{"id":141779,"date":"2025-09-08T13:56:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T13:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/141779\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T13:56:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T13:56:08","slug":"first-year-wnba-coaches-who-have-over-or-underperformed-in-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/141779\/","title":{"rendered":"First-year WNBA coaches who have over- or underperformed in 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"


How much a coach wins or loses is of paramount importance when evaluating their performance, but so is how they did relative to expectations. Win more than oddsmakers projected you would? You should be in line for Coach of the Year consideration. Win less? Research suggests<\/a> your seat is warming up.<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, this is why we often see Coach of the Year winners seemingly carry a “curse” in subsequent seasons: One year’s surprising overperformance sets the bar of future expectations higher, portending backlash — and sometimes dismissal — when they go unmet.)<\/p>\n

The same applies to new hires. While the jobs they take were generally open for a reason, the question isn’t whether they would immediately contend for a championship — it’s whether they could get more out of their rosters than oddsmakers and pundits assumed in the preseason.<\/p>\n

That’s why we leveraged Elo forecasts<\/a> to rank the seven first-year WNBA coaches by whether they are on pace to lead their teams to more (or fewer) wins than ESPN BET had projected with preseason over\/unders. As a bonus, we also highlighted players who have played key roles and are on track to produce moreEstimated RAPTOR wins<\/a> than we would have expected based on their established levels of recent performance. Because, rookie or not, top coaches are the ones who coax the best performances out of their players.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Preseason over\/under wins: 8.5<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2025 ESPN Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How much a coach wins or loses is of paramount importance when evaluating their performance, but so is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[88452,3444,438,4384,15231,2834,352,4804,2849,3029,99,8253,434],"class_list":["post-141779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-88452","tag-atlanta-dream","tag-chicago-sky","tag-connecticut-sun","tag-daily","tag-dallas-wings","tag-espn","tag-golden-state-valkyries","tag-list","tag-los-angeles-sparks","tag-sports","tag-washington-mystics","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}