More than perhaps any season in its 28-year history, big name rookies are dominating the storyline in the 2024 WNBA campaign.
No. 1 draft pick Caitlin Clark, one of the most anticipated prospects in the WNBA, is embarking on her pro career with the Indiana Fever after rewriting the college record books at Iowa. Former LSU star Angel Reese (now with the Chicago Sky) and ex-Stanford standout Cameron Brink (Los Angeles Sparks) lead a group of top draftees looking to enhance their WNBA legacies.
Throughout the season, we keep tabs on which rookies perform the best according to a variety of statistics. To that end — and in a similar vein to our NBA playoffs player rankings — we’ll be blending three different metrics: Basketball-Reference’s Win Shares, Estimated Wins Added from Player Efficiency Rating (PER) and wins generated via the Simple Player Rating (SPR), a box score plus/minus-style stat that provides yet another prism through which we can view a player’s production.
Each estimate of wins created is then averaged into a single metric, called Consensus Wins, which can be used to rank qualified rookies on a per-minute basis. (We’re…
