yes! Veronica Burton v. Courtney Williams last night, but that's the only one.
Kelsey Mitchell v. Rachel Banham and Arike Ogunbowale v. Brittney Sykes (both last night) are the only two non-finals games where a player has had 1 possession total.
Did Veronica Burton beat Courtney Williams that bad?
Burton's win was the fastest Unrivaled 1-on-1 tournament victory for any non-finals game.
With the Unrivaled 1-on-1 Tournament starting today, I broke down the best storylines, the top scorers heading in, what's changed since last year and more for @sportsillustrated.bsky.social:
(there's a table ranking the top 10 players by points per possession, too!)
www.si.com/wnba/everyth...
A+ ad placement on ESPN’s trade tracker
some definitions for the stats:
true shot: any FG attempt + free throws stemming from shooting fouls. it's a middle ground between eFG% and TS%
usage percentage: (true shots + turnovers)/(player's offensive possessions). how often a player was used when on the floor.
Who are the highest usage and most efficient players in Unrivaled?
Paige Bueckers is coming close to taking Chelsea Gray's efficiency crown.
2015 Warriors Elevator Screen, with tracking data!
(This was the last of Brandon Rush's 14 third quarter points in a win against the Kings)
The full table (a bit long!) of all lineups with at least 100 possessions is here!
ICYMI: Assessing which team has the best three-player lineup in Unrivaled should be an easy task. The league doesn't publish lineup stats, though, so I went ahead and pulled the data.
I ranked each team's best lineup, sorted by net rating:
www.si.com/ranking-top-...
Which Unrivaled team has the best three-player lineup? Lineup stats aren't available ... until now!
For @sportsillustrated.bsky.social, I parsed play-by-play and possession data, and ranked each team's best lineup by net rating.
Full table at the bottom of the story!
www.si.com/ranking-top-...
Spun through the best games to watch for the women's college basketball week 11 slate, which will kick off in full force tomorrow night when TCU goes on the road to face a gritty West Virginia team:
www.si.com/college-bask...
thanks again to @sumersports.bsky.social and the Shrine Bowl for running this competition and making the data available! it was a really great opportunity to get hands-on experience with tracking data.
important caveats:
- small sample size (2024 alone, many players only have 3-4 reps. 10 seconds, or as few as ~2 seconds for stall/bull score, isn't enough for a comprehensive evaluation and is subject to noise.)
- no film (makes ground truth validation for contact onset tough)
... and for bull score:
Here are the top six reps by stall score. I found these handy for assessing whether the metrics were measuring what they were intended to measure!
Secondary metrics:
Stall Score (did you stop the rusher’s progress?) and Bull Score (given engagement, did you drive the blocker back?). Both focus on what happens after contact onset.
Top 3 leaderboard for both, along with media quotes from 2024 East-West Shrine Bowl Practice:
Primary metric: DL Depth Allowed at Frame 25
Median time to throw was ~2.68 seconds in 2025; ESPN Analytics pass rush win rate is anchored at 2.5 seconds. Use DL depth @ frame 25 as a proxy for how much ground an OL gave
Top 5 leaderboard below, small sample size caveats apply:
Feature engineering and "contact onset":
1-on-1 reps have phases (get off, set, engagement, etc.) and properly quantifying a lineman’s performance can be tricky.
So, approximate frame when closing ends and engagement (likely) begins. It's not ground truth, but it's a start.
Small amt. of manual inputs --> Outer algorithm that scans through drill period and triggers when a candidate rep is detected --> Local algorithm to extract OL-DL pair, rep start and rep end --> Continue loop --> Tidy dataframe of 133 reps
For the @sumersports.bsky.social x Shrine Bowl Analytics Competition, I built an automated pipeline to detect OL vs. DL reps from player tracking data, engineer contact-onset features and create metrics for evaluating interior line play.
Details below!
Week 2 of college women's hoops action starts with an incredible UCLA vs. Oklahoma matchup. It's one of the games I'm most looking forward to watching this week:
www.si.com/college-bask...
Women's college hoops is back 🥳
I previewed some of the best games to watch for the first week of action for @sportsillustrated.bsky.social.
Looking forward to Creighton vs. South Dakota State tonight and Texas vs. Richmond this week!
www.si.com/college-bask...
A’ja Wilson is who she thinks she is.
everyone touches the ball on this! (phoenix’s inverted P&R has been hard to guard as is.) good ball movement to start.
Andraya Carter and Chiney Ogwumike nailing what the players are fighting for (to be paid what they deserve!) and critiquing Cathy — all before the WNBA finals tip off — is exemplary work.
Like, what do you do against *this*?
bsky.app/profile/stev...
For more numbers, check out the article!
It's been so fun to watch Alyssa Thomas shine this season and in the playoffs.
This season, Alyssa Thomas set career highs in *both* usage rate and effective field goal percentage.
Alyssa Thomas is responsible for 41% of the triple-doubles ever recorded in a WNBA non-exhibition game.
She also has *10* more triple-doubles than all other players with one career triple-double combined.
(Data via @acrossthetimeline.com)
This year, Alyssa Thomas became the only player in WNBA history to average at least 15 points and 9 assists per game in a single season.
(Data via @acrossthetimeline.com)
