🏀 Caitlin Clark might make Team USA — but don’t count out her competition

My Week in Sport(s): the guards fighting for an Olympic place, Connor McDavid's scoring and Jake Fraser-McGurk

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

In this edition:

• 🏀 How good Caitlin Clark will have to be to get to Paris

• 🏒 Connor McDavid and adjustments for playoff playing time

• 🏏 Jake Fraser-McGurk, blazing a trail in T20 cricket

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🏀 Caitlin Clark might make Team USA — but don’t count out her competition

When the 2024 WNBA season tips off in 10 days’ time, the sport’s administrators will all be praying that the incredible level of fan interest generated by women’s college basketball so far this year carries over to the pros.

Caitlin Clark — the biggest star of the 2024 NCAA tournament and the first-overall pick in this year’s WNBA Draft — will be hoping that she has little trouble bridging the gap when she joins the Indiana Fever, too.

There’s been lots of great coverage of the transition Clark faces elsewhere — particularly in

Neil Paine

’s newsletter, where he recently set out what we can reasonably expect from her in terms of impact in year one.

But what if we look a little further ahead? With the Summer Olympics taking place in Paris this July and August, there’s a chance Clark could ride that narrative momentum and become a legitimately global star — if she’s able to make the Team USA roster.

The question of whether or not to select the 22-year-old is unlikely to have much competitive significance; with the US having won the last seven gold medals, women’s basketball at the Olympics has severely lacked jeopardy.

It’s also far from a given that she’ll be good enough in her first year as a professional.

There are a number of other guards competing for spots on the American roster who are genuine stars in their own right — and, during the first instalment of the 2024 WNBA season¹, Clark will have to prove her worth on a Fever team which hasn’t made the playoffs since 2016.

Nine different players at the position have been named to a Team USA roster — either for training camps or for February’s Olympic Qualifying Tournament — so far in 2024.

There are a number of different types of player represented in that group, but Clark will have to execute a few basic things well to stand a chance of breaking in.

While we do have good data on the former Iowa star’s college career, it’s worth treating that information pretty carefully. All of the issues that arose when we talked about moving between professional leagues earlier in the year — in reference to Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto — also apply to the college-to-pro transition².

What we can do is set up some benchmarks for Clark at the outset of her first year in the WNBA, and check back in on her performance against them as the season progresses.

We’ll focus here on her scoring and playmaking relative to this group of nine US guards — as these are the easiest aspects of the game to analyse in a granular way, using Synergy Sports’ play-tracking data for the league.

Below, Synergy data for the last two complete regular seasons³ has been analysed, to ensure that we’re looking only at the current versions of the veterans in the running for Team USA this time around.

A recurring feature of this newsletter has been using very basic mental models to help us quickly start thinking more systematically about whichever sport we’re analysing.

One such model which can be applied to offensive basketball is the split of scoring opportunities into ones which occur in the ‘half-court’ (or, in settled possession) and ones which occur in ‘transition’ (or, on the counter-attack).

The latter tend to be more efficient than the former, but occur much less frequently.

To illustrate: of the nine guards in this cohort, no one averaged more than 3.8 transition possessions (finished with a shot, drawn shooting foul or turnover) per game over the last two WNBA seasons — and no one averaged fewer than 11 half-court possessions.

And everyone but Diana Taurasi — who, at 41 years old, can be excused for not having as much left in her legs as she used to — has averaged more points per possession (PPP) in transition than in the half-court over the last two years.

A first target we can set for Clark, then, is to get out and finish plays efficiently in transition: a mark of at least 1 PPP would rank her at the lower end of her prospective national-team peers.

Per ESPN’s Kevin Pelton, though, she couldn’t meet this level in her final year of college:

“According to Synergy Sports tracking, [Paige] Bueckers averaged at least a point per play on each of her six most common play types. For Clark, it was four of her top five -- all but transition.”

It would be hugely surprising, then, if she matched the efficiency of transition monsters like Jackie Young, Jewell Loyd and Kelsey Plum — who all scored more than 1.2 PPP in that phase of play — in her first year in the pros.

But, as we’ve noted, how Clark plays in the half-court will have much more of an impact on how much immediate success she can have in the league.

To analyse how players fare in this facet of the game, we can set up another handy model: comparing their ‘on-ball’ and ‘off-ball’ involvements⁴ in half-court offense.

Those categorisations are obviously fluid — and the nature of a player’s involvement can change multiple times within the course of a single possession — but provide a useful framework for analysing the types of plays that a player finishes.

Most of the nine US guards in this group have a fairly even balance of on- and off-ball involvements, ranging from Allisha Gray and Ariel Atkins — around 40% of whose half-court possessions are on-ball — to Sabrina Ionescu and Jewell Loyd (at around 60%)⁵.

