Last week we uncovered some interesting trends in NBA player development. Namely that in recent decades, the best NBA players have made bigger improvements after getting into the league than players did in the 1980s and 1990s. This week I’m taking that analysis to the WNBA.
Rookies Better than Jim Morris
Rookies dominated the 2024 WNBA season. Caitlin Clark led the league in assists, with more per game than anyone in history not named Courtney Vandersloot1. Angel Reese led the league in rebounding, shattering the previous record. Cameron Brink was on pace to lead the league in blocks before she succumbed to injury. Leonie Fiebich had the league’s best true shooting percentage among non-Centers and was a critical piece of the Liberty’s championship run. Kamilla Cardoso, Rickea Jackson, and Aaliyah Edwards all had great first seasons as well.
Future lottery picks will almost certainly keep this rookie dominance going. Later this year we’ll see Paige Bueckers in the WNBA, alongside fellow rookies Sonia Citron, Aneesah Morrow, Hailey Van Lith, and more. The next year we’ll get Olivia Miles, Flau’jae Johnson, and Lauren Betts. Then Juju Watkins and Hannah Hidalgo. The future of the WNBA is in good hands.
For comparison, among the top eight 2024 NBA draft picks, Alex Sarr and Donovan Clingan are the only ones to break the top 20 leaderboard in any stat (blocks for both, as well as some rebounding efficiency numbers Clingan2). Most casual fans can’t even tell you who was drafted into the NBA last year. Actually, even diehard fans can’t.
There are a few structural differences between the WNBA and NBA that drive this discrepancy. First, to be eligible for the W draft players must be “four years removed from high school graduation, or turn at least 22 years old during the year in which the draft takes place”. If that rule applied in the NBA, we wouldn’t have seen Giannis in the league until what was, in reality, his fourth year when he won the Most Improved Player award, made an All-Star team, and finished seventh in MVP voting.
To take another example, Paige Bueckers and Jalen Suggs were often linked during their freshman seasons as two March Madness stars and friends from the same hometown. Now Suggs is wrapping up his fourth NBA season, while Paige is still in Storrs.
Additionally, the WNBA is a smaller league with just 12 teams to the NBA’s 30, and a max of 12 players per team vs 183 in the NBA. Add it all up and it’s a much smaller pool: 144 women vs 540 men.
As a result, we might expect the best players in the WNBA to make a bigger splash immediately upon entering the league. Caitlyn Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink are the latest examples of amazing rookies, but top WNBA players have always established dominance early in their careers.
The top players hit ~20 PER in their first season (well above average), increase slightly from there, then drop back to where they started by about years 9-10. This trend has held fairly reliably for the last 25 years (the 1990s are different since the league started in 1997 and top players were already at or past their primes).
We can also look directly at the best players’ careers to see how they started. 16 different women have won WNBA MVP. Here’s how their rookie year compares to their best year in terms of PER.
On average, MVPs hit 81% of their peak efficiency in Year 1. Granted, the older years are a bit misleading given Cynthia Cooper and Yolanda Griffith were in their late 20s / 30s when the WNBA started, but the Tamika Catchings 100% bar is legit. By a number of metrics, she had her best (and anyone’s best) season as a rookie.
A few years after Catch, Candace Parker had the most famous rookie season in WNBA history. After years of hype, Parker took the WNBA by storm in 2008, posting one of the most efficient years ever and winning MVP in addition to Rookie of the Year.
Parker stands alone as the only woman to win both awards in the same year4, but it is not at all uncommon for rookies to be considered in the MVP competition. 19 different WNBA rookies have finished top five in MVP voting within their first three years in the league. Luka Dončić is the only NBA player to do that this century, squeaking in at fourth place in his third year.
Looking at it another way, 11 different rookies have made an All-WNBA team since 2000. Even though the NBA has three award teams to the WNBA’s two, no NBA rookie has made a team in that time period. Not LeBron. Not Derrick Rose. Not Luka. Not Wemby. Not even Anthony Bennet. Caitlin Clark? Check
Despite all the hype for Cooper Flagg, Bueckers will make an all-league team before him. JuJu Watkins, who won’t be in the WNBA until at least 2027, will too. Heck, based on the stats above, there’s a 13-year-old girl5 out there somewhere who will probably get an MVP vote before Cooper Flagg.
The women understand the assignment and show up on time. Adds a little more credence to my question from last week to NBA players: “What took you so long to get so good?”
Regression to the Mean
What about the late bloomers? What does the trend look like for Most Improved Players (MIPs) in the W? Here the story is similar to that in the NBA, but with an even more satisfyingly sine-wavey answer:
WNBA MIPs follow a very in-line-with expectations trajectory, starting their careers slightly below average before having a big breakout season, then regressing back to just above league average.
So, straightforward. But not exactly standard, as the average hides some pretty interesting career arcs.
Satou Sabally’s improvement was not being hurt. She won MIP the first year she played more than 17 games, and a year after being limited to 11 games by injury
Leilani Mitchell won MIP twice in her very spiky, up-and-down career
Jonquel Jones is by far the best MIP. Her PER before winning was higher than any other MIP’s in the season they won
Elizabeth Williams has a very stable efficiency for a MIP
Kelsey Bone regressed to below the mean, and was out of the league shortly after her MIP
Kia Vaughn has the largest single year PER jump going from 4.4 to 16.4 (+272%!)
Kelly Miller and Wendy Palmer tied for MIP in 2004. They obviously did not consider advanced stats then, as Miller’s PER dropped 2.5 points as part of a big downward trend, while Palmer’s rose 5.2.
With some notable exceptions, the WNBA MIPs don’t hold onto their efficiency gains very strongly. Perhaps that’s because they have to deal with a new crop of amazing rookies each year.
So if the strategy for success in the NBA is either get a little better each year or get a lot better one year and stay that good, if you want to be a really good WNBA player the strategy is … already be really good at basketball before you play in the WNBA.
Lest you forget how good Courtney Vandersloot is at passing:
Clingan also leads the NBA in personal fouls per minute, committing one every seven on average.
Including the three players allowed on two-way contracts.
Wilt Chamberlain (1959-60) and Wes Unseld (1968-69) did it in the NBA.
This is not an exaggeration. Elena Delle Donne was 13 when Carmelo Anthony won a National Championship at Syracuse. They both finished top five in MVP for the first time in 2013.