I was mucking around with the NBA API and Dash to put together a WNBA player dashboard. It’s fun poking around at the stats. The bar charts show a players percentage on the left, with their percentile as a bar chart and the number on the right. Lines are at the 5, 50, and 95th percentile. The shot chart is from matplotlib, I couldn’t get the hexbins to work how I wanted in Dash.
A player like A’ja shines across the board, eventhough she takes tough shots (shot quality of 45%, her efficiency is quite good, with an average effective field goal percentage and high free throw rate. Shot quality is if you take the league average eFG% for the shots the player took, what would you expect the player to shoot. Unfortunately tracking data isn’t available for the WNBA, so this isn’t adjusted for how close a defender is.
On the other side you can see why Angel is so polarizing. Terrible shooting numbers and high turnovers, that are balanced by taking a lot of shots around the rim and going to the line a ton. Her defense is legit, with opponents shooting 49% within 6’ of the rim with her on the floor.
Quite a good rookie season from Paige, taking and making a lot of tough shots.
And Phee, with monster shooting numbers.
Some other fun ones, red hot shooting from “The Enforcer”
If Nneka could get to the line more, she might jump another level.
