Sunday Notes, Week 13: Aliyah Boston, Emily Engstler making strides

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	2nd-strongest (11th-easiest)	Top lottery odds
Dallas	7	3	3	Second-best lottery odds
Washington	6	1	10	No. 8 seed or bottom-two lottery odds
Chicago2	6	———	5	No. 8 seed or bottom-two lottery odds
Atlanta3	7	———	11	No. 8 seed or bottom-two lottery odds

If the Mystics go from having the second-best odds of getting Paige Bueckers, to dropping out of the lottery entirely, to instead have a meaningless first round exit, someone should probably suffer consequences. From a fan and player perspective, it’s an incredible turnaround for a team that suffered the fourth-worst start to a season in WNBA history. From a management and long-term planning perspective, it feels like malpractice.

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Chicago Sky

Per Synergy, Elizabeth Williams was the screener in a pick-n-roll (PnR) 37 total times at Duke, compared to 769 post-ups. In the six-straight seasons she played for good head coaches beginning 2018, she screened in 462 PnRs and ran 241 post-ups. You will not be surprised to learn that she is a very solid PnR big and a very poor post scorer.

In the nine games she played this season before suffering a torn meniscus, Williams was involved in 20 PnRs and post-up 16 times.

Dallas Wings

Dallas is almost certainly going to end this season with four different 17 points-per-game scorers on their stat sheet. Per Sports Reference, that has never happened before in WNBA history.

I should be clear this is with no minimum qualifying statistics, since Odyssey Sims is included here. Normally I would not make this caveat so explicit, because this stat is funnier without it, but what is even funnier is the following:

1. Dallas at two separate points this season has had three different players averaging 17 points on the roster — when Sims was on a hardship and since the break when Satou Sabally has been healthy — and in both of those stretches, they went 3-6.
2. A 3-6 record is a .333 winning percentage, which across a full season this year would not make the playoffs.
3. Four previous teams in league history had three players averaging 17 points; two of them won a title (2007 Phoenix, 2023 Las Vegas), another lost the winner-take-all game of possibly the most exciting semifinals ever (2018 Phoenix), and the other lost one of their leading scorers midway through the season but still made the second round anyway (2020 Phoenix).

This year’s Wings are not only near locks to miss the playoffs, but even during the two separate stretches during which they were one of the most offensively potent teams in WNBA history, they were still not competitive.

Indiana Fever

When we last checked in with Aliyah Boston, it was 11 WNBA weeks ago, and she was starting to develop her short-roll passing and quick decision-making skills. These are generally skills which take a fair amount of time to develop, and while she wasn’t developing them from scratch, they were certainly not strengths of her game.

Despite that, Boston wasn’t concerned. As she told me at the time, “I mean, at South Carolina we did a lot of ball screen action as well. I think not just because Caitlin [Clark]’s here, but I think [adjusting from college] is just the pace of playing in the W, ball screen action; I think, after last year, I’ve been able to get a good read off of that as well.”

I don’t purport to know Boston’s game better than she does, but the numbers bear out a real change during this season: using a very arbitrary cutoff point, Boston over her last 12 games has averaged 3.9 assists against 2.0 turnovers, with a 17.9% assist rate; over her first 23 games, she averaged 2.6 assists against 2.1 turnovers.

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The only bigs in league history who have had a full season with at least 3.5 assists per game at a 1.5 assist-to-turnover ratio, per Across The Timeline, are Candace Parker (nine times), Alyssa Thomas (six times), Emma Meesseman (twice), Breanna Stewart (twice), Tina Charles, and Napheesa Collier.

But I think Boston’s in-season splits described above are a bit misleading. The eye test shows that her passing started making significant strides in late May, and have gotten even more impressive lately as Lexie Hull has locked down a spot in the starting lineup and improved the Fever’s spacing.¹ Indiana is pushing the limits of spacing and pacing in women’s basketball to the limits, and Boston’s short roll passing has clearly improved to the point where she is consistently turning the 4-on-3s created by Clark-led pick-n-rolls into high-quality shots.

It’s not surprising that Boston, one of the baker’s dozen best prospects in W history, would have outlier skill development. But to improve this much as such a cerebral skill in the middle of the season is truly wild.

Washington Mystics

You know who would be a great fit with the Fever’s four Starters Of The Future (Clark, Kelsey Mitchell, Hull, Boston) right now? Emily Engstler.

Washington traded away big Myisha Hines-Allen on Aug. 20, primarily clearing minutes for rookie big Aaliyah Edwards: in the nine games between Edwards returning from a mid-June lower back injury and the trade, Edwards played just under 20 minutes a game; her playing time has ticked up by a handful of minutes in the seven games since.

Another part of the trade, as noted by our Mystics beat Jenn Hatfield in the piece linked above, was giving more run to Engstler. She has received consistent playing time in the seven post-trade games, including double-digit minutes over the last six. In that latter span, she has averaged 11.8 points, 5.5 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 1.2 steals and 1.3 blocks in a little under 20 minutes on 62.2% from the field and 63.2% from three (good for a 75.2% true-shooting) and an assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.2.

Indiana is of course having some trouble at the 4 spot, where NaLyssa Smith has graded out catastrophically on the defensive end: by the stats, she’s the third-worst defender in the league this year, per Positive Residual, and per PBP Stats has a +7.6 on-off defensive rating² despite her backups not being particularly good defenders themselves; by the eye test, she still greatly struggles with making team rotations and offers little backline help. Engstler, on the other hand, has graded out solidly, though in a much smaller sample size.

This is all somewhat ironic, since the Fever drafted Engstler fourth overall in 2022, two spots behind Smith. And who knows where Engstler will settle in when she stops shooting the crap out of the ball and we get a larger sample size of what the Mystics’ player development infrastructure has accomplished with her. For now, it’s fun to watch a unique player doing very well on a team loaded with young frontcourt talent.

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1. Hull has shot 19-for-28 on 3-pointers since the break, good for a 67.9% mark from deep. Which is a lot. ↩︎
2. A positive number in defensive rating is bad. ↩︎