🏀 The Liberty's WNBA title window is wide open. Can they capitalise?

My Week in Sport(s): the WNBA postseason, Pedri in space and Phoebe Litchfield

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

In this edition:

• 🏀 The New York Liberty in pole position for a championship

• ⚽️ A Spanish midfielder, effective between the lines

• 🏏 Phoebe Litchfield hitting for power

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🏀 The Liberty's WNBA title window is wide open. Can they capitalise?

I’ve written a lot in this newsletter about how to correctly apportion credit to teams who’ve won titles, across a number of different sports¹.

‘Chance’ or variance must come into the assessment of what happens when you’re actually on the field. Bounces either go your way, or they don’t — and can ease (or halt) your path to a trophy accordingly.

But there are also things outside of your control that impact your likelihood of winning before you even set foot on the field.

As an elite sports team, the strength of the competition you face in any given year can fluctuate significantly — and there’s nothing you can really do about it.

The WNBA’s New York Liberty will be well aware of this; the franchise is still searching for its first-ever league title after losing in the Finals last year.

They’ve been on the right track for a while: after adding superstar Breanna Stewart to former first-overall pick Sabrina Ionescu in the prior offseason, they improved rapidly during 2023. They won their games last season by an average margin of 8.6 points, having recorded an average margin of -2.4 points per game in 2022.

And things look even better this season: unlike last year, the Liberty will enter the 2024 postseason as the league’s top seed.

But that’s not because the team has taken a significant leap forward. While it’s impressive that they’ve consolidated their performance at an elite level, their average per-game points margin has remained around the +9 mark — similar to last season — for most of 2024.

Rather, their status as the league’s top-ranked team is down to the drop-off of the team that beat them in last year’s Finals: the Las Vegas Aces.

The Aces have won the last two WNBA championships — but their underlying performance has steadily declined throughout the 2024 season², such that the Liberty are now clearly the best team in the league.

The Aces have fallen off despite another historic season from star big A’ja Wilson — and the Liberty have maintained their level despite reigning MVP Breanna Stewart taking a step back from the heights she hit in 2023.

How can we quantify this?

Basketball Reference doesn’t publish Box Plus/Minus³ estimates for the WNBA like it does for the NBA — but it does publish its estimate of each player’s ‘Win Shares’:

“Win Shares is a player statistic which attempts to divvy up credit for team success to the individuals on the team…the important things to note are that it is calculated using player, team and league-wide statistics and the sum of player win shares on a given team will be roughly equal to that team’s win total for the season.”

While Wilson’s 2024 performance bas been about as valuable (on a per-minute basis) as her 2023 performance, Stewart’s 2024 is clearly less impactful than her 2023 by this metric⁴.

Stewart will actually get additional credit in the Win Shares model this year for the Liberty’s improved team defence, meaning that the majority of her decline is on the offensive side of the ball⁵.

So where exactly has her game changed for the worse in 2024?

This year, Stewart is assisting an identical share (19.5%) of her teammates’ made field goals as she did in 2023; she’s converting a similar share (52%) of her shots from two-point range; and she’s getting to the free throw line for around one more attempt per 100 team possessions.

The answer to this question lies elsewhere, then: in her three-point shooting.

Through the Liberty’s penultimate regular-season game, she had converted only 29.2% of her attempts from range; she’d never previously been below 33.6% across a whole WNBA season.

How poorly this stretch of shooting form compares to her career numbers is clear when you plot her rolling average three-point conversion percentage over time, as in the chart below.

But so too is her recent improvement. Since returning from the Olympics, she has been successful with 23 of her 58 three-point attempts — a rate of 39.7% that exceeds her career average.

A hot (or cold) run from deep is one way that variance can work for (or against) you in top-level basketball while you’re on the court.

And this is particularly exacerbated in the postseason, where the outcome of a series between closely-matched teams can be poised on a knife edge. Rodger Sherman summarised this well for The Ringer after the infamous night in 2018 when the Houston Rockets crashed out of the NBA playoffs, missing 27 consecutive threes:

“As the old saying goes: If you live by the 3, you’ll die by the 3. The gist is that the farther away from the net you shoot from, the more unreliable your skills will be, so if you depend too much on deep shots, it might come back to haunt you. To put it in fancier words: There’s an unsettling amount of variance inherent in building a team around 3-point shooters.”

The Liberty should have more than enough firepower to take down the Atlanta Dream in the first round, regardless of whether or not Stewart has fixed any underlying issues with her shooting. They have another pair of stars — Ionescu and Jonquel Jones — who can pick up any of Stewart’s slack⁶.

