Green Chile wrote:DOT wrote:It was about half Fever fans, but the game was sold out, and I would say about 90% attendance
I'm just being petty about the implication that CT can't support a WNBA team
Fun game, loved seeing Leila Lacan and Saniya Rivers ball out, and a rare efficient Marina Mabrey game too
Just a shame we seem to think the offense needs to run through 36-year-old Tina Charles. Love her, obviously, but she's clearly not the player she used to be. Her and Marina kind of hijack the offense any time they're out there, and if Marina's off like she normally is cause she also isn't a 1st option type of player, it usually goes pretty bad. TC also is causing issues on defense, something I noticed yesterday was how much switching the team was doing, which usually ended up with TC on the perimeter, leading to easy blow-by's and open layups cause the rest of the team wasn't rotating. And then I go check the stats, right, and when TC is on, we have a 113.7 DRTG (worst in the league is the Sky at 109.4), and when she's off, the team has a DRTG of 94.3 (best in the league is the Lynx at 95.7)
It's more complicated than this of course, but the on/off difference with her is the difference between being the best defense in the league and the worst defense in the league
I hope they get the sale settled by the offseason, cause the Sun have a ton of cap space next year, only 5 players are under contract, all of them on rookie deals (ONO is a RFA, I personally want to keep her but, you know, stuff happens), meaning there's less than $400,000 on the books for next year
But overall, it was a win, cause I got fresh Krispy Kreme out of it.
For such a drastic difference, I'm sure it's meaningful.
I'd guess, at least some of it, has to do with Saniya coming off the bench (I feel like Lacan was too earlier in the season).
I would guess a lot of the minutes with TC off the court have a lot of Rivers/Lacan combo playing, which is obviously good for the DRTG.
But I'm sure that doesn't have a huge impact. At 36, to still be such an offensive weapon is really impressive. To be a positive on defense too would just be crazy.
Or just look at Atlanta. The roster is largely the same as last year. They basically just upgraded the coach and the bigs.
Going from TC/CPT to Bri/BG made a pretty significant difference (and Naz Hillman taking a massive leap helps too).
Actually, not really
Lacan and Rivers have played 223 minutes together this year, with 148 of those being with TC. TC is also the teammate with the most minutes played for both Lacan and Rivers (270 out of 408 for Lacan, 561 out of 803 for Rivers, which is also the most TC has played with anyone on the team in her 920 minutes as well as the most minutes any 2 Sun players have played together this year)
So Lacan and Rivers have only played 75 total minutes together without TC this year. I'm too lazy to do the math in my head, but given they are a -2.6 net together overall and a -6.8 net with TC, I would assume their net without TC is pretty good
To be fair, a lot of that is we had a pretty dumb rotation for a while, TC and ONO played way too much together and very clearly did not work. In their 414 minutes together this year, they had a net of -25.8. Over the first 22 games, they were playing 15.5 mpg together, in the last 10 that's been dropped to 7.3 mpg together. So that's messing with the numbers, cause Rivers played with ONO and TC for 246 minutes and Lacan 104 minutes, which is not insignificant
I can keep throwing numbers around, and pretty much all of them are bad, I'm not looking to blame one person, the team as a whole kinda sucks which is to be expected, I just think moving TC to the bench and starting ONO would make the team significantly better.
