Elena Delle Donne and the boundaries of usage and efficiency
By Ian Levy
Elena Delle Donne, the 6’5″ wing for the WNBA’s Chicago Sky, has been having an incredible season. Actually, incredible might not fully capture it. A month ago, her PER was in a territory that no player in either the NBA or WNBA had ever sustained for a full season. She’s come down a bit since that point, but is still working on one of the greatest scoring seasons either league has ever seen. In 25 games, she has produced 7.3 Win Shares, slightly more than Eric Bledsoe managed in 81 NBA games last season. Forget incredible, let’s go with phenomenal.
Currently, Delle Donne is using 27.8 percent of the Sky’s possessions when she’s on the floor, with a true shooting percentage of 60.5 percent. Those marks both rank fourth in the WNBA. It can be tricky to make straight comparisons across leagues, the scale of each statistic from top to bottom just isn’t the same. However, for the sake of context, those numbers would have ranked 13th and 9th in the NBA last season, respectively. Essentially, she’s scoring as efficiently as James Harden did in the NBA last season, while carrying a load as big as Anthony Davis.
What really makes the two numbers so special though is the combination.
The relationship between usage and scoring efficiency (measured by a statistic like true shooting percentage) in the NBA has been well established. The larger an offensive role a player carries, the harder it is to score efficiently—they receive more defensive attention and often need to take more difficult shots (there are only so many open three-pointers and layups a defense will surrender). Thus, a high usage rate makes a high true shooting percentage less likely. For example, only eight times in WNBA history has a player finished a season with a usage rate above 27 percent and a true shooting percentage about 60 percent. Delle Donne, if she holds on, would be the ninth.
The graph below plots all WNBA players who have finished a season with a usage rate above 22 percent and a true shooting percentage above 50 percent. You can see that Delle Donne sits right on the outer boundary, one of the most efficient high-usage seasons in league history.
What’s amazing is that Delle Donne has accomplished this extraordinary level of efficiency while shooting just 29.8 percent on three-pointers. She was a 41.1 percent three-point shooter during her first two years in the league. If Delle Donne was hitting three-pointers at the same rate this season, her true shooting percentage would be 64.3 percent, arguably THE most efficient offensive season in league history.
Delle Donne’s statistical accomplishments this season have been historic in the context of the WNBA, but they’d be nearly as impressive if placed in the statistical canon of the NBA. The usage and efficiency marks she’s flirting with—greater than 27 percent usage and greater than 60 percent true shooting percentage—have only been hit 45 times in NBA history, by 20 different players. It is a list heavy on hall of famers—Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant have each done it four times. Adrian Dantley did it five times. If we place Delle Donne on a similar scatter plot for NBA players, she still sits extremely close to that boundary between usage and efficiency.
Delle Donne is in a tight battle for the WNBA MVP award, one of several players doing rare and special things this season. Whether she wins or not, her incredibly efficient and high-volume scoring is something rarely seen, no matter what league you’re watching.