Raw Seasonal +/- Leaders (League, Team)

[Doctor MJ]

So we've reached the end of the regular season. Woot! Now the playoffs up the stakes.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to share some raw +/- I like to take note of. This data is extremely coarse, and not meant to be a rejection of more sophisticated stuff, but it's easy data to get and gives us about the simplest measure we can that factors in both +/- and minutes played.

One other note, I tend to focus on regular season data in the WNBA for this type of analysis because traditionally the playoffs are so, so small in sample - whereas in the NBA, we have 7 game series from round 1.

So then without further ado, here are the leaders in raw +/- for the regular season:

1. Napheesa Collier (MIN) +343
2. Naz Hillmon (ATL) +335
3. Courtney Williams (MIN) +321
4. Bridget Carlton (MIN) +302
5. Kayla McBride (MIN) +296

And here are other team leaders on teams that have a positive +/- player who played at least 100 minutes:

A'ja Wilson (LVA) +292
Alyssa Thomas (PHX) +192
Breanna Stewart (NYL) +192
Aliyah Boston (IND) +185
Skylar Diggins (SEA) +182
Veronica Burton (GSV) +97
Julie Allemand (LAS) +56
Kaila Charles (DAL) +20
Brittney Sykes (WAS) +16

Connecticut & Chicago have no qualifying players.

So you can see with the top 5 the tendency for the top team to dominate something like this, and clearly no one believes the Lynx have 4 of the 5 best players.

I can't emphasize enough how odd it is that a 6WOY candidate like Naz Hillmon almost took the top spot. I don't believe I've ever seen that before, but I'd also emphasize that she really didn't play like a 6th woman all year. From August onward, she's been playing more minutes than anyone else on her team.

As you can see with the names listed below that top 5, it's going to tend to be team stars, but there is noise generally, and I'd say more noise on worse teams in the sense that stars of bad teams tend to have a negative +/- and so if anyone qualifies, it's lesser players.

Now, I also keep tallies of which players have successfully done this (top their team) the most in their career. In any given year noise might make the best player not look like the best player in a coarse metric like this, but generally I'd expect that any true outliers are going to top their teammates some of the time.

So here's the historical WNBA leaderboard with the number of times a player led her team in +/-:

1. Tamika Catchings 10
2. Maya Moore 8
3. Elena Delle Donne 6
(tie) Sancho Lyttle 6
(tie) Breanna Stewart 6
6. Napheesa Collier 5
(tie) Yolanda Griffith 5
(tie) Lauren Jackson 5
(tie) Kara Lawson 5
(tie) Alyssa Thomas 5

We note that Stewie, Phee & AT all lead their teams this year, and are the top active players on the list.

A'ja & Skylar are the other multiple time winners of this who won this year, they are each at 3 now.

I'll also note that Moore got to her number in just 8 season, which means she led her team in +/- every year of her career, which no one else can really come close to.

Moore also led the entire league in +/- 5 times, which means that she'd make the above list even if we held her to a much higher standard than anyone else.

Now, a bit more briefly, while I don't break it down team by team, I do also look at who had the worst +/- for the season. We should note that we wouldn't expect that these are the worst players in the league, because we wouldn't expect the worst players to actually see the floor that much.

Without further ado, here's the other end of the leaderboard:

1. Tina Charles (CON) -406
2. Rachel Banham (CHI) -314
3. Kia Nurse (CHI) -312
4. Kamilla Cardoso (CHI) -304
5. Marina Mabrey (CON) -293

Okay so, while the worst players in the league are probably not listed above, I have to note that Charles is a huge outlier here. As in, nobody should have a +/- that bad for the Sun because while they were bad, they weren't actually THAT bad.

Here's where I'd also note that I've tracked this for both men's and women's going back to the start of the PBP era, and Charles has topped this list now 3 times, which is more than any other player of either sex.

The WNBA world is generally quite sunny its tone compared to the NBA, and I love that, but I'd say it's also come with a general lack of nitty gritty analysis about when things go wrong. Charles is high on many all-time leaderboards because of her scoring/rebounding volume and longevity, but she's also an interior post volume scorer, which tends to be the most overrated thing in the game by those not really up-to-speed with analytics, and yeah, I think Charles is probably the most overrated player in the history of the WNBA. Again, she's nothing like "the worst player in WNBA history", but she should have never been a college POY or WNBA MVP, and no team in 2025 should be playing her big minutes, and it's questionable whether she really should have any place at all on a WNBA roster given that she's never been known for leadership.

