🏀 The WNBA All-Stars keep beating Team USA. Can anyone else?

My Week in Sport(s): basketball in Paris, Xander Schauffele and Aitana Bonmatí

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

In this edition:

• 🏀 The US women’s national team pursuing their eighth straight gold medal

• ⛳️ Xander Schauffele, cashing in during the 2024 season

• ⚽️ Aitana Bonmatí, causing havoc in the right half-space

---

---

🏀 The WNBA All-Stars keep beating Team USA. Can anyone else?

It’s quite amusing: the US women’s basketball team — who are practically invincible in international competition — just lost again to the WNBA All-Stars in one of their pre-Olympic warm-ups¹.

Last weekend, they were turned over 109-117 by this selection of the league’s best talent who won’t be playing in the Olympics — just as they were in 2021, before they headed to Tokyo.

I said ‘practically invincible’ above, and that’s barely even an overstatement.

Their dominance is staggering: they’ve won seven consecutive Olympic golds, and eight of the last ten FIBA World Cups.

In World Cup and Olympic competition since the conclusion of the 1984 Games in Los Angeles — which their rivals the Soviet Union boycotted — they have played 143 games and lost only three times.

Their last loss in either competition was in 2006.

When a team is so dominant, though, looking purely at wins and losses doesn’t really provide much insight.

Does the US team’s performance over the last number of decades look any different if we analyse it at a more granular level?

Taking the scorelines from their Olympic and World Cup matches after 1984, we can see that their level has fluctuated more than their underlying win-loss record might suggest — but never to the extent that it has been fair to question their dominance.

Looking at the rolling average number of points they have scored and conceded in these matches — on a 30-game rolling basis, as we’ve used before when looking at results in men’s international rugby — we can see that the USA’s peak came in the middle of the 2010s.

During a 30-game stretching ending with their 94-72 win over France in the 2014 FIBA World Cup, they beat their international opponents in these competitions by 36 points per game on average.

This average margin — on a 30-game average basis — strayed into the low 20s in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but has generally hovered in and around the 30-point mark since².

The current iteration of the squad is very close to that 30-point mark: through the end of the 2022 World Cup, they had won their last 30 matches by an average margin of about 29 points³.

There’s not much hope in these figures for their Olympic competitors, then.

But you can come at this question from another angle too: can we work out whether women’s basketball outside of North America has strengthened over time?

One way to answer this is to repeat the exercise we performed last year looking at the make-up of All-NBA teams with historical All-WNBA selections.

We found there that, “slowly but surely, the NBA is starting to reflect the worldwide reach of the sport.”

There has been no such shift in the women’s game’s elite league, though.

Since 2012, there have only been three All-WNBA places in total awarded to players from outside North America: Australian Liz Cambage’s pair of selections in 2018 and 2019, and the first-team selection of Germany’s Satou Sabally last year⁴.

If anything, the structure of women’s professional basketball has actually pulled players in the opposite direction.

At only 40 games long, the WNBA season takes up a much shorter portion of the calendar than the NBA’s does in the men’s game. This has historically opened up opportunities for elite US players to ‘top up’ their salaries by playing overseas outside of the WNBA window.

This is why six-time All-WNBA selection Brittney Griner was in Russia at the time of her arrest in November 2022.

And it’s why multiple overseas teams appear on the résumés of many of Team USA’s current stars — like Breanna Stewart, who has played in China, Russia and Turkey while remaining active in the WNBA.

That structure is likely about to change, though:

“The WNBA’s current media deals, valued at roughly $50 million annually, are set to expire after the 2025 season, with Disney, Ion, CBS and Amazon as its media partners. The new rights fees could have as much as six times multiple of the league’s current media rights fees since the new deals leave room for the WNBA to bring in new partners.”

In the short term, more money for the league should mean more money for the players — and less need to go offshore in the offseason in order to earn a comfortable living.

In the long term, it should also have a substantial impact on the global talent pool for women’s basketball by making a career in the sport even more attractive to young athletes from overseas.

But — as we saw last week, when discussing the Spanish women’s football team — producing lots of young talent doesn’t automatically translate into top-level success.

Upsets are always possible, but you shouldn’t count on any other nation pushing Team USA at this Olympics⁵ — or, realistically, at any of the next few Games.

Project forward decades rather than years, though, and there’s a clear path towards women’s basketball globalising successfully in the way the men’s game has.

The current climate is arguably as favourable for the development of professional women’s basketball as it’s ever been; the new media rights deal which is on the horizon reflects the explosion of interest in the sport in North America, which the Olympics will be hoping to build on.

