Nylon Calculus: WNBA team ratings and the Lynx’s slow start
By their championship standards, the Minnesota Lynx got off to a slow start this season. Their first seven games saw them compile a 2-5 record, including a four-game losing streak. Saddled by a lackluster offense scoring less than 100 points per 100 possessions, they found themselves in the bottom-half of the league with a -3.5 net rating. The WNBA, as head coach Cheryl Reeve aptly described it, had put them “on notice.”
If the Lynx had been alerted to the challenges of consistent dominance, they certainly responded with fervor. Over their last seven games, they’ve enjoyed six victories, punctuated by their current five-game winning streak. They’ve corralled some of their turnover problems, improved their scoring opportunities and earned a 108 offensive rating, the second-best mark during that time. Meanwhile, they’ve grabbed over 80 percent of their defensive rebounding chances and held opponents under 100 points per 100 possessions. They have proverbially turned things around.
This idea of a turnaround is worth parsing, though.
On the one hand, the Lynx did indeed have some noticeable issues during their sluggish start — from bewilderingly poor execution to suboptimal minutes allocation, all of which required a three-day mini training camp to address. On the other hand, it was still just a small sample of games. The foundations of the Lynx dynasty were still intact, particularly with Maya Moore and Sylvia Fowles on the floor, and it seemed to be just a matter of time before they reemerged.
Moreover, their early 2-5 mark — while certainly bad — may have exaggerated the actual depth of their struggles. After all, this record included a one-point home loss in the final minute against the top-ranked Los Angeles Sparks. It had another three losses against teams with winning percentages above .600 (the Phoenix Mercury, the Washington Mystics, and the Sparks), as well as a two-point stumble against the .500 Atlanta Dream. Three of these games were on the road. They were winnable matches, to be sure, but Minnesota was faced with formidable competition.
In other words, when looking at just the raw numbers for the Lynx, we miss so many important pieces of contextual information. Standard summary statistics ignore crucial factors like game location and opponent quality. Yet, as we know, “strength of schedule” is an important consideration for understanding team performances.
Fortunately, we have numerous publicly available tools at our disposal that can help us account for such context and enhance our team evaluations. Perhaps the most recognizable one is the Simple Rating System from Sports Reference. This approach takes a team’s average margin of victory and adjusts it up or down based on strength of schedule, as measured by opponents’ own average margin of victory and game location. The same concept can be used with offensive, defensive, and net ratings to account further for pace. If the Lynx have indeed encountered stiff competition, then their adjusted net rating should be higher than their standard net rating.
Alas, in contrast to the NBA, statistics of this kind are relatively harder to come by for the WNBA. Still, there are some excellent resources that relate to the topic, including Nylon Calculus contributor Matt Femrite’s dashboard, which tracks Four Factors and other advanced metrics relative to league average, as well as Inpredictable’s betting market rankings, which feature an SRS section. Drawing upon these and many other references, I decided to put together adjusted team ratings that update daily at https://presidual.shinyapps.io/wnba-stats/:
These numbers reflect that, after accounting for strength of schedule, the Lynx have been better than their basic statistics indicate. Their adjusted net rating (+4.9) is nearly two points higher than their standard net rating (+3.2), putting them on par with the Sparks. Their offense, in particular, gets a boost from the adjustment.
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It’s worth re-emphasizing that the sample size is still small, as only 89 games have thus far been played leaguewide. A single blowout, for example, can have a sizeable impact on the ratings — above and beyond how garbage time can complicate our assessment of a team. Nevertheless, there are benefits to having these adjusted ratings on hand, if for no other reason than to continue to expand WNBA analytics.