True Contenders or Paper Tigers? How the 2024 Lynx Stack Up » Winsidr

In the high-stakes world of professional basketball, the quest for championship glory hinges not just on talent and strategy but on statistical prowess. As the 2024 WNBA season reaches the Olympic break, all eyes have been on the Minnesota Lynx, scrutinizing every dribble, pass, and shot in anticipation of their potential to clinch the ultimate prize. 

The Lynx have been the darlings of the 2024 season, outpacing many of the pundits’ expectations heading into the season. Minnesota is 17-8 and tied for the third seed in the league. The Lynx heartbeat is their all-everything forward Napheesa Collier. Of late, the Lynx have fallen on a bit of hard times, coinciding with losing Collier to a left foot plantar fasciitis injury that has not been easy to overcome. Since she left the  game on July 4, the Lynx have gone 3-3, including that fateful game. As Phee goes, so go the Lynx, and without her it’s an equal opportunity offense begging for someone to step up. All season, the team has leaned on its defensive pressure to motivate its offense. If the Lynx want to make hay, they’ll need their All-WNBA leader.

Diving beneath the surface, this article embarks on a meticulous analysis, delving into the numbers that truly define contenders. By comparing the performance metrics of the Lynx against the averages of the past decade’s champions, I aim to unravel whether this season holds the promise of championship success or the bitter realization of unmet expectations.

To do so, I gathered data from 19 statistical categories, ranging from the traditional (points per game (PPG) and assists per game (APG), to the more analytically driven like offensive and defensive rating (ORTG and DRTG) and true shooting percentage (TS%). This also included offensive numbers like field goal percentage (FG%) and rebounding percentage (REB%) but also defensive ones like opponents’ second-chance points and points off turnovers. I believe this gave me a detailed and comprehensive look not only at what a team does overall but whether there were certain statistics that champions excelled at over others. By averaging the data for each statistic, I leveraged that number as the baseline and compared the teams accordingly.

The obvious conclusion from the data above is to be a champion, you have to excel above the average. Nearly every statistical category had half of the previous decade’s worth of champions above average. For a champion to rise above the rest, they must be the best on both sides of the ball. OK, this you likely knew, but where do the 2024 Lynx fall?

Outside of the 2021 Chicago Sky who represent quite the outlier here, the previous 10 champions were consistently above average. This year’s Lynx iteration falls in line with the champs, albeit on the lower end,. Some of this is due to the dropoff caused by Collier missing a small handful of games of late. Nevertheless, this marker places them better than only the aforementioned ‘21 Sky, and  still well behind juggernauts like the 2019 Washington Mystics and 2020 Seattle Storm. For context, closer to the end of June, Minnesota was above average in 10 categories. To be a champion this season, they’ll need to look like the Lynx of then rather than the Lynx of now.

Let’s take a look at how it breaks down by category. I wanted to see if the decades’ champions excelled at certain statistics over others, which might help to identify more definitively if the Lynx are true contenders.

Impressively, the 2024 Minnesota Lynx match up quite well with the champions’ averages. There isn’t one category where they far exceed or significantly trail the averages. Considering the  sample size has grown larger for the Lynx than these champions, and recognizing that playoff basketball is very different from the regular season, this is still very telling. We don’t know if the Lynx can produce these same numbers come playoffs, or even maintain them throughout the rest of the regular season, but these are encouraging numbers that speak to the Lynx’s legitimate contender status.

Exploring deeper, I wanted to see how the players individually were playing and compare them to the structure and individual contributions of the previous champions. Luckily, I have done a lot of this work already, so it was a fast comparison. I will once again use the kitchen-sink wins probability added metric (kWPA)  from Inpredictable. 

As I charted out before, minus the 2023 Aces championship, the average kWPA for the champions from 1997-2022 was 1.6 kWPA. Considering all the different ways players can contribute to wins, each player on the championship team averaging over a win and a half contribution is pretty special and speaks to the depth and greatness of why these teams won in their respective years. 

The 2024 Minnesota Lynx average kWPA per player? That number is currently 3.84 kWPA. Again, somewhat of an apples-to-oranges comparison of playoffs to the regular season plus the sample size differnece, and I would be surprised if the average remained so high the rest of the way, but the early indication is that this Lynx team is talented and it seems fair to be considered as true a contender as any other team.

As I did in that article, I broke down the championship teams’ players into tiers, contingent on their playoffs’ kWPA. If the player was over 2.0, they’re in Tier 1, 0.75-1.99 is Tier 2, and below 0.74 is Tier 3. The 2024 Lynx currently have eight players in Tier 1 above 2.0 kWPA this season, one in Tier 2, and four more in Tier 3. That is  high-level production from their best players and other having career years, but a team that could use some additional depth.

Based on the data, I also concluded that a guard must be one of the top two kWPA playoff contributors. Of the eight Tier 1 Lynx players, three are guards. The Lynx have gotten balanced contributions from their lineup. Again, it’s a small sample, but early factors speak to this team being legitimate. 

It helps when you have your best players not just contributing, but putting up career numbers in a plethora of statistical categories. The Lynx’s top-six kWPA contributors are Napheesa Collier, Kayla McBride, Alanna Smith, Courtney Williams, Bridget Carleton, and Natisha Hiedeman, and each is contributing career highs in integral statistical categories.

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This is the remarkable aspect of the Lynx’s production this year. It isn’t just that they’re good; they’re career-high-level production good. Led by franchise cornerstone Collier and newcomer Smith, the Lynx have been a compelling team for good reason and speaks to, assuming once again it can remain, why people need to keep an eye on this team.

Lastly, two components impress me most about the 2024 Minnesota Lynx. According to the team’s PR, the Lynx rank as the second-youngest team in the league in the average age of its current roster and 10th in average years of WNBA experience. The Lynx have a perfect balance of youth and experience that not only makes them fun to watch but also the competitive drive to remain in games and increase their chances of winning. They won the 2024 Commissioner’s Cup against the New York Liberty, another title contender and current number one overall seed in the league,  so there is no shortage of confidence as the season continues, even with their recent troubles.

The other, and this may explain their surprisingly strong start besides their defense, is the way they share the ball. Most teams have assist networks that usually pan out between two or three players. The strongest networks tend to have two bands, one player feeding the other one or two, with the rest sprinkled into the mix. Check out the 2024 Lynx assist network below, from PBP Sports.

Note the size of the assist bands on this team. There are at least three or four very thick bands, indicative of a team that loves to share the ball and diversify their attack. If this, among the other numbers, continues, assuming Phee’s health returns, there’s a real chance the Lynx can hoist the trophy by season’s end. 

All stats through 7/17. Unless otherwise noted, all stats courtesy of WNBA.com