WNBA Finals 2020: Storm vs. Aces is a battle of opposites

The WNBA Finals matchup between the Seattle Storm and Las Vegas Aces is all about the contrast in offensive styles — space versus power.

If you check out WNBA Twitter during any Las Vegas Aces game, you’ll almost instantly be met with tweets about how the Aces aren’t shooting 3s. In the regular season, Las Vegas — coached by former NBA All-Star center Bill Laimbeer — attempted 11.5 3-pointers per game, the lowest mark in the league and 5.4 per game fewer than the Atlanta Dream, who finished 11th in that category.

In fact, Vegas’s 11.5 attempts were the lowest mark in the league since 2018, when the Aces attempted just 10.9 per game in Laimbeer’s first year as the team’s head coach. In three years as the team’s head coach, the Aces have always ranked dead-last in 3-point attempts.

The WNBA Finals are starting on Friday night, and the Aces are one of the two teams who’ll face off in the best of five series. Their opponent, the Seattle Storm, only finished seventh in the league in 3-point attempts this season, but had finished in the top four in the league in attempts for four consecutive seasons.

The differences between these two teams go deeper than just 3-point attempts, but it’s a solid starting point to understand how their approaches to basketball work. This isn’t just a meeting of the top-two seeded teams in the WNBA this season. This is a meeting of polar opposite offensive systems. It’s a team at the forefront of innovation in women’s basketball facing a team that sometimes feels stuck in the 1980s, but are still winning in spite of that. And it’s a chance for Laimbeer’s team and 2020 WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson to show that there’s still room in professional basketball to win with old school techniques.

The Seattle Storm’s offensive approach

The Storm offense is led by 2018 WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart, who was the runner-up for MVP this season.

As noted above, Seattle has been shooting less this year than in the past, though a big part of why they’ve dropped down the 3-point attempt leaderboard is that more and more teams are shooting more, while Seattle’s taken a few less per game.

Seattle’s offense works because of how dangerous Stewart is. They can run the Sue Bird/Breanna Stewart pick-and-roll, with Stewart able to roll to and finish at the basket, but also able to pop out and shoot. Bird — and Jewell Loyd, who’s actually been much more efficient than Bird when shooting out of the pick and roll this season — can cause serious problems for the opposing defense on these plays.

Seattle also succeeds because they’ve got some knock-down shooters. Per Synergy, the Storm are first in the league in points per possession off of spot-ups at 1.193. Sue Bird is in the 99th percentile on that play type. Loyd is in the 97th percentile. Stewart’s the weak link of the three, ranking in the 68th percentile.

The Storm have the right personnel to spread the floor out, creating driving lanes and spot-up chances, and they have high-level shooters to take advantage of that.

The Las Vegas Aces’ offensive approach

It’s important to note that the expected version of the Las Vegas Aces offense this year was to feature a pair of elite bigs in Liz Cambage and A’ja Wilson, neither of whom really have an offensive game that extends past the mid-range. They’re also missing two of their best shooters in guard Kelsey Plum and forward Dearica Hamby, the two-time Sixth Woman of the Year whose versatility offers an additional offensive path for the Aces.

But even with those players out, we’re still essentially seeing Bill Laimbeer’s offensive system at work, which is all about scoring in the paint and in the mid-range.

The Las Vegas Aces are not the darlings of the analytics community. 16.1 percent of their points this season came in the mid-range, the second-highest percentage in the league behind the Atlanta Dream. In fact, Vegas was the only team in the league to score a higher percentage of their points in the mid-range than on 3-pointer, with just 14.3 percent of their points coming from there. Seattle, meanwhile, had the fourth-fewest percentage of their points come in the mid-range game at 11.7 percent.

This reliance on the mid-range and lack of long-range shooting are two things that can really hurt the Aces offensively, but we can’t just focus on the negatives here. There are things that Vegas is really good at.

51.8 percent of their points come in the paint. This team does a good job of working the ball down to A’ja Wilson in the paint, and their primary ball-handlers — Danielle Robinson and Jackie Young — are both strong finishers who can make up for their lack of shooting by driving into the paint. Wilson’s becoming a really good shooter from the top of the key, which helps open up some space underneath for drives. And no, it’s not as much space as could theoretically be opened by an offense that played more of a four or five out approach, but it’s working for Vegas.

What does the contrast in styles mean?

We talk about this series as one that pits two opposing styles against each other, but that doesn’t make this series a referendum on both team’s styles. The Storm have already won a title with this group and with this playstyle. Last year’s champion, the Washington Mystics, were led by stretch bigs also in Elena Delle Donne and Emma Meesseman. There’s been a distinct trend in this league towards 3-point shooting and versatile 4s being key components of good teams. Before the 2019 season, I wrote about the arrival of the three-point revolution to the WNBA, noting that before 2018, the most teams to average 20 3-point attempts in a season was three. In 2018, that ballooned to six. In 2019, it rose to seven, and this season we saw eight teams do it. The shift has happened, and Seattle winning this series won’t speed up the changes, just as a loss won’t suddenly change the direction of the league.

But for Vegas, a championship validates how the Aces have played over the past three seasons. It would show that Laimbeer’s post-centered approach to coaching can still work and that you don’t necessarily need ideal spacing around your star big to win.

On most other teams, you’d expect to see Wilson playing the five with floor spacers around her to maximize her talent. But the Aces use Wilson almost exclusively as a power forward, starting a traditional five beside her in Carolyn Swords.

If Vegas can win with this style of play, it might encourage other teams with similar team builds to lean in and try to replicate that. Could the Indiana Fever with Teaira McCowan and Lauren Cox take a page from Laimbeer’s playbook, with Cox working in the high post like Wilson does?

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Maybe the real key that makes Vegas run is the talent of A’ja Wilson. Maybe her skill is propping up a doomed offensive system that no other team could get away with.

Because Vegas isn’t 100 percent, these Finals won’t definitively tell us anything about how Laimbeer’s ideas work in the modern WNBA. But if they can make this a series or pull off the victory, it’ll be a huge win for this style of play.

Regardless of the results, it’ll be fascinating to watch how two teams who are so opposite in their approaches go at it in a championship series. Sometimes, it can seem like the best teams in each sports league are replicating each other’s playstyles. But not here.