My thoughts on another week of basketball and another week of retirement.
Iowa 8th Graders- The Iowa athletic associations have voted to allow 8th graders to play high school sports next year. The claim is that it is intended to help small schools who struggle to field teams in some sports.
It is going to be a nightmare for high school coaches. How many parents are going to be pressuring to have their 8th graders play varsity?
If schools are struggling for athletes, wouldn’t it be a better option to start combining with other schools?
When to Challenge- The light went on for me about another perspective on challenges. It is not just whether it is clear that it will be a call reversed. Coaches need to determine also what they gain. Indiana challenged a 50/50 call that involved no points and no possession. If they won the challenge, they would have lost a foul on Cunningham and had a jump ball.
No offense to Cunningham, if you want to have a foul erased, don’t waste it on Cunningham’s second foul in the second quarter. After doing that, they had no ability to challenge Clark’s 5th foul in the third quarter.
On Saturday, Indiana did not challenge Boston’s fifth foul. Even if the coach thinks it would be a 30% chance to win the challenge, with a star and a fifth foul, it is worth while. And then the “rules expert” said it should not have been a foul.
Fouls, Fouls, Fouls- Indiana’s defensive scheme is to leave players on an island to defend without help. The logic of the scheme is to not help off potential three point shooters. There is some merit to the concept of focusing on not giving up threes, but you need very athletic defenders to do that. Indiana cannot athletically play that system so the result is tons of fouls.
In Game Adjustments- If a team consistently seems to jump out to big leads but struggles to maintain the leads, and has trouble finishing games- there is a good chance that the coach is not making necessary in-game adjustments.
50 Games- Next year the WNBA will go to a 50 game schedule. Obviously there is money to play more games. A real question will be at what point players decide that it doesn’t make sense to spend the off-season anymore playing in other leagues like the Unrivaled. Once the players are making enough money in their mind and are loaded with enough games- when they decide to use the off-season to train vs play, the game and the players will benefit.
Clark Shoe- Clark’s shoe looks good but certainly either Nike or Clark dropped the ball on this shoe release. It will not come out until after the end of this WNBA season. Think about it- how many more shoes would Nike have sold if they came out with this shoe her rookie year?
All-Star Voting- Last year Clark led the WNBA in voting with 1.2 million votes. Maybe voting will jump up, but at the halfway mark, Clark had 250k votes and was in 5th place. So at this point she is headed to get half the number of votes as last year. And it is a pretty sure thing that the media and the coaches who each count for 25% of the vote will not be bumping Clark up.
There is a potential ugly situation brewing. If they do it like last year, at this point A’ja Wilson and Paige Bueckers will alternate, picking the teams. If Clark is not top two in voting, will she get snubbed and be one of the last picks by the captains.
GM’s Job- In WNBA voting- Boston #3, Clark #5, Mitchell #10. In WNBA scoring- Mitchell #3, Clark #4, Boston #13.
WNBA Scoring Rank- #51 Cunningham (10.2ppg), #84 Hull (5.9ppg), #85 Billings (5.6ppg), #101 Johnson (4.1ppg), #104 Hines-Allen (3.9ppg), #110 Timpson (3.5ppg)
My point would be that offensively, the Fever have three of the best players in the WNBA, but the GM failed to give the Fever a roster to go with them.
Cunningham- When Cunningham plays the #4 for the Fever, in terms of +/- points, that is one of the Fever’s best rosters.
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