One of the great complaints of followers of women's basketball is that it's a game of the haves and have-nots, and the haves own the casino.

It has now been nearly 24 years since a school not belonging to the half-dozen power conferences (ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big Twelve, Pac-12, SEC) has won a women's basketball national championship. How is a team like, say, Northern Arizona supposed to compete with teams like Tennessee or Connecticut, schools which have a massive amount of resources?

But as anyone who follows women's basketball for even a little while knows, big budgets do not necessarily lead to big wins. Take Illinois and Washington, two schools which should have decent budgets to compete but which somehow come up short in terms of winning. Take Texas, which undoubtedly has money to spend and has Gail Goestenkors to boot, but hasn't broken into the Big Twelve elite. You could then look at all the mid-major powerhouses like Wisconsin-Green Bay and Middle Tennessee, which must be short on money but still somehow yield great results on the court.

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- North Tartan AAU coach Bill Larson on recent University of Minnesota commit Grace Coughlin.

There are times when it seems that pure point guards are imagined as The Chosen Ones in the collective imaginations of basketball fans, destined to lead some wretched team from the darkness of their conference cellar to the light of championship glory.

Beyond just being a "coach on the floor", there are those who seem to imagine a pure point guard as their savior; the one player that epitomizes altruism as they glide about the court uplifting all those they come into contact with.

It's a beautiful thing to think about, but the Holy Grail of Purity probably isn't really what people want or simply not exactly what they imagine.

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In a previous piece about potential assists in the WNBA, I mentioned that I didn't have the numbers to calculate a metric SB Nation's Tom Ziller created called "creation ratio" (CR).

I took a bit of a break from writing in between the women's pro and college seasons, but I did get the numbers I needed in that time and thought I'd share what these numbers say about who the top "creators" are in the WNBA...and what that even means.

What is Creation Ratio?

Put simply, CR is a measure of a player's ability to create shots for themselves. It is the ratio of a player's shots created for herself or others compared to the shots others create for them. The actual formula is somewhat elaborate*, but is essentially a player's assists plus estimated unassisted field goal and free throw attempts over their estimated assisted field goal and free throw attempts.

Ziller uses his creation to take a close look at a recent debate about whether Oklahoma City Thunder forward Kevin Durant's ability to create shots for himself is truly important, but adding assists** to what it means to "create shots" is what stands out for me: creation ratio suggests that NBA point guards create three times as many shots as other players.

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Minnesota Lynx point guard Lindsay Whalen running Chin Iso, as described/diagrammed by Fast Model Sports.

Whenever people try to suggest that point guard play doesn't matter that much, I immediately think of the Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball team's beat down of the LSU Tigers in 1996.

That's extreme, so perhaps Nikki Caldwell's UCLA Bruins are a better example: if you can't get the ball upcourt, you can't score baskets. It's really not a whole lot more complex than that.

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pilight's great post on ranking the Minnesota Lynx definitely caught my eye.  As someone who never got a chance to see the great teams of the Houston Comets or the Los Angeles Sparks, I've always been interested in which teams in the WNBA were the best ever.

My favorite method - every stathead had his favorite metric - is the Noll-Scully Measure.  I'm sure I must have written about Noll-Scully Measures a thousand times, but they are one method to measure the competitiveness of a league in any given year.  (Oh yeah.  Here it is.)   The ideas behind the Noll-Scully measures - simplied - are as follows:

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Just yesterday in a comment on the 2011 WNBA All-Playoff Team post, Shannon correctly pointed out that I had sort of loosely tossed out the term "plus/minus" without sufficient explanation. 

The confusion, as I described briefly there, was that there are two forms of plus/minus currently publicly available to WNBA fans: the "raw plus/minus" that shows up in the boxscore and the "net plus/minus" provided by the Minnesota Lynx stats site that I normally use in my posts on this site.

As it turns out, my insufficient explanation - and Seimone Augustus' surprisingly negative playoff net plus/minus - presents an excellent opportunity to discuss the value of the metric before introducing a third type of plus/minus to WNBA fans: regularized adjusted plus/minus (RAPM).

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NEWARK, NJ - Good to get back in action and put the follow up of Irene aside for the time being. Let's just say that nasty lady of a hurricane had yours truly in each of the Four Factors. It was quite dominant. Moving on past the jump there is the possession concept to touch upon.

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Here is a list of some of the statistics I use most often for your (and my) reference. It’s helpful to me so I thought I’d share.

Each entry has the following:

• Name of the metric
• A description of what it’s used for
• The question it answers
• A more technical definition
• The formula itself
• A link to a description from someone more intelligent than me.
  

Please add any corrections, questions, or suggestions in the comments section.

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