[wojoaderge]

no team in 2025 should be playing her big minutes, and it's questionable whether she really should have any place at all on a WNBA roster given that she's never been known for leadership.

Not even the 2025 Connecticut Sun?

[Doctor MJ]

no team in 2025 should be playing her big minutes, and it's questionable whether she really should have any place at all on a WNBA roster given that she's never been known for leadership.

Not even the 2025 Connecticut Sun?

Did you see how much worse her numbers were than anyone else? Here's the Sun's On-Off numbers for their major minute players:

Charles -13.2
Mabrey -1.2
Rivers -0.8
Hartley -4.8
Nelson +3.9
Morrow +6.0
Sheldon -9.0
Lacan +17.6

Remove the Charles minutes, and the Suns are better. Simple as that.

Now, you can make an argument that Charles getting run made sense for a tank job, but this is not the year for a tank job.

Additionally, I think part of the reason Charles was there was because she was a name with prior history with the Sun, and so they thought she'd add value beyond the team's record... but I think the assumption was that Charles would be a floor-raiser not a ditch-digger.

[DOT]

Yeah, TC should not have been playing so much

But as a glass half full perspective, the team had a Net of -22.8 before Leila Lacan showed up (next worse was the Sky at -11.2), their first 17 games, but the final 27 games, they were only a -6.7. Still 4th worst in the league (worst was the Sky at -13.8), but going from historically bad in the first half of the season to just regular bad in the second half is a positive outlook, especially since that turnaround was built off of the younger players like Lacan, Rivers, Morrow, and ONO.

[Doctor MJ]

Yeah, TC should not have been playing so much

But as a glass half full perspective, the team had a Net of -22.8 before Leila Lacan showed up (next worse was the Sky at -11.2), their first 17 games, but the final 27 games, they were only a -6.7. Still 4th worst in the league (worst was the Sky at -13.8), but going from historically bad in the first half of the season to just regular bad in the second half is a positive outlook, especially since that turnaround was built off of the younger players like Lacan, Rivers, Morrow, and ONO.

Indeed. The Sun got a lot better later in the year. Just doing a split based on the all-star break, they were 3-19 in the first half of the year, and 8-14 in the last half.

In the first half, their main players by minutes: Charles, Rivers, Sheldon, Hartley, Nelson
In the second half, their main players by minutes: Mabrey, Charles, Rivers, Lacan, Morrow

Another perspective of simple stat I look at: OnWins - games where a player had a positive +/-:

Lacan 14
Nelson 13
Rivers 12
Hartley 11
Mabrey 11

But I think maybe we should look at games where a player played at least 20 MP, because the "cheat" way of getting OnWins on bad teams is to just play not very much, so here's the "On-Record" for players in these circumstances where an OnLoss is any game where you don't have a positive +/-

Lacan 12-10
Rivers 12-25
Mabrey 11-23
Morrow 9-14
Charles 8-32
Hartley 8-19

Lacan managing to have a positive record in big minute games on a team like this is damn impressive, let alone for a rookie.

For contrast, if I do this same thing for the other awful teams this year (Sky, Wings):

The Sky

Cordoso 12-25
Atkins 11-21
Banham 9-25
Reese 8-22
Onyenwere 7-10

The Wings

Paige 14-22
Hines 10-16
Arike 8-21
Geiselsoder 7-10
Quinerly 7-6

So we can see one other player (JJ Quinerly) with a positive record, but with way less qualifying games.

We can see Paige & Cordoso also matching/surpassing Lacan's OnWin total, but with a much worse record.

And we can see that none of the key players on these two teams have an On-Record as bad as Charles.

While I'm at it here, let me just do a few other rookies:

Citron (WAS) 18-26
Iriafen (WAS) 18-25
Akoa Makani (PHX) 21-7
PaoPao (ATL) 13-3
Salaun (GSV) 16-15
Leite (GSV) 8-5
Malonga (SEA) 4-7

ftr, Paige is my ROY, so obviously I don't take this data too seriously, but I think it can help us identify players who were emerging as - sometimes - surprise successes. Akoa Makani for example isn't someone I'd be looking to say is the best player on her team (Alyssa Thomas), but she is someone who earned her way to get more minutes by the team just working better when she was out there.

[MrDollarBills]

1. Napheesa Collier (MIN) +343
2. Naz Hillmon (ATL) +335
3. Courtney Williams (MIN) +321
4. Bridget Carlton (MIN) +302
5. Kayla McBride (MIN) +296

Yeah that's frightening.