Courting greatness: Evaluation of the relationship between talent and team performance in the WNBA

Abstract

There has been a recent rise in interest and funding in women's professional sports, specifically the WNBA. This has created an increased pool of talented players that coaches have to sort through to identify whom they want on their teams. Prior literature has researched the relationship between talent and the quantity of talented players on NBA teams, but this has not been evaluated within the WNBA. As such, the present works investigate this relationship through a regression analysis operationalizing talent as either plus-minus ratings (PM) or player impact estimates (PIE) and team performance as regular season wins. Results from this analysis indicate that teams with a higher quantity of top talent tend to win more games during the regular season when utilizing both PIE (F(2, 117) = 120.37, p < .05) and PM as a measure of talent (F(2, 117) = 120.37, p < .001). These findings create novel insights to assist coaches in their decision-making for player selections.