An unsettled identity could keep the Sparks from a deep playoff run

The Los Angeles Sparks are loaded with talent but have yet to truly hit their stride while the lineup changes from night to night.

Just before the 2019 season tipped off, the Sparks were tied with the Mystics as the third-most-popular championship pick among WNBA GMs. Taking a quick look at the standings these days, it looks like the GM’s got it just about right: Los Angeles came into the All-Star Break at 11-8, trailing only the 13-6 Las Vegas Aces in the Western Conference.

However, a closer look at the Sparks’ season shows that this team is performing in a tier meaningfully below the championship contenders — the Aces, Washington Mystics, and Connecticut Sun — who have all started to separate themselves from the pack. Combining together all of the games from the first half of the season, Los Angeles has only outscored their opponents by a total of six points, 1485-1479. That season-long margin is the thinnest out of all eight current playoff teams and pales in comparison to the league-best Mystics, who blow the doors off their opponents by an average of 11 points every 100 possessions.

What’s surprisingly difficult to answer about the Sparks, even at this halfway point in the season, is the question: “What is this team’s best lineup?” Coach Derek Fisher has put 10 different players in the starting lineup across his first 19 games, in part due to injuries, but also due to experimentation. Using lineup numbers from pbpstats.com, we can see how often each WNBA team plays each combination of five players. There are surprisingly accurate power rankings you can build using these stats: a team is usually more successful when they are rolling out their most-commonly-used lineup more often than other teams are doing the same.

Not only are these the teams whose key players have been healthy, but they are the teams whose coaches do not need to use valuable game minutes digging through the bench in search of a lineup that clicks. They already have lineups they trust. And so here’s the surprise: despite having a record that is keeping up with the championship contenders — who have incredible lineup stability compared to the rest of the league — the Sparks are down with the lottery-dwellers in terms of having high lineup churn:

Team: MPG by most-used lineup
1. Sun — 16.6
2. Sky — 13.6
3. Mystics – 11.8
4. Aces — 9.2
5. Dream — 8.8
6. Lynx — 8.5
7. Storm — 8.0
8. Fever — 6.5
9. Sparks — 6.4
10. Mercury — 5.7
11. Liberty — 5.1
12. Wings — 4.3

The Sparks’ most-used lineup consists of the famously reunited Ogwumike sisters, Nneka and Chiney, alongside All-Star guard Chelsea Gray and — surprise on top of surprise — wings Tierra Ruffin-Pratt and Sydney Weise. Last year, Ruffin-Pratt was going to the Finals with the Mystics, and Weise only logged 36 total minutes for the Sparks. This maybe wasn’t the Sparks plan before the season, as they anticipated taking the court with the most name-recognizable starters in the game, but the skillsets in this lineup are actually incredibly complimentary.

The key — which is the key to just about everything going well with the Sparks’ season — is the diversified skill-set of Nneka Ogwumike. Across Nneka’s first seven WNBA seasons, she attempted a 3-pointer roughly every other game. This year, it’s 2.7 attempts per game, and Nneka is just one of 11 qualified players in the league connecting at better than 40 percent. This has turned the Sparks’ most-commonly-used lineup into a spacing nightmare for defenses: Ruffin-Pratt and Weise lurk in the corners and Chiney can set up shop inside, giving Gray and Nneka most of the square footage of the half-court to create:

Put it all together and the lineup crushes, outscoring opponents by about 21 points per 100 possessions. So, why don’t we see it more? The Sparks have dealt with injuries this year, but not from these five players — their good health has, basically, propelled them to be the team’s most-used lineup. All five of these players have appeared in at least 17 of the team’s 19 games.

The relative absence of this lineup is even more confusing when considering how often Chiney Ogwumike and rookie Kalani Brown are played together. While the Ogwumike sisters have similarly huge social impacts on the game, and while they are roughly similar in size, their games are actually dramatically different from one another. Nneka’s added 3-point shot confirms her status as a dominant stretch-4, whose 2019 combination of 3-point shooting accuracy and high rebounding rate has only ever been matched by Elena Delle Donne and Lauren Jackson. Chiney is a traditional, paint-bound center whose assist rate is one of the lowest in league history.

The problem is, the 6-foot-7 Brown is was taken by the team with the seventh pick in this April’s draft precisely because of her potential to dominate the interior. Having both Chiney and Brown on the floor at the same time has the opposite effect of the floor-spacing lineup above: the defense can load up the key while easily monitoring any other shooters on the floor. In this clip, the Liberty — one of the most porous defenses in the league — easily deny the Sparks on consecutive out-of-bounds plays. Note how, in the second play, Liberty coach Katie Smith urges her team to overload the strong side of the floor, further shrinking the Sparks’ space:

Even though the Brown/Chiney combination is only two players, as opposed to a whole five-player lineup, the duo has been played together slightly more (132 total minutes) than the most-common five-player lineup, with Weise and Ruffin-Pratt (122 minutes).

Ironically, both of the players who could dramatically propel the Sparks to a new level in the second half of the season are also frontcourt players. Candace Parker has only had seven brief appearances, and may have returned from injury too fast — or, at least, that’s the only plausible explanation for a metronomically consistent Hall of Famer suddenly becoming one of the least efficient players in the league.

The other moonshot option is Maria Vadeeva. In her 2018 rookie season, Vadeeva became one of only nine players in league history to play at 19 years old. As a developing player on a contending team, Vadeeva was limited to 8.2 minutes per game, performing — in a small sample — even more efficiently than Liz Cambage did as a teenager in 2011. While the now-older Cambage was held out of the season-opening matchup between the Aces and Sparks, Vadeeva received her first career start. The result was absolutely explosive. In just 24 minutes, Vadeeva dropped 24 points, canning two 3-point shots, and also registered three blocks and two steals:

And, incredibly, that’s been it from Vadeeva. She represented Russia in the midseason FIBA Eurobasket tournament, and an injury sustained there has kept her out of WNBA play since then. Vadeeva has still only played in one game for the Sparks in 2019, but it’s a game she played like an MVP.

If the Sparks iron out their lineup issues in August and begin to find a winning rhythm, this team absolutely has the talent and history to grind out a win in any playoff series. But dramatic changes will be necessary. If August for the Sparks looks a lot like June and July, come playoff time they’ll quickly run into a team whose roles have already gelled together.

Statistics from pbpstats.com and Basketball-Reference.com.