The challenge is for other nations to step up — both on and off the court.

---

---

⛳️ Run the Numbers

Data Golf summed up the year that Xander Schauffele — now a two-time Major winner — has had pretty neatly in their newsletter this week:

“This season has shifted our perception of Schauffele from a perennial "top-5" guy into one of this generation's best players. He has now averaged +2.4 strokes-gained in his 30 major championship starts, a mark only bettered among active players by Scheffler (+2.7 in 21). This consistency, which often got muddied by "inability to close" narratives, will finally be properly recognized now that he has the major Ws to back it up.”

He recorded rounds of six shots under par on the final day of each of his Major victories this year — but Sunday’s at Royal Troon was by far the more impressive of the two.

Schauffele’s closing 65 at last weekend’s Open Championship saw him gain 8.2 strokes on the field⁶, while his 65 in the final round of the PGA Championship in May was equivalent to +4.3 strokes.

This pair of victories made him the fifth player in the 21st century other than Tiger Woods to collect multiple Majors in the same calendar year — following Brooks Koepka in 2018, Jordan Spieth in 2015, Rory McIlroy in 2014 and Padraig Harrington in 2008.

And we can use Data Golf’s ‘expected wins’ metric to see how Schauffele’s bumper year stacks up against those others.

According to their model — which calculates “[t]he number of major wins we would expect given a golfer's strokes-gained performances in the majors [that] season” — only Spieth’s 2015 betters Schauffele’s total of 1.7 ‘expected Majors’ in 2024⁷.

---

⚽️ Watch the Games

In the hypothetical football matches that play on a loop in my head, Aitana Bonmatí and Kevin De Bruyne tend to operate in similar spaces on the pitch.

They can pop up all over the field in the middle and final thirds for their possession-dominant clubs, but it’s in the right half-space where they do their most memorable work.

Their contributions differ in some important ways, though: De Bruyne’s attacking output is skewed much more obviously towards shot creation, while Aitana gets on the end of a lot of shots herself⁸.

She plays in a much more dominant international side than the Belgian does, too — and her work for Spain is similar to her involvement for Barça⁹.

In their opening Olympic fixture on Thursday, Aitana — who started on the right of a midfield three — combined with her right winger in that right half-space in order to put Spain back on level terms with Japan.

With four teammates stationed to her right and working the ball between each other, the midfielder is able to drift infield and play off the shoulder of Japan’s defensive line.

As Spanish winger Athenea del Castillo turns towards goal with possession, Aitana’s marker is drawn ever so slightly towards the ball.

Aitana sees an opportunity to lose her cover, and slides behind the line to receive a threaded pass just outside the six-yard box — with only the goalkeeper to beat. Two touches with her right foot are all it takes, and the ball is nestled in the bottom corner of the goal.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here.

---

---

My Week in Sport(s) will be on an extended break during August, and will return on Saturday September 14th.

However, you can look out for a special post-Olympics edition of Plot the Ball arriving in your inbox on Saturday August 17th!

1. They did considerably better in their second warm-up en route to Paris — a win by a scoreline of 84-57 over Germany, which I was lucky enough to attend in London.

2. Their most recent low point was reached at the beginning of the 2022 FIBA World Cup; after defeating Belgium 87-72, they had won their last 30 matches by an average margin of +26.6 points.

3. This is an above-average Team USA in both offensive and defensive terms, but far from the best ever in either facet: their current offensive average of 93.4 points per game trails their 1998 peak of 97.2, and their current defensive average of 64.4 points per game trails their 2006 peak of 56.9.

4. Australian legend Lauren Jackson — who will be competing in this Olympics at 43 years old — recorded eight consecutive All-WNBA selections between 2003 and 2010, while compatriot Penny Taylor recorded two selections in 2007 and 2011.

5.

Neil Paine

has them as the biggest favourite to win gold in any team event over the next couple of weeks, with an implied probability based on betting odds of around 80%.

6. Although conditions were in his favour: “in Round 4 the course played most difficult for the early-to-midday starters, and easiest for the final groups”.

7. Spieth recorded 1.8 xWins in Majors in 2015; McIlroy in 2014 recorded 1.2; Harrington in 2008 recorded 1.0; and Koepka in 2018 recorded 0.8.

8. De Bruyne recorded 2.4 non-penalty expected goals in the Premier League for Man City last year, and 11.5 expected assisted goals; Bonmatí recorded a much more balanced 7.3 and 7.7 for Barcelona in Liga F.

9. Across Euro 2022 and the 2023 World Cup, she recorded a combined 2.6 non-penalty xG and 2.2 xaG.