For reference, since this notebook comes out over the weekend, I define “this week” as the prior Sunday through Friday night, and all stats are as of Friday.
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Tankathon check-in
To be clear, no one in the WNBA is currently tanking on purpose (at least, the players aren’t). That said, let’s see where the teams are right now in the lottery standings and where they project to end up (chart vaguely organized by rightmost column):
TeamGames back in lotteryGames back of No. 8 seedStrength of schedule remaining (out of 13)1Likely finishDallas Wings—72nd-strongest (12th-easiest)No. 1 lottery oddsChicago Sky34.56.52No. 2 lottery oddsLos Angeles Sparks26—5No. 8 seed or No. 3 lottery oddsWashington Mystics10.51.54No. 3 or 4 lottery oddsConnecticut Sun41796Worst lottery oddsGolden State Valkyries8—8Low playoff seed or No. 4 lottery odds1. Remaining strength of schedule is calculated using data from Massey.
2. Seattle owns Los Angeles’ pick.
3. Minnesota owns Chicago’s pick.
4. Chicago owns the rights to Connecticut’s pick if the Sun finish worse than the Mercury.
Atlanta Dream
A team’s net rating is its points scored per 100 possessions minus its points allowed per 100 possessions. A positive net rating means a team is outscoring opponents per 100 possessions, and a negative net rating means it’s being outscored.
Atlanta’s starting frontcourt duo of Brionna Jones and Brittney Griner has played 311 minutes together and has a -2.1 net rating, according to PBP Stats. Jones and Naz Hillmon have played 391 minutes together without Griner and have a 19.8 net rating in those minutes. Griner and Hillmon have played 181 minutes without Jones, for a 4.6 net rating.
The issues here aren’t particularly complex. Jones and Griner are offensively a bit redundant and far more supplementary than complementary, and Griner has been appreciably worse at just about everything this year than she was in 2024. Defensively, there’s little that Griner can do that Jones isn’t better at. Hillmon can fill more defensive roles than either, and she slots in offensively as a lower-usage rolling, popping and cutting big.
Especially after the Dream’s recent run of success, they would do well to continue sacrificing some of Griner’s minutes for Hillmon’s.
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Dallas Wings
The Wings have played 16 players this season, and 12 of them have started at least one game, tied for the most in the league. The leader in on-off net rating this season among those players? Haley Jones.
After playing nearly 1,300 minutes for Atlanta as a point forward, Jones has played the four full-time for Dallas. She has already set or tied her single-game career highs in 3-pointers made, offensive boards, steals and blocks. She’s averaging 8.5 points on 55.9% true shooting, 3.1 rebounds, 2.2 assists and 1.6 stocks (steals plus blocks) per game. This is the best she’s shot on volume across a 12-game span in her WNBA career, per Sports Reference.
The Wings’ offense and defense are both around 6 points better with Jones on the court, despite her being the seventh different frontcourt player to be a featured part of their rotation.
As Mavs Moneyball’s Jack Bonin discussed last week, Jones’ shift from running point to the frontcourt has drastically altered her usage. She’s already increased her career reps as a roller and cutter by an order of magnitude. This has opened her offense a bit, turning what was lackluster playmaking and poor athleticism1 for a point guard into plus playmaking at the four and giving her a shiftiness relative to her defenders that allows her to find more shots.
In lineups that have featured Luisa Geiselsöder as the primary big, those advantages are accentuated by Geiselsöder’s effect on Dallas’ spacing, with more space creating clearer passes and less contested finishes.
But Jones’ play at the four has benefited her teammates even more than herself. Being a forward who can operate above the break has allowed Chris Koclanes to experiment with using her in handoffs and as the big in split cut actions. (Koclanes has also done the latter with Geiselsöder more of late, too, but she’s not as good of a passer.) The upshot is that, on a roster full of athletic guards, most of whom function best off the ball, the Wings now have options for getting those players advantages without needing them to create their own shot.
It also helps that Jones has been an impactful screener. Our Lincoln Shafer noted that was a swing skill for her going into the 2023 draft, and our primary and upside comps for her were based on her expanding her game as a forward, while her worst-case comps were wings. Atlanta was a poor environment for player development under Tanisha Wright’s tenure, and Jones suffered from being played at a disadvantageous position in her time there.
Being moved into a true frontcourt role also plays up Jones’ ability to guard across wing/forward positions and her reads in rotations while relieving the ball screen navigation issues she has.
This isn’t to say that Jones is going to continue to be a starting-caliber player. She’s already regressing a bit toward her mean, with an assist-to-turnover ratio across her last three games of 4:7. But there’s a good chance that not only has Dallas made a useful long-term role player out of a midseason free agent signing, it’s also learned more about what qualities to look for from potential starters in the frontcourt.
Golden State Valkyries
Generally, players who get the green light from 3-point range are those who can make those shots at a decent clip. Among seasons in which a player took over seven 3-pointers per 100 possessions and made at least 25 total threes, the median shooting percentage was 36.2%, per Sports Reference.
Carla Leite probably isn’t going to qualify for that list because despite taking 7.5 threes per 100 possessions, she’s made only eight this season. But she is shooting just 13.8% (8-for-58) from deep. Only Megan Walker has ever had a full season with this frequency of attempts without even cracking 15%, per Sports Reference.
This cold streak for Leite will probably snap at some point soon, given that she’s shot around 30% from three over the past two seasons in Europe on a diet full of pull-up jumpers. But it likely won’t be soon enough to save her from the annals of history.
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Seattle Storm
The Gabby Williams hot streak appears to be over, as she’s shooting 45.8% from the field and 18.5% from three over Seattle’s last 10 games. Erica Wheeler’s fountain of youth elixir faltered as well in July, as she shot just 34.3% overall and 30.0% from three in a 10-game stretch that mostly overlapped with Williams’ regression. The Storm went 4-6 in that stretch, with five of those losses coming to likely lottery teams.
Self-evidently, offenses take a big hit when two of their starters see hot streaks end. But Seattle is especially vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of Williams and Wheeler. Its offense lacks shooting gravity, features inconsistent scoring efficiency at the one and limited ability at the five, and has little natural synergy between players’ skill sets.
During the eight games that Williams and Wheeler were both cold, the Storm had an offensive rating of 95.8, per WNBA Advanced Stats. That would rank second-to-last in the WNBA for the full season. No matter how good this defense is, even with new addition Brittney Sykes, Seattle cannot compete in the playoffs with scoring woes like that.