WNBA Finals Ratings

I finally got the statistics into my spreadsheet for the finals...I also ran the 2005 playoff totals and got a few surprises...

	Offensive Rating	Defensive Rating	Differential
Monarchs	94.90	90.99	+3.91
Sun	90.99	94.90	-3.91

No big surprise there, it was the Playoff totals that were interesting to me.

	Offensive Rating	Defensive Rating	Differential
Monarchs	94.88	87.39	+7.49
Sun	100.44	96.27	+4.17
Fever	87.41	85.70	+1.71
Comets	98.10	98.39	-0.29
Storm	93.77	99.48	-5.71
Shock	92.94	106.63	-13.69
Sparks	95.96	110.89	-14.93
Liberty	85.60	102.55	-16.95

I didn't realize quite how well Indiana played. The three best teams in the playoffs are clearly identified, and two of them are from the East. The spread gets even larger once you get past Seattle, with the last three teams in the playoffs in a completely different bracket. So much for parity in the league. The Fever were the best defense in the playoffs, and the Sun the best offense. Clearly the Sun need to work on their defense if they want a championship. Ultimately, in this case, defense won the championship, but offense didn't hurt. Sacramento was in the top half of the postseason offenses, but combined that with the second best defense. Indiana, as good as its defense was, just couldn't break out of the east against the dominant offense of Connecticut. They need to add some scoring if they want to make it past Connecticut next year. Sadly, there is little surprise that Seattle fell out this postseason on their shoddy defense. The Comets and Sparks will have to improve theirs as well. I can't even bear to talk about the Liberty and the Shock...they were an embarassment in the post season.

What's Next

I know that I said I would run individual numbers next, but I actually want to wrap up the ratings for the rest of the teams in the league for 2005 first. Once I run all of those numbers I will start work on the 2004 and 2005 Storm individual player ratings. I am also starting a WNBA database, but I am moving slowly. I am still refreshing my SQL and Perl skills. I am a few years out of practice...once I get all the tables created I can start loading data. I have got all of the teams, but only a few of the team rosters loaded so far, and the stats will have to come after that. I hope to have that up with tools to generate both player and team ratings before next season. I may move faster if I get a working script to parse the stats printouts and load them in automatically. I have one for the rosters, but am still struggling with the exception cases like players with two last names, and players with apostrophes...we'll see how long it takes...I tend to move in bursts.

WNBA