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By Chris Gunther, Charting Hoops: In today’s WNBA, nearly every team has the luxury of sporting a bona fide star on their roster. Of course, we have A’ja Wilson on the Aces, Napheesa Collier on the Lynx, and Alyssa Thomas on the Mercury, but even further down the standings we have Kelsey Plum on the Sparks, Kelsey Mitchell on the Fever, and take your pick of Stewie / Sabrina / Jonquel and Nneka / Skylar / Gabby on the Liberty and Storm. Even the lowly Wings have Paige Bueckers, the rebuilding Mystics have Sonia Citron, and the upstart Valkyries have Veronica Burton.
Partly due to expansion, partly due to the growth of the women’s game, there is more talent more evenly distributed amongst WNBA teams. According to Neil Paine’s latest estimated RAPTOR player ratings, 11 of the 13 teams have at least one player among the best 18 in the league, and no team has more than three.
Simultaneously, coaches are relying on those stars more and more.
10 years ago, only a few stars played more than 30 minutes per game – they made up just 20% of overall minutes played in the league. Last season, that high-minutes player share has doubled, to more than 40%.
The trend is reverting a bit this season, but there are still 23 players on pace to play 30 or more minutes per game, led by Kelsey Plum at 35.4. Josiah Cohen at Rise of the Valkyries has been putting together terrific visualizations looking into how teams distribute minutes amongst their stars, and as you can see in his latest update, Plum has played 86% of her possible minutes with the Sparks this season, the second highest rate in the league.
Plum’s teammate, Dearica Hamby, is not far behind, playing 78% of her available minutes, sixth in the entire league. LA coach Lynne Roberts plays her top two players more than any other pair in the league, and nearly the same amount as the top three players on the Valkyries or Wings.
Still, that leaves ~15-20% of the time, over 200 minutes thus far, when one or both of these players is off the court. One approach to these minutes would be to stagger the stars, minimizing the number of minutes the team has to play with both Plum and Hamby off the floor. That’s not the way Roberts has run her rotations this season. Instead, she opts to maximize the amount of time they spend on the floor together, even if it means the team has to play with both of them on the bench more often than is ideal. For the Sparks, that comes in (relatively) long stretches at the beginning of the second and fourth quarters. Overall, about a quarter of the time that at least one of Plum and Hamby are resting, they both are.
Quick Reading Guide: Each horizontal bar is one game of the 2025 season. Earlier games are at the bottom, more recent games at the top. The length of the bar, from left to right, represents the number of minutes into the game, segmented into the four quarters. The colors show which combination of players (of those considered) are on the court during those minutes.
Those are the times when the Sparks lose control of games. They have a positive net rating when both Plum and Hamby are on the floor (which accounts for 70% of overall minutes), but are significantly outscored when Plum and Hamby sit.
Karl Smesko in Atlanta takes a different approach, choosing to just minimize overall rest. Allisha Gray leads Plum and the rest of the league in total minutes played, accounting for nearly 88% of the Dream’s minutes this season. She rarely rests for more than a few minutes at a time, as seen in the minimal yellow and gray in the chart below:
Bri Jones is right there with her, appearing in every game so far, and playing nearly 70% of available minutes. The Dream’s relative health, in a season where most teams have been wrecked by injuries, is a big reason they are holding down the third spot in the standings. The Dream post a negative net rating when these two are off the court, but that’s only happened for about ~100 total minutes this season, and 0 minutes in high leverage situations.
Other teams do take the stagger approach with their stars. Here’s the Indiana Fever’s rotations for Kelsey Mitchell and Aliyah Boston this season.
Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell do spend a lot of time on the court together, but Head Coach Stephanie White is not afraid to play one without the other. She typically opts for a Mitchell-only lineup (orange) at the end of the third quarter, then Boston-only (yellow) to start the fourth. Even with this staggering, White also chooses to rest both her stars at the same time for the first few minutes of the second quarter in most games, when the team struggles mightily.
It would be interesting to see what White would do with a healthy Caitlin Clark back in the rotation, but she has appeared in just 13 of the Fever’s 40 games due to injury. The story is similar in New York, where the Breanna Stewart-Jonquel Jones-Sabrina Ionescu trio have played just four games together after a hot start, making it impossible to get into any sort of rhythm.
However, there are other teams around the league that have been able to run the “Big 3” playbook. While the Liberty are fighting through injuries just to hold onto a top four seed going into the playoffs, the Mercury, who started off hurt, are getting healthy at the right time.
Phoenix’s three stars have all played in 16 of the last 17 games, letting Head Coach Nate Tibbetts start to lock in his substitution pattern, and it’s one of the cleanest, most consistent in the league. All three stars start (blue), Sabally comes out midway through the first (purple), then Copper subs out leaving Thomas (red). After a few minutes, Sabally subs back in for Thomas (orange), and starts the second quarter with Copper (brown). The second half follows the same pattern as the first, with all three finishing the game (if it’s close). The Mercury are a well-oiled machine heading into the playoffs.
Meanwhile, Seattle has had mixed success with their Big 3 of Nneka Ogwumike, Skylar Diggins, and Gabby Williams. When they are all on the court, the team is +9 in net rating, vs -15 when they all rest, but the in-between lineups are inconsistent. That could be because Head Coach Noelle Quinn hasn’t established a clear pattern for how she rotates these three All-Stars in and out of the game.
Seattle’s had some significant lineup changes outside of their Big 3 as well, including signing Erica Wheeler, trading for Brittney Sykes, and the general emergence of Dominique Malonga off the bench in the second half of the season. Adding in more combinations to the bar chart gets overwhelming, so let’s look at the rotation data another way.
The heatmap below depicts an average WNBA game, with each box representing one of the 40 minutes of a (regulation) game. The darker the box the more often a player plays in that minute. For the Storm, we can see Sykes slotting right into the starting lineup, spending most of her time on the court with the other starters, namely Williams, Diggins, Ogwumike, and Ezi Magbegor.
Malonga, a 6POY candidate, hasn’t started a game yet, and usually enters around minute eight or nine, and then again to start the fourth quarter. Quinn has chosen to play Malonga more often with the second unit, players like Wheeler and Tiffany Mitchell, rather than with the starters.
This is also a helpful view to explore even deeper teams, namely the top two in the league, the Lynx and Aces, who each run four+ stars deep. Starting with the Aces, Becky Hammon made one of the more controversial, and so far successful, rotation audibles of the season, moving Jewell Lyod, a max-level player, to the bench. You can start to see her minutes shifting further into the game as this change plays out. Otherwise, Hammon likes playing Wilson, Young, and Gray together for large chunks of the game.
Which brings us, finally, to the first-place Minnesota Lynx, and their future Hall of Fame coach, Cheryl Reeve. The Lynx can and do go eight players deep, and Reeve has created a consistent pattern for those rotation players.
She is a master of in-game strategy and player management, and knows the importance of routine for professional athletes. That routine extends to the way they flow in and out of the game, who they play with, and how long they’re out there. There are a lot of reasons the Lynx are atop the WNBA standings, and their lineup patterns are yet another one.
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