anywhere near as accurate.
To be fair to the league’s other top shooters, they assume a much greater offensive burden than Johannès does. Among the nine active players who average at least seven three-point attempts per 36, she takes the highest share while stationed in the corners — one pass away from where a team’s main creator tends to operate. That said, part of what drew James to her game was the degree of difficulty on many of her attempts; highlights abound of Johannès draining circus shots while off balance.
During the 2022 season, Todd Whitehead of Synergy logged every ‘no-look’ pass she made — and noted that they accounted for more than a third of her assists. If the data were available, I’d love to know how frequently she shoots one-legged threes. The depleted Liberty might need more than her flair to make it all the way back to the WNBA Finals this year, but I’ll be trying to catch as many of their games as I can all the same. Take LeBron’s word for it: watch Marine Johannès, and you will be entertained.
🏉 The Springboks remain the strongest team in the world — despite mixed results so far in 2025
Despite winning the last two Rugby World Cups, I was reserved in my assessment of the Springboks when I wrote about them last July. Now, I’m convinced that they’re the best team in the world — even after a string of mixed results to start 2025.
In two separate pieces this year, I’ve introduced the components of my basic model of team strength in men’s international rugby. Combine those ‘attack ratings’ and ‘defence ratings’ for each nation, and South Africa come out well ahead of their peers in the men’s game: their recent performances make them 12.2 points per game better than the average ‘Tier 1’ side. Their rating is down a bit after relatively poor outings against Italy and Australia, though; they began the year at a mark of +14.7 per game.
Why the change? This model aggregates a team’s two most recent home and away results against each other top team to estimate their overall strength. Consider their head-to-head record against Australia as an example. At the start of 2025, they had beaten the Wallabies by a combined margin of 50 points in their two most recent fixtures on South African soil; in two home matches against the same opponents earlier this month, however, they were outscored in aggregate by eight points.
What else I learned last week
🏏 Phoebe Litchfield is having her best year as a T20 boundary-hitter
Many talented Australian cricketers excel in multiple sports. Ellyse Perry has played senior international football; 15-year-old Caoimhe Bray might follow in her footsteps. Phoebe Litchfield, too, represented her country in field hockey at underage level.
The left-handed Litchfield’s signature scoring options are the reverse sweep and the switch hit. Both involve a change in her natural stance or grip before contact; she has called the former “a hockey shot” herself. Both have helped her develop into one of the most effective Twenty20 batters in women’s cricket, too. So far in 2025, the 22-year-old has recorded an effective boundary rate 10.3 percentage points higher than other batters in her matches — comfortably the best of any year of her career so far.
⚾️ No one gives MLB hitters less time to think than Jacob Misiorowski
You could reasonably split the topics that currently interest me in professional baseball into two rough buckets: how top Japanese players fare after moving to the major leagues, and the development of the sport’s extreme athletic outliers.
Along with Elly De La Cruz, 6ft 7in pitcher Jacob Misiorowski falls neatly into the latter. Put simply, the lithe 23-year-old throws extremely hard: his average fastball velocity is in the 99th percentile among MLB pitchers. Crucially, though, his frame also allows him to release the ball much closer to the plate than other pitchers do. As David Adler noted at MLB.com, combining those two factors gives Misiorowski’s fastball a higher ‘perceived velocity’ than any other starting pitcher’s since 2015.
🏈 Arch Manning is now behind his uncles on the QB development curve
Seth Wickersham said it best: “it's his name that makes the future feel inevitable.” The college American football season properly kicks off this weekend — and Arch Manning of Texas is widely expected to begin his ascent towards the top of the sport.
Manning is the latest in a family of blue-chip QBs: his grandfather (Archie) and two uncles (Peyton and Eli) all played in the NFL. A few years ago, Archie even noted that his grandson was “a little ahead of” where Super Bowl winners Peyton and Eli were as high-school freshmen. His development has been slow since starting college, though. In their first two NCAA seasons, Peyton and Eli respectively recorded 586 and 482 combined passing and rushing attempts; so far at Texas, Arch has registered just 123.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Friday September 5th.
