Neither Los Angeles Sparks point guard Ticha Penicheiro nor Phoenix Mercury point guard Temeka Johnson are likely to spring to mind when people think of the WNBA's best shot creators, but their "creation ratios" suggest that they're among the best in the league.

For all the emphasis on scoring points, being able to perform that function of a ball handler well has value that is easily overlooked. So just how valuable are point guards?

As someone who never got a chance to see the great teams of the Houston Comets or the Minnesota Lynx, 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.

There are two forms of plus/minus currently publicly available to WNBA fans: the type that shows up in the boxscore and "net plus/minus" often used for to evaluate player seasons. Here we introduce a third: Regularized Adjusted Plus/Minus (RAPM).

A look at the concept of "possessions" vs. "plays".

A list of some of the statistics we use most often for reference.

As fulfilling as it was to watch the Storm avenge their first loss of the season in Chicago, it was even sweeter as a fan of the game to watch a quarter in which a team executed an offense so well. After the game, Storm coach Brian Agler commented on the team's ball movement, noting that they finished the game with 24 assists, partially a result of the Sky's defensive strategy.

Based upon the few years of observation and the statistical work of others, I've came up with the following logic for evaluating rookie performance last year. Rookie Rankings: A Resolution for...

It would be a great thing if we knew how much "future value" a player had. This is why being a GM is hard; ofttimes you find yourself on the wrong side of history. Age curves and other predictive metrics are attempts to get on the "right side" of history.

Normally at this time of the week I would write about rookie rankings or do an analysis of which teams are hot and not. However, with most teams still coming together in very significant ways any assertions about a league pecking order right now after 2 to 4 games would be almost entirely arbitrary. So how are teams trying to come together?

Having looked at the style and value of a team’s performance, today I’m going to move on to describing the substance of a team’s strengths and weaknesses that contribute to success (or failure). Once a team’s strengths and weaknesses are established, it’s also possible to look at each individual’s contribution to those strengths and weaknesses.

Returning to the UConn’s big victory over Stanford, rhythm and synergy played a major role in flow of the game, if we believe that the words of commentators, coaches, and players were more than empty rhetoric. The question is how to measure those nebulous concepts in a way that represents what one might observe.

Just as UConn coach Geno Auriemma pushed former point guard Jennifer Rizzotti, the question that is often difficult to answer by looking at wins and final scores is how well a team played on a given night within the broader context of previous performances. How close was a team to that standard of perfection they pursue, independent of the final score?

Basketball statistics should be used to complement, not replace, the subjective beauty of games like basketball. So the question is: what details should we be looking to illuminate with the numbers, especially in a game like women's college basketball?

Given that I’ve made posts this week about San Antonio point guard Becky Hammon, Atlanta point guard Shalee Lehning, and a game that featured Washington point guard Lindsey Harding, you probably...

This is my explanation of how I created my first rookie rankings this season. Those rankings can be found here.I return to a January 2008 article by Bradford Doolittle at Basketball Prospectus,...