A Weekend of Madness

It's sad to me that there is little mention of the WNBA in the media. Living in the New York area it's more about Eli and Sanchez (Giants/Jets) and writer's predictions of the upcoming NFL season. There is barely even a mention of the WNBA on ESPN and it seems to be talked about with the attitude of "we have to talk about the games". They usually pick one game, show 2 highlights, show scores for the other games and pretty much read off of the same screen I am reading off of. They also always seem surprised if a player scores over 20 points, but that's besides the point. Anyway, there were some excellent games over the weekend and I'm here to talk about them (as best as I can because the coverage is non-existent).



Saturday

I think you could safely say that there were 5 close games on Saturday. The largest margin of victory was the Mercury winning against Lynx by 13 points. The rest of the games were 12 point (Sky over Sun), 6 points (Dream over Liberty) and two with 3 point (Sparks over Monarchs and Storm over Silver Stars). These were big games this weekend in the standings.



The Sky are now only a 1/2 game back on the Sun; Seattle stayed 2 back on the Mercury; the Sparks pulled to within 1 game of the Silver Stars (and the all important 4th place). The West is seriously tight from first to fifth while my Fever keep pulling away in the East.



Sunday

Fever won on the road at Washington; Sun beat Detroit in the city that Ford built then abandoned. The Sun are now tied for 2nd place with the Mystics since Connecticut won and Washington lost.



Upcoming Games

Monday is a night off for the teams but Tuesday will showcase the bottom feeders of the East battling to see who stays in the basement; the top two in the West and a great game between 4th and 5th in the West (Silver Stars hold that 1 game lead on the Sparks!).



Other news

I read an interesting article on how the WNBA has really improved its game over the last 13 seasons. It is an interesting article about the tweaking of the league that has certainly helped the game. There is a mention of attendance up but not matching that of 1998, oh yes, when the economy was BOOMING. And there is no mention of the NBA attendance being down. Of course there has to be some sort of comparison between men and women, rather then just show stats from WNBA 1997 and WNBA 2008, they want to compare two entirely different animals. But here's the interesting part: they aren't that far off in the categories they chose to evaluate AND they failed to mention that the men's game is 8 minutes LONGER then the women's game. The author provided a nice little table:
NBA WNBA
Field-goal percentage
45.9 42.7
Possessions per 48 minutes
91.7 92.1
Points per 100 possessions
108.3 98.3
Avg. points per team, per game
100 77.3



What the author fails to realize is that the women's game is similar to, I would say, mid-late 1990s NBA game. If you look at the stats there, the Chicago Bulls had a team field goal percentage of 45.1% in 1997-1998. This is the ridiculously talented Chicago Bulls and the entire WNBA league is only 3% off that pace? Come on people! If you really want to compare apples to bananas (no pun intended, or is there...) then the WNBA is doing extremely well considering they play fewer minutes then the men and their stats are nearly identical. 2% points is like making 10 more shots per game. And the women have more possessions then the men per 48 minutes (ahem, it's 40 for the women) because they actually play defense. Certainly the points are lower but that's changing, the same Chicago Bulls averaged 96.7 points per game. THOSE Bulls, the Jordan, Pippen, Kukoc, Harper, Kerr Bulls! Also, the women play far less games then the men in a regular season, so who is to say that is not a factor. By the end of the season you can watch the final score totals increase in the WNBA as the teams get more familiar with each other. Oh yes, and one final note: let's not forget that the big stars of the WNBA play 10-11 months out of the year. I'd like to see some of the NBA stars do that.



So while the league is young you are clearly seeing the effects of the improvement of the game, coaches and travel teams by the women that are entering the WNBA. As the players get stronger, faster and better those numbers will match the NBA. But hey, I didn't know it was a comparison game.



To read the article, click here.