They might match up with the Aces again as soon as the second round⁷, though — and they’ll take all the help they can get against the defending champions, even in their weaker state.

The Liberty could maintain their current performance level for another season, but there would be no guarantee of such a gap between them and the chasing pack remaining.

Titles don’t come easy — and they may never enter the postseason with better odds of winning an WNBA championship than they have this year.

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⚽️ Run the Numbers

Who’s the best in the world at finding space on a football pitch?

It’s quite a vague question — and one that consequently might seem difficult to address using data.

There are some public resources we can use to come up with an answer, though. And I have one — in the men’s game, at least — that I’m increasingly confident in.

StatsBomb published some analysis back in 2022 using data from its ‘StatsBomb 360’ product, which tracks the ‘ball receipts in space’ recorded by every player in a given game. In the most valuable area of the field — sometimes known as ‘Zone 14⁸’ — one player stood out:

“[I]t's Pedri we need to do a deeper dive on…his movement between the lines to get on the ball has also always been talked about as elite – and now we have the numbers to prove it. Not only does he receive the ball in space in Zone 14 more frequently than any other player, but he also has an impressive ratio of how many of his total receipts are in space. 62% of all his Zone 14 ball receipts are in at least 5 yards of space.”

And Uefa’s Euro 2024 Technical Report — published earlier this week — further supports the idea that Spanish midfielder Pedri is probably the correct answer to this question.

According to their advanced data, he recorded 18 receptions between the lines per 90 minutes during the tournament — two more than the next-best player⁹.

Whenever you’re watching Barcelona this season, look out for their number eight drifting into the gaps in their opponent’s defensive set-up and getting on the ball.

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🏏 Watch the Games

The last time I featured a cricketer in this section of the newsletter, it was to highlight the off-side power-hitting of young Australian batter Jake Fraser-McGurk.

Facing deliveries which pitch outside the line of his body, Fraser-McGurk has a remarkable ability to elevate the ball over the infield from a traditional batting stance — and he’s rewarded with runs at a frequency that likely justifies the higher risk of dismissal.

But there’s another way to access that space of the field, which is often undefended.

His compatriot Phoebe Litchfield used this method effectively on Thursday to seal a T20I win over New Zealand.

The game ended on the fourth delivery of the 19th over of Australia’s innings, with a well-struck boundary over the head of the fielder at cover. The path it took to get there, though, was unconventional.

Before the ball is even released by off-spinner Leigh Kasperek, Litchfield has switched her hands from her usual left-handed batting grip to a right-handed one — and is in the process of switching her feet around too.

In order to meet the trajectory of the ball — which Kasperek ultimately delivered wide outside the off stump — she has to shuffle an additional step in order to assume a powerful hitting position.

Litchfield does so nimbly, and connects with the ball exquisitely. With a perfect imitation of a right-handed batter’s slog sweep, she records her seventh and final boundary of the game through the off side.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here.

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The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday October 5th.

1. These pieces on Barça Femení and the Springboks are two that I have in mind.

2. The Aces finished the 2023 regular season having won their previous 40 games by an average margin of 12.4 points; going into the final game of the 2024 regular season, their rolling average per-game points margin was +5.5.

3. This metric — which I used earlier this year to look at LeBron James’ career — takes all of a player’s box-score statistics and combines them with knowledge of the position they play on the court and their team’s results “to estimate the player’s contribution in points above league average per 100 possessions played”.

4. Wilson has recorded 0.33 Win Shares per 40 minutes this year, compared to 0.34 last year; Stewart has recorded 0.28 this year, compared to 0.30 last year. In relative terms, Wilson has dropped off by just under 2% — while Stewart has dropped by just over 7%. (All statistics from Basketball Reference exclude the league’s final night of regular season fixtures, which were played on Thursday.)

5. Her Offensive Win Shares are down about 16% on a per-minute basis this year.

6. This analysis of their chemistry — by Myles Ehrlich of Winsidr — is worth a read.

7. The WNBA doesn’t split the playoffs up into Eastern and Western Conference brackets like the NBA does; rather, it seeds all eight playoff teams together and arranges them in a single bracket.

8. “On a pitch divided into a six-by-three grid with a central strip as wide as the six yard box, the Zone 14, also called The Hole, has been classified as the rectangle which helps teams score more goals. Zone 14 is the zone located in the middle of the pitch immediately outside the opposing penalty area.”

9. Italy’s Jorginho (with 16 per 90) was second, and Denmark’s Morten Hjulmand (15) was third; they played 215 and 245 minutes respectively, compared to Pedri’s 186. (This data is published on p.51 of the report.)