And the balance of Clark’s college role fell towards the top end of that range, according to Pelton.

We can still probably simplify things further, though.

If Clark is effective as the lead ball-handler in the pick and roll — both scoring herself, and finding the right passes to teammates — and hits her catch-and-shoot three-point shots when she’s playing off the ball, she will be immediately valuable in the half-court.

How good at those specific skills will she need to be to crack the national team?

Again, it’s not reasonable to expect her to be among the top guards by these metrics in her rookie year.

But, if she can hit 35% or more of her catch-and-shoot three-pointers and generate at least 0.8 points per possession from shots and passes out of the pick & roll, she’ll put herself in the conversation for one of the last guard spots on the roster.

One Team USA legend — Lisa Leslie — has seen enough already:

"She better be on the Olympic team. We should not leave the country without her. She's a bona fide baller. There's no doubt she's already one of the best players in the world."

As Taurasi herself has pointed out, though, it’s not going to be a straightforward transition for Clark:

"You look superhuman playing against 18-year-olds, but you're going to come with some grown women that have been playing professional basketball for a long time.”

I’d err on the side of caution, too. Many of those women will have their own designs on winning Olympic gold for the US — and Clark is going to have to earn the right to a roster spot through her play on the court, like everyone else.

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🏒 Run the Numbers

A few weeks ago, we looked into the fact that NBA stars play considerably more minutes per game in the postseason than the regular season — and it’s something that’s worth bearing in mind in other sports, too.

The NHL’s Connor McDavid is a great example of why it’s important to be aware of this trend.

The Edmonton Oilers star gets a lot of credit for upping his already phenomenal scoring rate in the playoffs: the average number of points he records per game increases by 6% from the regular season, from 1.52 to 1.61⁶.

But that increase is solely to do with the fact that he also plays more minutes per game in the postseason: 23:21 on average, compared to 21:42 in the regular season.

This means that his career rate of points per 60 minutes is actually about a tenth of a point lower in the playoffs⁷, somewhat contrary to the narrative. It’s still a feat to effectively maintain his level of production against a higher level of competition on average, though.

McDavid has started very strongly in the 2024 postseason — with 12 points recorded in just 105 minutes played — and will be hoping that this will finally be the year that he gets his hands on the Stanley Cup.

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🏏 Watch the Games

Australian batter Jake Fraser-McGurk has been a breakout star of this year’s IPL — and he’s scoring runs in a markedly different fashion to everyone else in the competition:

“Fraser-McGurk has batted just 104 balls but has attempted boundaries off a staggering 77 of them. That's nearly twice the aggressive shot percentage of 39 this IPL. No other batter has attacked even 60% of the balls he has faced.”

The concept of “off-side touch play” — key to the success of destructive white-ball batters who came of age in the 2010s — he eschews entirely. Unlike many others, he sees balls delivered outside the line of his body as opportunities to extend his arms and generate power⁸.

Sometimes Fraser-McGurk sees a ball delivered closer to the stumps as such an opportunity, too.

During his astonishing demolition of the Mumbai Indians last weekend, he shuffled away from a full delivery by Nuwan Thushara which pitched around off stump to create more space to swing his bat — and sent the ball to the boundary at deep cover on a trajectory that other modern cricketers rarely ever replicate.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here⁹.

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The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday May 18th.

1. The league has scheduled a month-long break from July 18th while the Olympic tournament takes place. (“USA Basketball has until July 7, nearly two months into the 2024 WNBA season, to send a final roster to the International Olympic Committee, though the team could be announced before then.”)

2. Clark will also be playing beside a pair of 2023 All-Stars with the Fever — fellow guard Kelsey Mitchell and last year’s first-overall pick Aaliyah Boston — which will be a markedly different experience for such a ‘heliocentric’ player.

3. The two seasons which have taken place in full since the last Olympic tournament in 2021.

4. Todd Whitehead of Synergy Sports has previously posted about how he groups these sequences, and I’ve used the same classification in the Synergy data I’ve worked with here.

5. Chelsea Gray — who, at 68%, has by far the largest share of possessions finished in on-ball roles in the half-court — is the one clear outlier.

6. As at the end of the Oilers’ series win over the Los Angeles Kings, McDavid has 87 points in 54 career playoff games — compared to 982 in 645 regular season games.

7. 4.14 per 60 in the playoffs (1261 career minutes), compared to 4.21 in the regular season (13,995 career minutes).

8. If batter ‘launch angle’ was tracked in cricket like it is in baseball, I’d hazard that Fraser-McGurk would rank at the top through the off side. (In the real world, this analysis by

Rahul Iyer

— which shows that he has scored faster than anyone else in the IPL against deliveries which spin away from him — suggests something similar.)

9. At the 1:41 mark.