Sunday Notes, Week 11: Kelsey Mitchell on fire, Satou Sabally returns to form, and more

Tankathon Check-in

To be clear, no one in the WNBA is currently tanking on purpose (at least, the players aren’t). That being said, let’s see where our teams are right now in the lottery standings and where they project to end up (chart vaguely organized by rightmost column):

Team:	Games back in lottery:	Games back of No. 8 seed:	Strength of schedule remaining (out of 12)1:	Likely finish:
Los Angeles	———	5.5	4	Top-two lottery odds
Washington	3	4.5	7th-strongest (sixth-easiest)	Top-two lottery odds
Dallas	5.5	5	8	Bottom-two lottery odds
Chicago2	6.5	———	5	No. 8 seed or bottom-two lottery odds
Atlanta3	5.5	1	11	No. 8 seed or bottom-two lottery odds
Indiana	3	-1.5	12	No. 6 or 7 seed

Dallas Wings

No one really “deserves” anything in life. But more than anything, the Wings do not deserve Satou Sabally.

Sabally played her first four games since February in the Paris Olympics, and has been back in the WNBA for Dallas’ three games following the break. Through three games against the top two teams in the standings, she is averaging 18.0 points, 6.7 rebounds, 5.3 assists, and 2.0 steals on 59.9% true-shooting — very similar numbers to the 2023 season which landed her First Team All-WNBA honors. Among the Wings’ six qualified rotation players in those three games, Sabally ranks second in points, second in rebounds, first in assists and first in steals. She has the highest assist rate, the second-highest usage rate, and the second-best on-off net rating by a wide margin over the No. 3.

Dallas is 0-3 in those three games, two of which were blowouts and the other an eight-point loss that never felt as close as the score indicated. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, after just 106 total minutes, Sabally is within a rounding error of being the Wings’ second-most-valuable player this season, at least per Positive Residual WAR. Teaira McCowan and Natasha Howard were supposed to help anchor a No. 4 seed returning all four of its consequential starters, but those two have had extraordinarily underwhelming 2024s in comparison to their 2023s.

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This was also entirely foreseeable, given McCowan and Howard’s preceding seasons. But beyond hoping Maddy Siegrist broke out — which did happen, though it quickly got derailed by injury — the Wings made little contingency plan for this. Paying six figures for a backup center in Kalani Brown is fine but doesn’t actually provide a buffer if McCowan regresses; neither does hoping a Lottery Pick In Name Only rookie coming off ACL surgery in Stephanie Soares suddenly plays better than she ever did in college. Dallas also entered the season with just one point guard on the entire team, a “rookie” in Sevgi Uzun who has been the fourth-best Fenerbahçe starter and has looked severely overmatched since day one.

Other than benching one of Howard and McCowan for Siegrist as soon as the latter is fully healthy (which should happen), it’s hard to see what the Wings’ path back to legitimate contention is, besides hoping Jacy Sheldon keeps improving (which she has). Also, the combination of their own 2025 draft pick and Chicago’s yield could yield a miracle named Paige Bueckers.

Indiana Fever

If you’ve watched Indiana much this year — and with how much their games have been nationally televised so far, it’s likely that you have — you’ve probably noticed that Kelsey Mitchell was playing quite a bit better over recent games than she did back in May. Your eyes did not deceive you: over the second half of the pre-Olympics schedule (a 13-game span), Mitchell averaged over 19 points on 50.0% FG%/40.2% 3P%/83.3% FT% — good for a 62.3% true-shooting on 22.0% usage. Among qualified players, no one shot more efficiently on higher usage over that span, per WNBA Advanced Stats.

Since the Olympics, Mitchell has continued her tear, putting up more than 25 points on 50/42/100 shooting.

This isn’t just a hot streak — well, it is, in the sense that Mitchell is highly unlikely to continue putting up over 20 points on 50/40/90 shooting. But the scoring improvement is indicative of real chemistry that has built between her, Caitlin Clark, and Aliyah Boston.

Mitchell has been adjusting to playing more off the ball than she ever has — more than probably any point in her life. There were some growing pains with that early on: Despite over 80% of her early season shots being assisted, per WNBA Advanced Stats, a ridiculously high mark, she shot just 38.4% from the field and 32.9% from three. The timing of her cuts on Clark-Boston pick-n-rolls (PnRs) was off, and their positioning on her iso possessions or her PnRs was at times rough. Mitchell ended up forcing a lot of shots on actions that these days would result in passes instead.

Part of Mitchell’s success is simply seeing easier matchups than she used to. With Clark drawing the opponent’s best point of attack defender, Mitchell sees the opponent’s second-best guard defender or their top wing defender — either way, a mismatch. That leads to a lot of the following:

Her assisted rate over these past 16 games remains high: having 67.8% of her buckets assisted, per WNBA Advanced Stats, would be by far the highest single-season rate of her career. But the passes she’s catching are leading to scoring at an extremely high clip, with her cuts now extremely deliberate and her ability to play Point Five Basketball continuing to improve.

Minnesota Lynx

Fun fact: there are currently five players in the W on pace for top-125 all-time seasons in 3-point accuracy, per Sports Reference. One of them is, of course, Stefanie Dolson, who’s having the greatest shooting season from this 3-point distance ever (discounting the Wubble). The other four are Lynx.¹ The 3-point accuracy of the next-best qualified shooter in the WNBA² would rank 388th in league history.

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New York Liberty

Maybe my favorite development this season has been Jonquel Jones going from a solidly value-added playmaker to the fanciest passer in the league.

Jones has always been a value-added passer, of course. Her 12.4% assist rate since she entered the league is higher than all but seven other centers, per SR, and she ranks third over the past four seasons.

But this year, Jones has taken her playmaking to a new level. Where she’s always had flair on her passes, she started experimenting with more backhanded and no-look dishes early in the 2024 season, to mixed results. But she kept on doing it, and, well, I’ll let the tape speak for itself:

Washington Mystics

On Monday, July 22, Julie Vanloo had made 52 3-pointers so far this season, per the WNBA’s stats site. On Tuesday, July 23, Vanloo had made 53 3-pointers so far this season, per the WNBA’s stats site. This was not the result of her making another three in a game one of those nights; the league was already a week into the Olympic break.

The issue was that Vanloo for some reason was not credited as hitting the following 3-pointer:

At least, the WNBA player stats page didn’t credit her. Its play-by-play data did credit her, but some bug led to that shot not being included in her stat line. As a result, we quickly got to find out which websites pulled their data from the W’s player pages and which pulled instead from the play-by-play data: Across The Timeline and ESPN both showed Vanloo with 52 threes, so they must pull their player data from the league’s player pages; Her Hoop Stats, Sports Reference, and HoopsOMG (the Mystics’ media site) had Vanloo with 53, so they must be collecting from the play-by-play. (PBP Stats’ total was not checked.)

The more you know!

Jenn Hatfield contributed reporting.

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1. Specifically: Cecilia Zandalasini, at 46.3%, which would rank 22nd all-time; Alanna Smith, at 43.5%, which would rank 67th; Bridget Carleton at 43.4%, which would rank 70th; and Kayla McBride, at 42.0%, which would rank 122nd. ↩︎
2. Leonie Fiebich, at 38.2% ↩︎

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